What Is Providence?

Previous generations had little problem with the concept of God.

Eighteenth century people assumed that there was somebody up there. There wasn't that much of a question about the fact that there was an overarching Almighty Creator who governed the affairs of this universe. But we're living in a period of unprecedented skepticism about the very existence of God.

If we can't touch it, feel it, taste it, or test it, most in our society simply deny it exists. Welcome to Redoing Your Mind on this Monday. I'm Lee Webb, and today we turn to Dr. R.C. Sproul's series on the providence of God. Is it possible in a time when there is so much skepticism to believe not only that God exists, but that He's in sovereign control of all that exists?

Let's find out. At lunchtime today, I spent some time looking at one of the news programs, and they flashed an advertisement on the screen advertising a series of books from Time Life Company. And one of the books had to do with glimpses of problems of life in the past.

And the advertisement went on to say, read this particular book that tells us what it was like to be sick a hundred years ago. That caught my attention because we as twentieth century people are so bound to our own timeframe. And do you ever think about how people lived their daily lives in previous ages, in previous generations? My mind thinks about that quite frequently because I have a habit of reading books that were written by people who lived in many cases long before the twentieth century.

I particularly like to read the authors of the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century. And what I notice in their writings, in their personal correspondence with their friends is an acute sense of the presence of God in their lives, a sense of an overarching providence. We even have a city in the United States by that name, Providence, Rhode Island, that was named of course in the eighteenth century or perhaps even earlier by that generation of people who had this sense that all of life was under the direction and the government of Almighty God. If you would go to Washington to the National Archives and read the samples of personal correspondence can be found even from the pen of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and people of that sort, you will see that word Providence sprinkled liberally throughout their language. People talked about a benevolent providence or an angry providence, but there was again this sense that God was directly involved in the daily lives of people.

Now one of my favorite anecdotes to describe the situation in our own day is one that Jim Boyce likes to use. He tells the story of the mountain climber who experienced a crisis about fifteen thousand feet up the side of a mountain when he fell over the edge and was about to plummet thousands of feet to his death when as he started his fall he reached out and grabbed the branch of a tiny scraggly tree that was growing out from the face of the cliff. And as he grabbed a hold of this thing and the roots started to come loose and he saw a certain death, he screamed to the heavens, he said, is there anybody up there who can help me? Whereupon he heard this rich baritone voice answering his query from the sky saying, yes, I am up here and I will help you.

All you have to do is let go of the branch and trust me. The man looked up to heaven, looked back down into the canyon. He raised his voice again and said, is there anyone else up there who can help me?

I like that because I think it typifies the cultural mentality of our own day because there are a couple of questions in that little illustration that I think are important. The first question is, is there anybody up there? Eighteenth century people assumed that there was somebody up there. There wasn't that much of a question about the fact that there was an overarching Almighty Creator who governed the affairs of this universe. But we're living in a period of unprecedented skepticism about the very existence of God. I know the polls say that between 95 and 98 percent of people in the United States believe in some kind of God or some kind of higher power, and also I think we can't escape the logic of assuming that there has to be some kind of foundational ultimate cause for this world as we experience. But usually when you pin people down and begin to talk to them about their idea of this higher power or supreme being, it is a concept of something that is more of an it than a he, almost like cosmic dust or some kind of energy. And that's why the question is not only the question is, but the question is, is there anybody? Is there a personal being in charge of the universe?

Now there are two other parts of that little anecdote that I think are significant. Remember the question the mountain climber raises when he's about to fall to his death. He says, is there anybody up there who what?

Who can help me? See, that's the question of modern man. Is there anybody outside the sphere of our daily lives in the supernatural realm? Not only is there anybody there, but if there is someone there, can that one who is there be of any help to us? So the next question is, can he help? But that's not where the question ends. The next question is close to this one. Close to this one. There may be somebody up there who can help, but is that any guarantee that he what?

