I came across the following comment written by mariakirby (screen name), in response to a post called “Summer Theology” on The Jesus Manifesto website. I don’t know mariakirby, but she paints such beautiful word pictures of her understanding of the sovereignty of God that I wanted to share…  

I’ve had similar thoughts about the sovereignty of God. When I was a child there was an artist who came to church and used art to illustrate God’s transformitive power. She drew a beautiful landscape of hills and sky and houses. Then she made big black marks across the page to show what sin does to our lives. Then she turned those black marks into palm trees and they fit right into and added to the picture she had drawn.

I’ve had similar experience co-drawing with a small child. I start drawing a well thought out scene and the child scribbles right over what I have done. My talent as an artist is when I can use those scribbles as part of the picture, incorporating them into what I’m drawing so that it forms a complete picture and it doesn’t look like two artists or one person had messed up the work of another.

In my mind God is such a talented artist that no matter what is drawn by someone else (by their own free will), whether it is Satan, or a human, or any other kind of agency such as evolution, God is able to incorporate it into the beautiful picture that he is drawing. And as the picture is being completed, it is very hard to discern where our scribbles have left their mark and God’s pen has deftly drawn them into what is making.

Following the commands of God is like aligning our selves with God’s principles, and is similar to how a transistor works. A transistor has three wires: one for the main current, one for a small current, one for the output. The main current flows through the transistor when and relative to the small current flow. If the charge for the small current is backwards, then there is no main current flow. When our actions and thoughts are at cross purposes with God, his power does not flow through us, we do not have eternal life because His Life which is eternal is not flowing through us. However, when we are aligned with God, our smallest action is a conduit of his great power and love. The significance of our acts our miniscule compared to the act of God through us.