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THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY
The Sovereignty of God in the Bible
By Bernhard W. Anderson

All over the world, Christian people repeat the Lord's Prayer with the supplemental doxology "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory." In this way, they affirm the sovereignty of God, a fundamental theme in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.
Today, this language is troublesome. The word "kingdom" is alien to the social experience of most people and is charged with objectionable hierarchical meanings. It connotes superiority over. one race over another, men over women, people over the environment. Surely, the rule of God, or even divine omnipotence, does not mean that God governs with absolute power, free from any opposition or limitation.

The word "kingdom," however, is so inextricably woven into crucial biblical texts (for example, Mark 1:14-15) that we can hardly find an adequate substitute. It has three facets of meaning: the authority of a superior power (dominion), the area over which one rules (realm), and the relationship between ruler and subjects (allegiance).

Even if it were possible to find other language that says the same thing ("Your dominion come" is proposed in a new "inclusive version")¹ the problem would not be solved. The difficult question is the reality to which the language points. The collocation of "kingdom" and "power" in the Lord's Prayer indicates that God's sovereignty is, in a basic sense, God's power. God is the Holy One, incomparable in wisdom and majesty (Isa. 40:12-26), who alone is worthy of worship. Wisdom writers affirm that the "fear [reverence] of God is the beginning of wisdom." Yet, it is precisely the sovereignty of God that is problematic in this century, which has

Bernhard W.. Anderson, Professor of Old Testament Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological S Seminary, is author of Creation versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible (1987) and From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (1994).

¹ The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version, edited by Victor Roland Gold et al.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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witnessed colossal violence: the Holocaust, the wanton destruction brought about by wars, the nuclear destruction of Japanese cities, to say nothing of the evils of AIDS, cancer, child abuse, and domestic violence.

In the Bible, we do not find a neatly packaged doctrine of God's sovereignty. The diversities of Scripture show that this is a complex subject; fraught with subtlety, contradiction, and mystery. In general, however, the issue is not the power of God as such-God would not be God without the power to rule the cosmos and human history. Rather, the issue is, how God uses that power. I intend to wrestle with this question in three time frames that can be separated only for the purpose of discussion: (a) the portrayal of God's original creation, (b) the prophetic word of God's judgment in the present, and (c) the eschatological horizon of God's rule or kingdom. In other words, we shall consider God's role as creator, as judge, and as redeemer.

GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY AS CREATOR

In the Bible, the primary expression of God's sovereignty is that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth-all that is. To be sure, within the Christian community of faith, creation is viewed christologi-cally-in the light of God's revelation in Christ, as in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel or the lofty affirmation of the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ in Colossians 1:15-23. But when Paul preached to biblically illiterate people, for instance, in the famous address to Athenians on the Areopagus (Acts 17:22-32), he started by speaking of "God who made the world and everything in it, [who] is Lord of heaven and earth" (Acts 17:24); in this instance, as Robert Bellah remarks, "he had to convert [hearers] to Judaism before he could convert them to Christianity."²

God's sovereignty is manifest in effortless creation by the word.
Let all the earth fear the LORD,
let all the inhabitants of the world
stand in awe of him.
For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
(Ps. 33:8-9)

This divine sovereignty, the poet continues to say, is manifest in God's overruling of the counsel of the nations and frustrating the plans of the peoples (k 33:10-17). In narrative form, the Genesis creation says the same thing-God speaks and the command is executed.

In the creation story, however, God's creative action does not eliminate chaos; rather, God pushes back the watery chaos and interposes a separat-ing barrier so that the earth may green with vegetation and be habitable for

² Robert N. Bellah, "At Home and Not at Home: Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth," The Christian Century, 112, no. 13 (April 19, 1995), pp. 423-424. This article is a summary of a lecture given at Yale Livinity School in honor of H. Richard Niebuhr.

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animals and humans (Gen. 1:6-8). If God did not sustain this fragile cosmic structure, the earth would be threatened with a return to precreation chaos. According to the biblical story, such a catastrophe almost occurred at the time of the great flood, when waters of chaos poured down through the sluices of the firmament and sprang up from the fountains of the deep (Gen. 7:11). So viewed, chaos continued to be a threat in God's creation.

