How does God’s sovereignty work, in a God-world relation? First, to speak of God’s sovereignty can never be done so in abstraction from God’s cruciform life for the world in Jesus Christ. It is from within this unio mystica (‘mystical union’) of God and humanity, in the particularity of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ, wherein God’s actions, where His power, His sovereignty and everything else must be thought. When we ponder the end for which God humiliated Himself in the Son for the world, we recognize that this ponderance goes back even before the foundations of the world; indeed, the Lamb being slain even before the foundations of the world. So, it is as we think back from the analogy of the incarnation of God, that we might arrive upon an answer to how God’s cruciformed, Son-faced sovereignty comes to penetrate and engage this world; particularly within its fallen status. We know that God’s sovereignty is first and foremost grounded in His Divine Freedom, within His inner life of triune life, wherein He has the Self-capacity to choose what His act will be for the world which He has created; indeed, created from the seed of the women, in the man from Nazareth. As we attempt to reason from within this inner theological reality of God’s life, indeed, as we have arrived upon this primordial point of liminal access, through first encountering this God in the economy of His life for the world in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ, we come to realize that all things, as Self-determined from within the fellowshipping life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are free and open for God to act as He will. Not from an abstraction, but from the concretion of His eternally triune life. It is here that God’s a-se life Has the freedom to determine an elected contingency, first for Himself, as the Son, God’s image, freely elects to be human, which entails within that space of chosen contingency, within His to-be assumed humanity, wherein human freedom comes to find its starting point. Not as a non-contingent freedom, as the ground of His freedom is sourced by, as the eternal Logos, but as a corresponding contingent freedom with His freedom; one that is finally given agency within even His own assumed humanity for us by the Holy Spirit. So, again, things come back to this Theanthropic mystery wherein God and humanity kiss, unite, in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the singular person of Jesus Christ.
So, God’s sovereignty works, in such a way, that humanity, and then the rest of the created order (cf. Rom 8.18ff), invades the contingent world order, which He first created, and then re-created in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, in and through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is as His non-contingent Logos life interfaces with the human contingent life that the miracle of God’s sovereignty comes to shape the world; both the world now, and not yet. It is within this mediating space as that inheres within the conversating person of the humanity of God in Christ, and Godself. The fact that non-contingency and contingency can communicate, and interface one with the other, whilst the non-contingency of God’s triune life circumscribes the whole event of the contingent, is indeed, the fact of God’s sovereignty in action for the world. Contingency finds its freedom to act only as an asymmetrical correspondence with God’s act within His own humanity for the world. So, ultimately, God’s freedom, as the ground of human freedom, as that is mediated for the world in the archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ, yeasts in such a way that God’s purposes, within the cruciform of His life, are made manifest as humanity in union with Him, through His union with humanity in Christ can be accomplished without violating, indeed quite to the contrary, the contingent events of created and recreated history. His will is done first and foremost because He is the One who is free within Himself. And it is within this freedom in His eternal life of love wherein He has come to sovereignly Self-determine to not be God without us, but with us for all eternity; indeed, in the face of Jesus Christ. It is within the economy of this determinate choice to be for, with and in us, wherein the contingent order comes to serve His purposes, whilst the contingent humanity finds their respective freedom with His.
But then of course there is always the “unelected” and inscrutable reality of sin and evil in the world. This complicates things. Not as far as thwarting God’s sovereignty (as we have already defined that), but by introducing a perversion into the mix of human freedom that attempts to gain a life of its own, whilst parasiting on the real freedom God has determined for humanity in His Free Grace choice to be not-God without us; that is, not without humanity and the created order He has made humanity, His humanity in us, and ours in His, stewards over. And yet, even in the facet of sin and evil God’s cruciform humanity perdures, it yeasts in such a way that it finally gives birth to a babe, wrapped in swaddling cloths, born in a manager in Bethlehem. It is here where, when finally eventuated in the ascension, that humanity comes to have the capacity to make genuinely free choices that are in keeping with God’s sovereignly Self-determined plan and purpose for the world; indeed, as that purpose and plan has always already found its fund and orientation by its reality and elevation in the supra planned incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. And yet, there remains a battle between the old first Adam world, and the now greater and new second Adam world. Even so, God’s plan has been pervasive throughout both epochs of the first and second Adams. That is, because God first elected all of the sundry events of created history to unfold in the reality of the Deus incarnandus (God to be incarnate). This has always already been the inner reality, the beating im-pulse of the created order; i.e., God’s choice to become Creator, even as He was first Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit.
Really, all I’m saying is that the relationship between God’s sovereignty and humanity in the created order, turns out to be rather miraculous. And there remains many holes in what I have been torturously attempting to articulate. But you gotta start somewhere. And I had the urge to just sit down and spitball.