To God alone belongs all things. God is sovereign over all. This means that He is in control over all. Yes, He is even in control over us. There is nothing that happens without His knowing and permission of. We cannot even think to come to Him without His permission, nor can we run away without His permission. He is sovereign over all.
To begin with, God is sovereign over all because He is omnipotent, omniscient, and free to do whatever He desires. Because He is omnipotent, nothing is to great or to powerful for Him. He is the supreme power, everything flowing from His hand. Any power that He does not control is power that He is not sovereign over, which would mean that He was not sovereign over all. He must be omnipotent in order to be sovereign over all. No force can contend with Him. He is omniscient, meaning that He knows all. If He is ruling over all He must know all. If there is anything that He did not know, even the smallest bit of information, He would not be sovereign God. He must know all in order to be sovereign over all. He must be free to do whatever He desires. He must be self-sufficient in order to not be limited or dependent on anything. He must not rely on anything or depend on anything. Anything that He depends on limits His infinitude and eternal being. He must be free to do whatever He wants, also, in the sense that nothing is off limits to Him. He must be able to go where He wants, do what He wants, and control what He wants. Any place that He is not able to go limits Him and makes Him less than the almighty sovereign God.
Wait... if everything has to happen by His permission, how did we get sin? Did God allow sin? Doesn't that make Him the father of sin? Yes, and no. He did allow sin, but He did not create sin. He gave us free will to do as we please, and it pleased us to sin. He gave us the ability to make our own moral choices, and we fell. It is not against His will that sin exists because He had made the choice to sin.
Wait... does that mean that we are all controlled by God? Do we have an option in life? This goes to the pre-destination argument, which I just discovered less than a year ago, which says that God either controls every aspect of our life in the face that we are saved or not, or God does not control us and we have free will to do as we please. I like the way that A. W. Tozer put it in The Knowledge of the Holy. He said, "God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it." We have permission to choose our path. God is sovereign over us, regardless of what we believe; and, in the end, it does not matter by what law we were allowed to sin; what matters is that we were given the ability to sin and we did it and we need Jesus.
It is only by God's sovereignty that we can be redeemed because God willed it. Look at John 14:6. "Jesus answered, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Jesus clearly states the authority of God. No one goes to God except on His conditions and His rules. We are still under His sovereign rule, even if we think we have freedom. Even in our limited freedom, God is in control. We must never forget that He is sovereign over all.
-D
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