If God is not sovereign, God is not God.

When I was teaching seminary, I was responsible to teach a course on the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith,

the Westminster Confession of Faith, the 17th century theological document that was the Confessional Foundation for

Historic Presbyterianism.

And we'd come to the place in the Confession where I was going to have to teach chapter 3 the following week.

And chapter 3 is entitled on the eternal decrees of God.

Now I'm on Presbyterians, they know exactly what that means. They say, uh-oh, I want to talk about predestination.

And you get a bunch of seminary students together.

And there's nothing they enjoy better than to chew over questions about predestination in that endless discussions into the night.

They love it. And they love to debate that topic.

So I said, as the next Tuesday night, we're going to take up chapter 3 of the Confession.

I have to understand that this particular class was open to the public.

And so people who were not enrolled as seminary students were allowed to come in and audit the class or drop by to visit a particular lecture.

So everyone of my students, you know, who had a friend who didn't believe in predestination.

They went out and cornered them and grabbed them by the throat and said, you got to come here, our professor.

And he's going to play paladin, have gun real trouble.

You're going to teach us all about predestination.

So we had about 250 students assembled, I guess, that night in the class.

And I started the class by reading the opening lines of chapter 3 of the Westminster Confession.

I don't have them down verbatim, but I can give you basically what it says there.

It starts off by saying something like this that God has, or does, from all eternity immutably and sovereignly,

ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

...