This portrayal, according to Jon Levenson, helps us in the post- Holocaust era to understand how God copes with evil. Taking issue with the "triumphalist" view of Yehezkel Kaufmann and other interpreters, Levenson maintains that the basic teaching is not God's absolute sover-eignty but God's "mastery" over opposition. At creation, the recalcitrant powers of chaos were not overcome but only confined or domesticated; consequently, the threat of chaos, understood as evil, persists, and God has to regain mastery again and again. Indeed, in its liturgy, the worshiping community seeks to "awaken" the "slumbering" God to new combat. The conflict will continue until the eschatological time "beyond history" when, as Levenson says, God will be victorious over all opposition and "God will become God" indisputably³

"Chaos need not be viewed as evil in opposition to God; rather, it may be seen as instrumental in God's continuing work of creation. "
The view of a limited deity may have been present in an early recension of the biblical creation story that was influenced by the ancient myth of the creator's battle with the powers of chaos, found, for instance in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma elish.⁴ Vestigial remains of this old story survive; but in the final form of the biblical text, the prevailing view is that God creates in absolute sovereignty, without any obstacle or hindrance. God's command is immediately executed: "God said ... and it was so."
At no point does the biblical story equate chaos with evil. Chaos is primeval disorder, symbolized by turbulent waters and untreated darkness. Order and chaos belong to the creation, which, as a whole, the Creator perceives to be "very good" (Gen. 1:31) for it conforms to the divine purpose. This view seems to be compatible with a new scientific revolution that sees the cosmos not as a static, Newtonian system but as a complex, dynamic universe in which chaos and order belong together.⁵ In any case,

³ Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).
⁴ See Hermann Gunkel, "The Influence of Babylonian Mythology upon the Biblical Creation Story," in Creation in the Old Testament, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp, 25-52.
⁵ See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987). "To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being" (p. 5)."

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chaos need not be viewed as evil in opposition to God; rather, it may be seen as instrumental in God's continuing work of creation.
Furthermore, in the mythopoetic view, the triumphant creator established boundaries for chaos. A poet expresses this view in the magnificent creation Psalm 104, which, in some respects, parallels the Genesis creation story. In the beginning, God covered the earth with "the deep"; but at God's "rebuke," the waters "fled" to their assigned place.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
(Ps. 104:9)
In this view, there are unruly elements in God's creation, but they are under God's control. The waters of chaos have their place in God's creation, but they cannot overflow the banks of God's sovereignty (Prov. 8:29). Despite persistent chaos, the cosmos is stable. There are regularities (we call them "laws" of nature) that express God's covenant faithfulness, upon which all creatures depend (Gen. 8:22).
In Psalm 29, an ancient poem that Israel may have adapted from a Canaanite source, God is portrayed as enthroned triumphantly over the unruly forces of nature, symbolized mythopoetically as waters of chaos:
The LORD sits enthroned over the flood;
the LORD sits enthroned as king forever.
(Ps. 29:10)
This theme is elaborated in a group of psalms that portray the triumphant enthronement of God as cosmic king and ruler of the nations (Psalms 47; 93; 94-99). The keynote of these psalms is the exclamation "Yahweh is king!"
The LORD is king, he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength.
He has established the world; it shall never be moved;
Your throne is established from of old;
you are from everlasting.
(Ps. 93:1-2)
In the poet's view, God is enthroned over the restless, insurgent waters of chaos: "the floods," "mighty waters," "the sea."
The floods have lifted up, O LORD,
the floods have lifted up their voice;
the floods lift up their roaring.
More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters,
more majestic than the waves of the sea,
majestic on high is the Lord!
(Ps. 93:3-4)

