themselves out of the arms of his grace into the furnace of his justice;
they have, by their revolt, forfeited the treasure of his goodness,
but cannot exempt themselves from the sceptre of his dominion; when
they would not own him as a Lord Father, they are under him as a Lord
Judge; they are cast out of his affection, but not {b383} freed from
his yoke. He rules over the good angels as his subjects, over the
evil ones as his rebels. In whatsoever relation he stands, either as
a friend or enemy, he never loses that of a Lord. A prince is the lord
of his criminals as well as of his loyalest subjects. By this right
of his sovereignty, he uses them to punish some, and be the occasion
of benefit to others: on the wicked he employs them as instruments of
vengeance; towards the godly, as in the case of Job, as an instrument
of kindness for the manifestation of his sincerity against the
intention of that malicious executioner. Though the devils are
the executioners of his justice, it is not by their own authority,
but God’s; as those that are employed either to rack or execute a
malefactor, are subjects to the prince not only in the quality of
men, but in the execution of their function. The devil, by drawing men
to sin, acquires no right to himself over the sinner: for man by sin
offends not the devil, but God, and becomes guilty of punishment under
God.[1004] When, therefore, the devil is used by God for the punishment
of any, it is an act of his sovereignty for the manifestation of the
order of his justice. And as most nations use the vilest persons in
offices of execution, so doth God those vile spirits. He doth not
ordinarily use the good angels in those offices of vengeance, but in
the preservation of his people. When he would solely punish, he employs
“evil angels” (Ps. lxxviii. 49), a troop of devils. His sovereignty is
extended over the “deceiver and the deceived” (Job xii. 16); over both
the malefactor and the executioner, the devil and his prisoner. He
useth the natural malice of the devils for his own just ends, and
by his sovereign authority orders them to be the executioners of his
judgments upon their own vassals, as well as sometimes inflicters of
punishments upon his own servants.
(3.) The earth of men and other creatures belongs to his authority
(Ps. xlvii. 7). God is King of “all the earth,” and rules to the “ends”
of it (Ps. lix. 13). Ancient atheists confined God’s dominion to the
heavenly orbs, and bounded it within the circuit of the celestial
sphere (Job, xxii. 14): “He walks in the circuit of heaven,” _i. e._ he
exerciseth his dominion only there. _Pedum positio_ was the sign of the
possession of a piece of land, and the dominion of the possessor of it;
and land was resigned by such a ceremony, as now, by the delivery of a
twig or turf.[1005] But his dominion extends,
1st. Over the least creatures. All the creatures of the earth are
listed in Christ’s muster‑roll, and make up the number of his regiments.
He hath an host on earth as well as in heaven (Gen. ii. 1): “The
heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them.” And they
are “all his servants” (Ps. cxiv. 91), and move at his pleasure. And he
vouchsafes the title of his army to the locust, caterpillar, and palmer
worm (Joel ii. 25); and describes their motions by military words,
“climbing the walls, marching, not breaking their ranks” (ver. 7). He
hath the command, as a great general, over the highest angel and the
meanest worm; all the kinds of the smallest insects he presseth for
his service. By this sovereignty he muzzled the devouring nature of the
fire to preserve the three children, and let it loose to consume their
adversaries; and if he speaks the word, {b384} the stormy waves are
hushed, as if they had no principle of rage within them (Ps. lxxxix. 9).
Since the meanest creature attains its end, and no arrow that God hath
by his power shot into the world but hits the mark he aimed at, we must
conclude, that there is a sovereign hand that governs all: not a spot
of earth, or air, or water in the world, but is his possession; not a
creature in any element but is his subject.
2d. His dominion extends over men. It extends over the highest
potentate, as well as the meanest peasant; the proudest monarch is
no more exempt than the most languishing beggar. He lays not aside
his authority to please the prince, nor strains it up to terrify the
indigent. “He accepts not the persons of princes, nor regards the rich
more than the poor; for they are all the work of his hand” (Job xxxiv.
19). Both the powers and weaknesses, the gallantry and peasantry of the
earth, stand and fall at his pleasure. Man, in innocence, was under his
authority as his creature; and man, in his revolt, is further under his
authority as a criminal: as a person is under the authority of a prince,
as a governor, while he obeys his laws; and further under the authority
of the prince, as a judge, when he violates his laws. Man is under
God’s dominion in everything, in his settlement, in his calling, in the
ordering his very habitation (Acts xvii. 26): “He determines the bounds
of their habitations.” He never yet permitted any to be universal
monarch in the world, nor over the fourth part of it, though several,
in the pride of their heart, have designed and attempted it: the pope,
who hath bid the fairest for it in spirituals, never attained it; and
when his power was most flourishing, there were multitudes that would
never acknowledge his authority.
