Providence (eBook)

Introduction

Four Invitations

God has revealed the goal and nature and extent of his providence. He has not been silent. He has shown us these things in the Bible. This is one of the reasons that the apostle Paul says, “All Scripture is . . . profitable” (2 Tim. 3:16). The profit lies not mainly in the validation of a theological viewpoint but in the revelation of a great God, the exaltation of his invincible grace, and the liberation of his undeserving people. God has revealed his purposeful sovereignty over good and evil in order to humble human pride, intensify human worship, shatter human hopelessness, and put ballast in the battered boat of human faith, steel in the spine of human courage, gladness in the groans of affliction, and love in the heart that sees no way forward.

What we find in the Bible is real and raw. The prizing and proclaiming of God’s pervasive providence was forged in flames of hatred and love, deceit and truth, murder and mercy, carnage and kindness, cursing and blessing, mystery and revelation, and, finally, crucifixion and resurrection. I hope my treatment of God’s providence will have the aroma of this shocking and hope-filled reality.

In this introduction, I would like to offer you four invitations.

Counterintuitive Wonders

First, I invite you into a biblical world of counterintuitive wonders. I will argue that these wonders are not illogical or contradictory, but they are different from our usual ways of seeing the world—so different that our first reaction is often to say, “That can’t be.” But the “can’t” is in our minds, not in reality. “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33).

For example, in the justice of his judgment, God raises up a cruel shepherd for his people, and then he sends punishment on that shepherd:

Behold, I am raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for those being destroyed, or seek the young or heal the maimed or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs.

“Woe to my worthless shepherd,

who deserts the flock!

May the sword strike his arm

and his right eye!

Let his arm be wholly withered,

his right eye utterly blinded!” (Zech. 11:16–17)

This jars us. For most of us, this is not how we usually think about the ways of God. First, that God raises up a brutal shepherd for his people seems to implicate God in sinful brutality. Second, that God judges the shepherd for his worthlessness seems like capriciously condemning what he himself ordained.

There are many such scenes in the Bible, and I will argue that in them all, God is neither sinful nor capricious. If we are prone to be critical rather than be changed, we should put our hands on our mouths and listen. We are sinful and finite. God is infinite and holy.

My thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:8–9)

I am inviting you into a world of counterintuitive wonders. I hope that you will let the word of God create new categories of thinking rather than trying to force the Scripture into the limits of what you already know. When Paul calls us to be “transformed by the renewal of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2), part of what he has in mind is the overcoming of our natural resistance to the strangeness of the ways of God. Immediately before calling for transformed minds, he writes:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

“Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom. 11:33–36)

In the end, my invitation into the biblical world of counterintuitive wonders is an invitation to worship. God is vastly greater and stranger and more glorious and more dreadful and more loving than we realize. Immersing ourselves in the ocean of his providence is meant to help us know him, fear him, trust him, and love him as we ought.

Penetrating through Words into Reality

Second, I invite you to penetrate through words into reality. Providence is a word not found in the Bible. In that sense, it is like the words Trinity, discipleship, evangelism, exposition, counseling, ethics, politics, and charismatics. People who love the Bible and believe that it is God’s word want to know what the Bible teaches, not just what it says. They want to know the reality being presented, not just the words that were written.

The Bible itself makes clear that it is not enough just to say the words of the Bible. The Bible mandates that all churches have teachers. All churches are supposed to have elders (Titus 1:5), and elders are required to be teachers (1 Tim. 3:2). The task of a teacher is not just to read the Bible to his hearers, but to explain it. And explaining means using other words besides the ones in the text. Throughout the history of the church, heretics have frequently insisted on using only Bible words in defending their heresy. This was certainly the case for the fourth-century Arians, who rejected the deity of Jesus and were happy to use Bible words to do so.1

R. P. C. Hanson explained the process like this: “Theologians of the Christian Church were slowly driven to a realization that the deepest questions which face Christianity cannot be answered in purely biblical language, because the questions are about the meaning of biblical language itself.”2

The longer I have studied Scripture and tried to preach it and teach it, the more I have seen the need to encourage preachers and laypeople to penetrate through biblical words to biblical reality. How easy it is to think we have experienced communion with God when our minds and hearts have stopped with verbal definitions, grammatical relations, historical illustrations, and a few applications. When we do this, even Bible words themselves can become alternatives to what Paul calls “spiritual . . . understanding” (συνέσει πνευματικῇ, Col. 1:9).

I am going to use the word providence to refer to a biblical reality. The reality is not found in any single Bible word. It emerges from the way God has revealed himself through many texts and many stories in the Bible. They are like threads woven together into a beautiful tapestry greater than any one thread. We are using a word that is not in the Bible for the sake of this larger truth of the Bible.

Of course, there are dangers in doing this—just like there are dangers in using only Bible language, which can be twisted to carry false meanings while giving the impression of biblical faithfulness (cf. 2 Pet. 3:16). I will mention one danger, among others.

Since the word providence is not used in specific biblical texts, we have no biblical governor on its meaning. We can’t say, “The Bible defines providence this way.” We could say that only if the Bible actually used the word providence. Whenever you ask what a particular word means, there must be a meaner if the meaning is to have validity. So if the meaner is not one (or more) of the biblical writers, then when I use the word providence, I must assign a meaning. That is what I do in chapter 1. I don’t assign an arbitrary meaning; I try to stay close to what others have meant by the word in the history of the church. But I do choose the meaning.

You can see what this implies. It implies that the issue before us in this book is not the meaning of the word providence. The issue is this: Is the reality that I see in the Bible, and call providence, really there? There is no point in quibbling over whether providence is the best word for the reality. That is relatively unimportant. The all-important truth is whether there is a reality in the Bible that corresponds to my description of the goal, nature, and extent of God’s purposeful sovereignty. You will see in chapter 1 why I use the short definition “purposeful sovereignty” for providence. But for now, I am simply flagging the danger that it would be a sad mistake to miss the biblical reality by focusing on the word.

A God-Entranced World

Third, I invite you into a God-entranced world. Jesus said to look at the birds because God feeds them (Matt. 6:26) and to consider the lilies because God clothes them (Matt. 6:28–30). Jesus’s aim was not aesthetic. His aim was to free his people from anxiety. He really considered it a valid argument that if our heavenly Father feeds the birds and clothes the lilies, how much more surely will he feed and clothe...