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This is not a sovereignty that has to be won again and again in the rhythm of "the eternal return."⁶ God's kingship is everlasting, embracing all times. Indeed, God's throne is established "from of old" (Ps. 93:2); God is praised as triumphant ruler in the present (Ps. 47:5-8); and God is the one who comes to judge the earth (Ps. 96:13). In these psalms, sovereignty is lifted above human rulers and national idols to the cosmic king "who made the heavens" (Ps. 96:5), the One who was, who is, and who is to come.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD'S JUDGMENT
Another aspect of God's sovereignty is expressed in God's role as "judge" (shofet). For many people, God's judgment has a forensic meaning of law courts, attorneys, and jurists. The biblical term, however, has a basically active; meaning: The role of the judge is to obtain justice, often by an exercise of power (as in the case of the leaders of the Book of Judges). When it is said that God comes to judge the earth (Ps. 98:9; Isa. 33:22), the meaning is that God comes to establish God's rule by overthrowing oppressing powers and establishing justice and peace.
In the covenant community, the people of God tell and retell a story in order to identify the saving and commanding God whom they worship. The story begins with what ancient Israel shared with other peoples: the experience of the holy. Holiness, however, is more than a sense of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum;⁷ it is fundamentally divine power that breaks into the human world. God's power is often symbolized in violent imagery: earthquake, wind, and fire; a fierce storm that breaks the cedars of Lebanon; a roaring lion.
According to the story that unfolds in the Pentateuch, however, God's power is not experienced as brute force that terrifies and devastates but is revealed as redemptive concern and ethical demand. The "saving Presence" of the exodus and the "commanding Presence" of Sinai both testify to the invasive power of God's holiness in the human world.⁸
Here, we encounter a paradox. One would think that human beings, standing before the earthquake, wind, and fire of God's holy power, would be overwhelmed with terror and paralyzed with fear. Yet just the opposite happens, according to the exodus-Sinai story. God's power does not crush human freedom but "addresses" it; it does not prompt despair over human weakness but summons to action and covenant relationship. According to a Jewish midrash:
Rabbi Eliezer says, The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: "Moses, My children are in distress. The sea forms a bar and the enemy pursues. Yet you

⁶ See the study, now a classic, by Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper, 1959).
⁷ The subjective, experiential dimension of holiness is highlighted in Rudolf Otto's great work, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).
⁸ Here, I am using the language of Emil Fackenheim, God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

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stand and say long prayers! Why do you cry unto Me?" Rabbi Eliezer was
wont to say, there is a time to be brief in prayer and a time to be lengthy.⁹

It is when the people surrender to the sovereign grace of their liberating God and are bound to God in covenant relationship that they become free to act. Their freedom is also a "service" (`avodah) of God, the Hebrew word for worship.

The same paradox is found in the preaching of the great prophets of Israel. They rebuke a people trapped in a false service that is a betrayal of `, the covenant; but the purpose of their hard-hitting words is to call to repentance, a redirection of the will. "Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel , all of you according to your ways, says the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions; otherwise iniquity will be your ruin" (Ezek. 18:30).

"The sufferings of the present age cannot be accounted for adequately, if at all, on the basis of God's punishment for human sin. "

One of the most difficult problems is that, according to the witness of the Torah and the Prophets, God punishes the people for their transgressions. We hear this note in the message of the earliest writing prophet, Amos, who announce to Israel that God "will visit your sins upon you":

You only have I known
of all the families of the earth;
therefore I will punish you
for all your iniquities.
(Amos 3:2)

This visitation is something more than the consequence of violation of a moral code. To be sure, in one sense, the punishment is self-inflicted. As Jeremiah says,

Your ways and your doings
have brought this upon you.
This is your doom; how bitter it is!
It has reached your very heart.
(Jer. 4:18)

Yet, in another sense, God personally visits the punishment upon the people. God's chastisement, however, is not an arbitrary exercise of power

⁹ The midrash is quoted by Emil Fackenheim in connection with his discussion of the "dialectical contradictions" inherent in the "root experiences" of exodus and Sinai (God's Presence, pp. 14-19).

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but, as with parental punishment (Hos. 11:1-9), is disciplinary and corrective. "Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the LORD your God disciplines you" (Dent. 8:5). This is also a precept of wisdom teachers (Prov. 3:11-12), one that is picked up in the New Testament (Heb. 12:5-6). The purpose of the divine discipline is restora-tion to health and wholeness, as expressed in prophetic oracles of salvation, which supplement oracles of judgment.

This doctrine: of retribution, that punishment is deserved punishment for sin, is found all over the Bible, especially the Old Testament. None of the prophets departs from it by trying to locate the explanation for suffering outside the will of the people-in evil powers lurking in creation or demonic forces at work in history. Before the holy God, human beings feel culpable: "Where are you? ... What is this that you have done?" (Gen. 3:9, 11). The diapason of miserere (Psalm 51) sounds deeply in Israel's worship.