3d. But especially this dominion, in the peculiarity of its extent, is
seen in the exercise of it over the spirits and hearts of men. Earthly
governors have, by his indulgence, a share with him in a dominion over
men’s bodies, upon which account he graceth princes and judges with the
title of “gods” (Ps. lxxxii. 6); but the highest prince is but a prince
“according to the flesh,” as the apostle calls masters in relation to
their servants (Col. iii. 22).
God is the sovereign; man rules over the beast in man, the body; and
God rules over the man in man, the soul. It sticks not in the outward
surface, but pierceth to the inward marrow. It is impossible God should
be without this; if our wills were independent of him, we were in some
sort equal with himself, in part gods, as well as creatures. It is
impossible a creature, either in whole or in part, can be exempted from
it; since he is the fashioner of hearts as well as of bodies. He is the
Father of spirits, and therefore hath the right of a paternal dominion
over them. When he established man lord of the other creatures, he did
not strip himself of the propriety; and when he made man a free agent,
and lord of the acts of his will, he did not divest himself of the
sovereignty. His sovereignty is seen,
[1.] In gifting the spirits of men. Earthly magistrates have hands too
short to inspire the hearts of their subjects with worthy sentiments:
when they confer an employment, they are not able to convey an ability
with it fit for the station: they may as soon frame a statue {b385}
of liquid water, and gild, or paint it over with the costliest colors,
as impart to any a state‑head for a state‑ministry. But when God
chooseth a Saul from so mean an employment as seeking of asses, he can
treasure up in him a spirit fit for government; and fire David, in age
a stripling, and by education a shepherd, with courage to encounter,
and skill to defeat, a massy Goliath. And when he designs a person for
glory, to stand before his throne, he can put a new and a royal spirit
into him (Ezek. xxxvi. 26). God only can infuse habits into the soul,
to capacitate it to act nobly and generously.
[2.] His sovereignty is seen in regard of the inclinations of men’s
wills. No creature can immediately work upon the will, to guide it to
what point he pleaseth, though mediately it may, by proposing reasons
which may master the understanding, and thereby determine the will. But
God bows the hearts of men, by the efficacy of his dominion, to what
centre he pleaseth. When the more overweaning sort of men, that thought
their own heads as fit for a crown as Saul’s, scornfully despised him;
yet God touched the hearts of a band of men to follow and adhere to
him (1 Sam. x. 26, 27). When the anti‑christian whore shall be ripe
for destruction, God shall “put it into the heart” of the ten horns
or kings, “to hate the whore, burn her with fire, and fulfil his will”
(Rev. xvii. 16, 17). He “fashions the hearts” alike, and tunes one
string to answer another, and both to answer his own design (Ps. xxxiii.
15). And while men seem to gratify their own ambition and malice,
they execute the will of God, by his secret touch upon their spirits,
guiding their inclinations to serve the glorious manifestation of truth.
While the Jews would, in a reproachful disgrace to Christ, crucify two
thieves with him, to render him more incapable to have any followers,
they accomplished a prophecy, and brought to light a mark of the
Messiah, whereby he had been charactered in one of their prophets, that
he should be “numbered among transgressors” (Isa. liii. 12). He can
make a man of not willing, willing; the wills of all men are in his
hand; _i. e._ under the power of his sceptre, to retain or let go upon
this or that errand, to bend this or that way; as water is carried by
pipes to what house or place the owner of it is pleased to order. “The
king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of waters; he
turns it whithersoever he will” (Prov. xxi. 1) without any limitation.
He speaks of the heart of princes; because, in regard of their height,
they seem to be more absolute, and impetuous as waters; yet God holds
them in his hand, under his dominion; turns them to acts of clemency
or severity, like waters, either to overflow and damage, or to refresh
and fructify. He can convey a spirit to them, or “cut it off” from
them (Ps. lxxvi. 12). It is with reference to his efficacious power,
in graciously turning the heart of Paul, that the apostle breaks off
his discourse of the story of his conversion, and breaks out into
a magnifying and glorifying of God’s dominion. “Now unto the King
eternal,” &c. “be honor and glory forever and ever” (1 Tim. i. 17). Our
hearts are more subject to the Divine sovereignty than our members in
their motions are subject to our own wills. As we can move our hand
east or west to any quarter of the world, so can God bend our wills to
what mark he pleases. The second cause in every {b386} motion depends
upon the first; and that will, being a second cause, may be furthered
or hindered in its inclinations or executions by God; he can bend or
unbend it, and change it from one actual inclination to another. It is
as much under his authority and power to move, or hinder, as the vast
engine of the heavens is in its motion or standing still, which he can
affect by a word. The work depends upon the workman; the clock upon the
artificer for the motions of it.