Will help. And so the question of providence that we're going to look at is not only is there anybody there, but is there anyone who is there, is he able to do anything with this world in which we live? And if he is able, is he willing to do anything about the daily circumstances of our lives? Now, when we look at the development of ideas that shape culture, and again turn our attention to the twentieth century, there is one particular view of the world in which we live that has exercised enormous influence on everyone's thinking in this room. The concept is called the idea of a closed mechanistic universe. I know those of you who are students of science are quite aware of the theories that are more modern than this that speak of an expanding universe and of a universe that is open to almost any kind of future possibility and so on, but I'm talking about a view of this world that has persisted now for a couple of hundred years and has tremendous influence in shaping how people understand the way life is lived out. And I would say that in the secular world, secular world, still the dominant idea is that we live in a universe that is closed to any kind of intrusion from outside of it, and that the universe runs by purely mechanical forces and causes.

In a word, ladies and gentlemen, the issue for modern man is the issue ultimately of causality. I read an essay in a journal not too long ago where a person was exercising his frustration at the negative influence that religion has caused in our nation and in our culture. And we see this more and more frequently and more and more vehemently being expressed that religion seems to be the thing that keeps people bound up in the dark ages of superstition and of being closed in their minds to understanding the reality of the ways of this world as it has been discovered through the investigation and resources of science. Now, there's still a toleration for religion, but religion now seems to be treated to a wider and wider and wider gap from the scientific arena.

It's as if science is something for the mind, for research, for intelligence, and religion is something emotional, personal, for feelings. I just listened to a conversation from people the other day who were talking about different religions, and the basic thesis was, you know, hey, everybody has a right to believe what they want to believe, and the main thing is that you have a religion. And if you're Jewish, if you're Muslim, if you're Buddhist, if you're Christian, whatever you are, the important thing is that you believe in something.

And everybody at the table agreed with that thesis. The real important thing is that you believe in something. I wanted to get up on that table and say, does truth matter? The important thing to me is to believe in the truth. I'm not satisfied with believing in anything. If what I believe in is not true, if it's superstitious, if it's fallacious, I want to be liberated from it. But the mentality of our day seems to be in matters of religion, and truth is insignificant.

We learn truth from science. We get good feelings from our religion. Again, this article went on to say that in former days where religious superstition reigned supreme over people's minds, God was attributed as being the cause for everything, God or some element of the supernatural world. If you had a stomach ache, then that was the influence of some kind of evil demon like Peter Payne jumping on your back or on your tummy and making you sick or some invisible angel. Now we know that it's not invisible angels that are afflicting us. It's invisible microorganisms that are doing it, and those microorganisms are not of angelic nature. They're simple natural causes and so on.

And we don't believe that a thunderstorm or an earthquake is caused by the immediate hand of divine intervention. Remember, in the eighteenth century, one of the most important books in the sphere of economics was written what has become, of course, the classic in Western economic theory, written by Adam Smith, the abbreviated title being The Wealth of Nations. What Smith was trying to do was apply the scientific method to the field of economics to see what causes certain economic responses and counter responses in the marketplace that affect the national economic well-being and so on. But what Smith wanted to do was to cut through speculation and identify basic causes that produced predictable effects. But all the time as he was applying this scientific inquiry to the complicated network of economic actions and reactions, he spoke, if you remember, of the invisible hand. In other words, Smith was saying, yes, there are causes and effects going on in this world, but we have to recognize while we're examining the proximate, the cause that is in front of us and the effects that are taking place, if I drop this chalk, it's going to hit the floor, we can examine all the dynamics of what's taking that place. Smith said, don't forget, however, that above all of that there has to be an ultimate causal power, or there wouldn't be any lower causal powers available, and that the whole universe is orchestrated by the invisible hand of providence. See, what's happened now is that we have focused so intently on the proximate activity that's directly in our purview that for the most part we have ignored or denied the overarching causal power behind all of life, so that modern man, ladies and gentlemen, has no concept of providence. And what I want to do in our time together is to try to give definition to the concept of providence. We're going to have six lectures.

This will only serve as an introduction. The whole broad question of providence is one of the most fascinating, important, and difficult doctrines in the Christian faith because it deals with the difficult questions like, how does God's causal power and authority interact with ours? How does God's sovereign rule relate to our free choices? How is God's government related to the problem of evil, to the problem of suffering in this world? How does my prayer have any influence over God's providential decisions?