Nevertheless, the sufferings of the present age cannot be accounted for adequately, if at all, on the basis of God's punishment for human sin. Every pastor who makes hospital visits knows that; and theologians who reason in the shadow of the Holocaust know it too. In the Old Testament, the Book of Job stands as witness to the inadequacy of any simplistic explanation of human suffering.

God's sovereignty as supreme Judge is qualified in several important ways. First, God's sovereign exercise of power is flexible and open to the future. God may "repent" in response to human repentance or fervent prayer. This is beautifully illustrated in Jeremiah's parable of the potter (Jer. 18:1-12). Here, the point is not God's absolute power to mold passive clay (compare the well-known hymn, "Have Thine Own Way, Lord"). The clay has, so to speak, a mind of its own, and much depends on human response. If God threatens a severe judgment, and a people "turns from its evil," God will have a change of mind ("repent"). The reverse is true in the case of an oracle of promise. God is free to show mercy upon whom God wills to show mercy (Exod. 33:19). As Jonah found in his distressingly successful preaching for repentance, God is faithful and compassionate (Jon. 4:2b; echoing Exod. 34:6-7); therefore, God "repents" of planned evil if the people respond.

This paradox of divine sovereignty and human freedom is evident especially in intercessory prayers of leaders who seek to avert divine wrath and avoid impending punishment (for example, Amos 7:1-6).¹⁰ God's will is not an inexorable fate or an unalterable necessity. God is free to modify actions in the face of changed circumstances and to do new and surprising things.

¹⁰ This paradox is discussed perceptively by Patrick D. Miller, They Cried Unto the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), chapter 8. See my review, Theology Today, 52 (July, 1955), pp. 276--282.

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Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
(Isa. 43:18-19)

Second, God is involved with the people. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in his great book The Prophets, maintains that the dominant theme of the prophetic message is the divine pathos. God is not the apathetic deity of ancient Greek philosophy, who is beyond the realm of change and suffering. Rather, God is present in the world, reacting with anger or moved by compassion. According to this boldly anthropopathic language God "suffers." Whether divine passibility is only a metaphor of the language of faith or actually descriptive of God's "essence" is an issue for theological and philosophical debate.¹¹

Third, God's sovereignty is often hidden except to the eye of faith. This note is struck in some of the psalms of lament, which raise the cry, "how long?" (Ps. 6:3; 13:1-2), and especially in the prophecy of Habakkuk. Contemplating the violence on the face of the earth, Habakkuk complains that, though Israel may be culpable to some degree, the punishment does not fit the' crime. The answer given to him on his watchtower is that the righteous live by faith-faith that is trust in God even in the worst of times when God's sovereignty is eclipsed (Hab. 2:2-4). The book ends with the "nevertheless" of faith (cf. Ps. 73:23): "Even though the fig tree does not blossom. . . yet I will rejoice in the Lord" (Hab. 3:17-19).

Finally, faithful persons may boldly expostulate with God. This is especially evident in the Old Testament where Abraham, the father of the faithful, questions God on the eve of the holocaust of Sodom and Gomor-rah: "Shall not the Judge of the whole earth do what is just?" (Gen. 18:25). Expostulations continue in prophecy (especially in Jeremiah) and reach a climax in the Book of Job, who boldly challenges the justice of God's ways. These protests are not raised outside of faith but in faith. Significantly, in the end, God congratulates Job and rebukes his orthodox friends, "for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (Job 42:7).

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD As REDEEMER

In many and various ways, Israel's prophets looked forward to the time when God will judge the earth in righteousness and usher in a new age, the rule (kingdom) of God. In that day, social barriers will be overcome, and justice and peace will prevail. God's sovereignty will be that of the redeemer, who liberates people from the bondage of evil and gives them . freedom to participate in the new community

¹¹ See David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993). Blumenthal maintains that "personality," along with holiness, are the two essential attributes of God (chapter 2).

