God is the Lawgiver and Supreme: Quote of the Day: Gordon H. Clark

Gordon H. Clark's book, Christian Philosophy, (Unicoi: Trinity Foundation, 2004) pp. 234-235, should be required reading for all seminary students on both sides of the Arminian/Calvinist debate.  Clark says:

. . . In opposition to all this, the Christian--i.e., the Biblical view--is that God is the legislator.  Not Law, but the Lawgiver is supreme.

Divine Sovereignty

If then the personal God is supreme and all laws depend upon His ordinance, it follows that there is no superior law to restrict his sovereignty.  Most people find it easy to conceive of God as having created or established physical law by divine fiat.  He might have created a different kind of world, had he so desired.  It does not seem to stretch the imagination much to picture a world where freezing points are so arranged that we would have to put water in the radiator to prevent alcohol from freezing.   And why could not lead, like water, expand on cooling?  Nor does it bother theologians to suppose that various details of the Mosaic ritual might have been different.  Instead of requiring the priests to carry the ark on their shoulders, God might have forbidden this and ordered it to be borne on a cart drawn by oxen.  But for some particular reason people find difficulty in applying the same consideration to ethics.  Instead of recognizing God as sovereign in the moral sphere, they want to subject Him to some independent, superior, Platonic law.  This is inconsistent.

The short answer is that God does not answer to man!  (Romans 9:20).  Man must answer to God.  (Romans 3:5-6).  To accuse God of being a monster or unjust because of His decrees to election and reprobation or because there is both physical evil (Isaiah 45: 7) and moral evil in the world (Genesis 6:5; Romans 3:23) is to side with the atheist (Psalm 14:1-3).  It is telling that Arminians rely on the arguments of atheism in order to persuade atheists that Christianity is not so bad after all.  Rather than standing on God's Word alone the Arminian must ignore major portions of Scripture which teach the absolute sovereignty of God (Daniel 4:34-35; Psalm 115:3; Isaiah 46:9-11; Isaiah 45:22-23).  The Arminian must appeal to a law they believe is higher than God himself rather than simply taking God at His Word in the Holy Scriptures (Matthew 4:4).