Now, God Almighty is sovereign, and He has His way in the whirlwind and the storm, and no man can hold Him back nor say, "What are you doing?" No man! He ruleth in the affairs of men, and He gives the kingdom to whom He pleases. That is true God.
But yet God, when it comes to intelligent beings, does not assume authority over them by coercion—except when the time comes that He must. But in the meantime, the Lord is wanting a people who have freedom of choice to enable them to choose to obey, and moral ability to enable them to obey.
Now that's good, sound theology, and that's a whole lot better that you get a hold of this and get it in your mind and in your heart than if I were to entertain you with pleasant or humorous stories.
God, in His supreme dominion, must have a company of beings who are intelligent. It's no great problem to rule over unintelligent beings. It's no great problem for a farmer to have cattle in his barn; they're unintelligent, they can't make any choices. But God's dominion extends over those who have freedom of choice and who have intelligence to understand, so that they can look the thing in the face and say, "Yes, I choose God's way." And then, of course, there must be moral ability there to enable them to obey.
There is no such thing as unrestrained freedom anywhere in the universe. Only God is free! Keep that in mind: only God. Nobody else is free.
And then the concept of authority also involves a restraint of freedom. I say that the whole thing involves freedom of choice, but it also involves restraint of freedom. There is no such thing as unrestrained freedom anywhere in the world—anywhere in the universe, in fact. Only God is free! Keep that in mind: only God. Nobody else is free.
I read an article the other day in one of the local newspapers or magazines of a man, and the title of the article was "I'm Glad I'm a Bum." Did you read that thing? Well, a good-looking chap, and looked to be perfectly healthy. I'd assume he was 38 years old maybe, and seemed to be well-fed and intelligent. And yet he spends his lifetime going from Vancouver to the farthest east cities of this country, and just making his living by bumming, by asking people for money. Well now, he says that the reason he does that is he wants to be free! He doesn't want to be in bondage, "you businessmen."
Now think of it: tomorrow morning you're going to get up when the alarm clock goes off, and you don't want to get up, but you're going to get up! I can prophesy that you'll get up all right. And you will go to work, though you don't particularly want to go to work, but you will go to work. And you younger people will get up also, and you will go to school. We all get up and go somewhere, and yet nobody wants to do it. Funny thing, isn't it? Nobody wants to go to bed, nobody wants to get up! What a funny crowd! Nobody wants to go to bed, and nobody wants to get up again.
Well, you're going to do both, because there's no freedom in the world. You're in a free country—this is a free country, Canada's free, politically free—and yet there isn't a great deal of freedom in it, and there isn't a great deal of freedom in the world. Because while there is freedom from dictation by any self-appointed tyrants, there isn't freedom to live the way you'd just like to do if you consulted the lowest part of your nature.
If you take two bums and put them on a park bench, they're not wholly free. Because both of them will want to stretch out, and it isn't quite long enough for the two, so one of them will have to hunker his knees a little bit in order to make room for the other. There's no such thing as freedom! Take two tramps and put them anywhere, and they're not free. There's no freedom in society anyplace. You say, "I live in a free country and I'm a free man." That's what you think! Try parking by a water plug, brother, and see how free you are! Try going through a red light at 40 miles an hour—or 20 for that matter—and see where you are. No, we're not free. In fact, when it comes right down to it, if we were totally free, we'd be miserable—absolutely miserable!
So there's a certain restraint of freedom also, which is inherent in this whole concept of dominion.
You know there's no freedom even up in the planets above us, and up in the stars. When the brethren went around the world there, those gentlemen going around the earth, a little touch of claustrophobia would have driven those men crazy. I couldn't have gone and get in a place like that. I'd like to die out in the open; I don't want to die all cramped in someplace and you can't get out. Well, that's where they were. And a little touch of claustrophobia would have ruined them, because they were all tight in a little thing called a capsule. I don't want to be in a capsule at all—not until they put me in that black one after I haven't anything to say about it!
But there they were, floating around the earth, and they I suppose thought they were free. They weren't free at all—absolutely not! There were the laws of aerodynamics there; there was the gravitational pull of the earth and other planets; there was the centrifugal force throwing them outward; and there was the beating of their hearts; and there was everything. They were not slaves, but they weren't free. Nowhere is anything perfectly free. There's no perfect freedom in nature, and there's no perfect freedom in society.
And if there were perfect freedom in society, I'd want to get out of society and get to God as fast as I could! Because if there were perfect freedom for everybody to do as he pleased, your property wouldn't amount to a thing. You work and get yourself a house where you can live, and rear your family, and have to come back to, and where your children can come to, and your wife can look after your home—and it's yours, and it says it's yours down at City Hall, it's registered there, you've got the deed, it's yours. And if society suddenly were perfectly free, it wouldn't be yours at all; it would be anybody's that was bigger than you, anybody that wanted to come out and take it away. So remember that perfect and total freedom would be not an advantage at all; it would be something else. There must be restraint, and authority means that there is a restraint on freedom.