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The great prototype of God's redemption is the exodus from Egypt and the new life in a promised land. Israel was given freedom to be a covenant community through an act of divine liberation. According to the story, however, God's liberation was accomplished by force, by "the mighty hand" that broke Pharaoh's power. The purpose of the demonstrations of God's power 'was that Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian establishment would experience the sovereignty of God, that they would "know" Yahweh as the God who sets an oppressed people free. The powerful do not give up their sovereignty voluntarily, as Martin Luther King used to remind us, usually, some exertion of power is necessary-not military force necessarily, but other demonstrations of power (for example, boycotts, blockades, mandates of law courts).

In the New Testament, we hear the announcement that God's "mighty hand" is displayed in the sovereign power of love-divine love manifest preeminently in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. This "good news" should not be altogether surprising to those familiar with Israel's Scriptures; it is anticipated in the Old Testament, especially in Deuteronomic theology. Israel is commanded to "love God" (the principal commandment), but this love is reciprocal, going back and forth between God and people. Love of this kind "transcends all legalism and transforms Yahweh's sovereignty into something totally different from what human sovereignty can ever be."¹² "It was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath that 11e swore to your ancestors, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt" (Deut. 7:8, NRSV).

In the New Testament, the sovereignty of divine love is far greater, owing to a profounder awareness of the range and power of evil. Evil is not located exclusively in human disobedience of commandments or pharaonic structures of power from which the oppressed seek liberation; rather, under the influence of apocalyptic prophecy, evil is understood as power that corrupts the whole age of the world-its relationships, structures, and values. Evil belongs to a vast domain of sovereignty, the kingdom of Satan, that oppresses victims in many ways, as illustrated in various stories found in the Gospels. People pray that they not be led into trial, but that they be delivered from the evil one-the concluding petition of the Lord's Prayer. This dimension of evil-as a power that seizes and victimizes people ought to be taken more seriously than it has been in "enlightened" American Christianity.¹³

The New Testament, however, transforms the apocalyptic view of the radical discontinuity between the "two ages"-"this present age," which is under the dominion of evil, over against "the age to come," when the kingdom of God will prevail on earth as in heaven. According to the

¹² This "mutual love" between God and Israel is discussed by Norbert Lohfink, "The Sovereignty of God as the Abrogation of Human Sovereignty in Deuteronomic Theology," in Great Themes from the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1981), p. 50.

¹³ See M, Scott Peck, The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

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Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaimed that "the kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:14-15). In various ways, Christian interpreters announced that already the leaven of the kingdom of God is at work in this world (Luke 13:20); already people are able to taste the powers of the age to come (Heb. 6:5); already God's victory in Christ is liberating people from those powers that hold God's creation, both human and nonhuman, in bondage (Rom. 8:35-39); already the new creation has dawned even before the old has passed away (2 Cor. 5:17). No longer are the two ages like two circles that touch each other tangentially; rather, the circles have begun to overlap.

Christian transformation of the apocalyptic vision has tremendous, far-reaching implications. Even in this present evil age, when violence corrupts the earth and when the earth is being violated, people are invited to join a community that stands on the frontier of the expanding kingdom of God and to act as responsible agents of God. Living "between the times," followers of Christ experience the ambiguities, tensions, and trials of faith and rejoice in the "new things" that God is doing in the world.

The triumphant sovereignty of God's love is demonstrated in both the crucifixion and the resurrection. If one were to preach only "Christ crucified," God's love might be understood solely as that of the suffering God, who is vulnerable to human sin and who is with us as we go through the valley of death's shadow. But God's sovereignty is not fully expressed without the related proclamation that-as Paul puts it-Jesus Christ "was declared t'be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection, from the dead" (Rom. 1:4). Already, God has shattered the power of eil and that of "the last enemy," death, by raising Jesus from death to life. This is the sign par excellence that the new age has dawned as a foretaste of the final triumph of God's kingdom (1 Cor. 15:20-28).

Christians are called to announce the sovereignty of God's love, to live at the frontier of God's kingdom, and to celebrate God's triumph over the powers of darkness. The doxology added to the Lord's Prayer is appropri-ate in Christian worship: "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever."

So be it, Lord: thy throne shall never,
Like earth's proud empires, pass away;
Thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
Till all thy creatures own thy sway.¹⁴

¹⁴ Hymn "The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended" (St. Clement), words by J. Ellerton (1826-1893).