In other words, how do I live out my life down here in light of this invisible hand up there? That's basically what we're concerned about in the question of providence, and I want to start now with simple definitions. The word providence is a little bit of a misnomer.

You know, I like to take words and tear them apart. The word part, the word providence, has a prefix, pro, which means what? To do something for money, right? To play baseball. That's a pro, right?

He's paid for what he knows. The prefix pro means before or in front of. In other words, it means to be before with respect to time or before with respect to space. That's how the prefix pro is used. Now the root comes from the Latin word there, eh?

Uene, uite, uici, remember? I came, I heard. No, I came, I saw, I conquered, and that word comes over, of course, into our English language in a very appropriate way for these lectures here that we are doing as we're nestled comfortably in a television studio, and we have in our midst today video cameras.

And so long before there was video, there was pro video. There was providence. Now the word providence simply comes from the prefix pro and video, and so literally and technically the word providence comes from this idea that providence refers to God's seeing something beforehand. So that the providence of God refers to God's seeing something before or beforehand, before His presence or beforehand with respect to time. Now this is not the same thing as the concept of foreknowledge or prescience, where in theology we talk about the fact that God can look down the corridors of time and know the end of the activity before it even starts. But the doctrine of providence, though it speaks about God's seeing things before, certainly includes far more within it than simple foresight with respect to the deity. But the reason why we have the doctrine of providence is that the first thing it tells us about God's government of the universe is that the God of Judeo-Christianity, He's a God who sees everything that takes place in the universe. There is nothing that takes place that does not take place before Him.

It is in full view of His eyes. Now I know that that can be one of the most terrifying thoughts that a human being could ever have to consider, that there is someone who is, as Jean Paul Sartre lamented, an ultimate cosmic voyeur who looks through the celestial keyhole and observes every single action of every human being. As I said, if there's anything about the character of God other than His holiness that drives people away from Him, it is this all-seeing providence. The providence of God.

It's a biblical truth that a few people talk about these days, but it's so important to understand what it means. We're grateful that you've joined us today here on Renewing Your Mind. This is from Dr.

R.C. 's role series, The Providence of God. He'll have a few more comments for us in just a moment, so I hope you'll stay with us. When we hear a message like this, it can bring up new questions. For example, God is sovereign, but how can He be in charge of everything and not be the author of evil?

And if God has already decided how things are going to work out, why should we pray? R.C. 's series answers these questions and many others, and we'd be happy to send you the six-part audio series when you contact us today with a donation of any amount. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343. You can also find us online at renewingyourmind.org. And if you've never contacted us before, we would also like to send you a copy of next month's issue of Table Talk magazine for free. The theme is Providence, and you'll find helpful articles in that issue. Be sure to mention this offer when you do call.

Again, our phone number is 800-435-4343. And before we go today, let's listen to a final comment from Dr. Sproul. In our first segment on our study of the doctrine of providence, we've looked at the meaning of the word providence and seen its roots in the words to see everything that is in front of or beforehand. And we spent some time on the fact that the God of Providence is a God who sees everything that we do and knows everything about us. Now, that brings to mind the whole concept of God as a spectator. And one of the things that I've noticed about spectators is that spectators can become very enthusiastic about what they are watching, but they have little or no influence over the results of what they are watching. If any of you have ever been to movies, you can see that sometimes the audience gets so worked up in the middle of a dramatic scene that they'll begin to talk to the characters on the stage as if they're talking to these images on the silver screen. Can they have any possible influence on the outcome of the drama?

I remember the first version of Rocky and during the prize fight that was the culmination of the drama, that the people in the audience got all excited, and they're screaming up there saying, win, Rocky, win, Rocky. Or people at football games are screaming and yelling, and even to the television set. But the basic bottom line that I notice about that is that to be merely a spectator is to be virtually powerless to influence the outcome. That's why I said in our first lecture that even though the word providence is rooted in the Latin for seeing something beforehand, that it involves far more than God's seeing what takes place. Because if there's anything that is revealed to us about the character of God in the Old and New Testament is that God is not merely a spectator. He is a spectator, but not merely a spectator. He has the authority to change what He sees and to bring to pass whatsoever He desires to bring to pass. Thank you.