[3.] His dominion is seen in regard of terror or comfort. The heart or
conscience is God’s special throne on earth, which he hath reserved to
himself, and never indulged human authority to sit upon it. He solely
orders this in ways of conviction or comfort. He can flash terror into
men’s spirits in the midst of their earthly jollities, and put death
into the pot of conscience, when they are boiling up themselves in a
high pitch of worldly delights, and can raise men’s spirits above the
sense of torment under racks and flames. He can draw a hand‑writing not
only in the outward chamber, but the inward closet; bring the rack into
the inwards of a man. None can infuse comfort when he writes bitter
things, nor can any fill the heart with gall, when he drops in honey.
Men may order outward duties, but they cannot unlock the conscience,
and constrain men to think them duties which they are forced, by human
laws, outwardly to act: and as the laws of earthly princes are bounded
by the outward man, so do their executions and punishments reach no
further than the case of the body: but God can run upon the inward man,
as a giant, and inflict wounds and gashes there.
5. It is an eternal dominion. In regard of the exercise of it, it was
not from eternity, because there was not from eternity any creature
under the government of it; but in regard of the foundation of it,
his essence, his excellency, it is eternal; as God was from eternity
almighty, but there was no exercise or manifestation of it till he
began to create. Men are kings only for a time; their lives expire like
a lamp, and their dominion is extinguished with their lives; they hand
their empire by succession to others, but many times it is snapped off
before they are cold in their graves. How are the famous empires of the
Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, and Greeks, mouldered away, and their place
knows them no more! and how are the wings of the Roman eagle cut, and
that empire which overspread a great part of the world, hath lost most
of its feathers, and is confined to a narrower compass! The dominion
of God flourisheth from one generation to another: “He sits King
forever” (Ps. xxix. 10). His “session” signifies the establishment,
and “forever” the duration; and he “sits now,” his sovereignty is as
absolute, as powerful as ever. How many lords and princes hath this or
that kingdom had! in how many families hath the sceptre lodged! when
as God hath had an uninterrupted dominion; as he hath been always the
same in his essence, he hath been always glorious in his sovereignty:
among men, he that is lord to‑day, may be stripped of it to‑morrow; the
dominions in the world vary; he that is a prince may see his royalty
upon the wings, and feel himself laden with fetters; and a prisoner
may be “lifted from his dungeon” to a throne. But there can be no
diminution of God’s government; “His throne is from generation {b387}
to generation” (Lam. v. 19); it cannot be shaken: his sceptre, like
Aaron’s rod, is always green; it cannot be wrested out of his hands;
none raised him to it, none therefore can depose him from it; it bears
the same splendor in all human affairs; he is an eternal, an “immortal
King” (1 Tim. i. 17); as he is eternally mighty, so he is eternally
sovereign; and, being an eternal King, he is a King that gives not a
momentary and perishing, but a durable and everlasting life, to them
that obey him: a durable and eternal punishment to them that resist him.
IV. Wherein this dominion and sovereign consists, and how it is
manifested.
_First._ The first act of sovereignty is the making laws. This is
essential to God; no creature’s will can be the first rule to the
creature, but only the will of God: he only can prescribe man his
duty, and establish the rule of it; hence the law is called “the royal
law” (James ii. 8): it being the first and clearest manifestation
of sovereignty, as the power of legislation is of the authority of
a prince. Both are joined together in Isa. liii. 22: “The Lord is our
Lawgiver; the Lord is our King;” legislative power being the great mark
of royalty. God, as King, enacts his laws by his own proper authority,
and his law is a declaration of his own sovereignty, and of men’s moral
subjection to him, and dependence on him. His sovereignty doth not
appear so much in his promises as in his precepts: a man’s power over
another is not discovered by promising, for a promise doth not suppose
the promiser either superior or inferior to the person to whom the
promise is made.[1006] It is not an exercising authority over another,
but over a man’s self; no man forceth another to the acceptance of
his promise, but only proposeth and encourageth to an embracing of
it. But commanding supposeth always an authority in the person giving
the precept; it obligeth the person to whom the command is directed;
a promise obligeth the person by whom the promise is made. God, by his
command, binds the creature; by his promise he binds himself; he stoops
below his sovereignty, to lay obligations upon his own majesty; by a
precept he binds the creature, by a promise he encourageth the creature
to an observance of his precept: what laws God makes, man is bound,
by virtue of his creation, to observe; that respects the sovereignty
of God: what promises God makes, man is bound to believe; but that
respects the faithfulness of God. God manifested his dominion more to
the Jews than to any other people in the world; he was their Lawgiver,
both as they were a church and a commonwealth: as a church, he gave
them ceremonial laws for the regulating their worship; as a state, he
gave them judicial laws for the ordering their civil affairs; and as
both, he gave them moral laws, upon which both the laws of the church
and state were founded. This dominion of God, in this regard, will be
manifest,
(1.) In the supremacy of it. The sole power of making laws doth
originally reside in him (James iv. 12); “There is one Lawgiver, who is
able to save, and to destroy.” By his own law he judges of the eternal
states of men, and no law of man is obligatory, but as it {b388} is
agreeable to the laws of this supreme Lawgiver, and pursuant to his
righteous rules for the government of the world. The power that the
potentates of the world have to make laws is but derivative from God.
If their dominion be from him, as it is, for “by him kings reign” (Prov.
viii. 15), their legislative power, which is a prime flower of their
sovereignty, is derived from him also: and the apostle resolves it into
this original when he orders us to be “subject to the higher powers,
not only for wrath, but for conscience sake” (Rom. xiii. 5). Conscience,
in its operations, solely respects God; and therefore, when it is
exercised as the principle of obedience to the laws of men, it is not
with respect to them, singly considered, but as the majesty of God
appears in their station and in their decrees. This power of giving
laws was acknowledged by the heathen to be solely in God by way of
original; and therefore the greatest lawgivers among the heathen
pretended their laws to be received from some deity or supernatural
power, by special revelation: now, whether they did this seriously,
acknowledging themselves this part of the dominion of God,――for it is
certain that whatsoever just orders were issued out by princes in the
world, was by the secret influence of God upon their spirits (Prov.
viii. 15): “By me princes decree justice;” by the secret conduct of
Divine wisdom,――or whether they pretended it only as a public engine,
to enforce upon people the observance of their decrees, and gain a
greater credit to their edicts, yet this will result from it, that
the people in general entertained this common notion, that God was
the great Lawgiver of the world. The first founders of their societies
could never else have so absolutely gained upon them by such a pretence.
There was always a revelation of a law from the mouth of God in every
age: the exhortation of Eliphaz to Job (Job xxii. 22), of receiving
a “law from the mouth” of God, at the time before the moral law was
published, had been a vain exhortation had there been no revelation of
the mind of God in all ages.
(2.) The dominion of God is manifest in the extent of his laws. As
he is the Governor and Sovereign of the whole world, so he enacts laws
for the whole world. One prince cannot make laws for another, unless he
makes him his subject by right of conquest; Spain cannot make laws for
England, or England for Spain; but God having the supreme government,
as King over all, is a Lawgiver to all, to irrational, as well as
rational creatures. The “heavens have their ordinances” (Job xxxviii.
33); all creatures have a law imprinted on their beings; rational
creatures have Divine statutes copied in their heart: for men, it is
clear (Rom. ii. 14), every son of Adam, at his coming into the world,
brings with him a law in his nature, and when reason clears itself
up from the clouds of sense, he can make some difference between good
and evil; discern something of fit and just. Every man finds a law
within him that checks him if he offends it: none are without a legal
indictment and a legal executioner within them; God or none was the
Author of this as a sovereign Lord, in establishing a law in man at the
same time, wherein, as an Almighty Creator, he imparted a being. This
law proceeds from God’s general power of governing, as he is the Author
{b389} of nature, and binds not barely as it is the reason of man, but
by the authority of God, as it is a law engraven on his conscience: and
no doubt but a law was given to the angels; God did not govern those
intellectual creatures as he doth brutes, and in a way inferior to
his rule of man. Some sinned; all might have sinned in regard to the
changeableness of their nature. Sin cannot be but against some rule;
“where there is no law, there is no transgression;” what that law was
is not revealed; but certainly it must be the same in part with the
moral law, so far as it agreed with their spiritual natures; a love to
God, a worship of him, and a love to one another in their societies and
persons.