Divine Providence

You have natural disasters and catastrophes, and everybody wants to say, oh, well, God is not involved in these things. If God isn't involved in those things, then we're alone in the universe, and we are simply at the mercy of impersonal forces that can crush us at any moment. Where is God when tragedy strikes? This is a question that has been raised through the ages.

That is a question we need to answer biblically, because to get the answer wrong is to get God wrong and not truly understand who He is. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. As you'll hear today, not too long ago, the idea of providence and an understanding of God's involvement with our day-to-day affairs was much more widely understood, but not so today. And for the Christian, misunderstanding providence can lead to discouragement and despair.

This week R.C. Sproul is teaching from the Westminster Confession of Faith's chapter on providence. This confession is one of the most precise and comprehensive statements of biblical Christianity. Dr. Sproul called it one of the most important confessions of faith ever penned, and when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org to thank you for your support, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's commentary on this confession, walking you through it chapter by chapter, section by section.

Well, here's Dr. Sproul to begin our week in the fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith. We're going to begin the fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which focuses on the doctrine of the providence of God. Let me say as we enter into a study of this doctrine that in previous generations in church history there was a widespread awareness among the Christian public of the providence of God. If any of you ever saw the series on public television chronicling the war between the states in which many moving letters were written by the soldiers on both sides back to their wives and to their families, they almost never mentioned God as such, but instead they constantly referred to God by the name Providence with a capital P. They would say, they would say, tomorrow it looks like we're going to enter into battle. I don't know what Providence has in store for us, but if it should be pleasing to Him that I not survive the morrow, let me explain my undying love for you and so on.

And we can remember the heart-wrenching content of those letters that were read in that special telecast. But what struck me was that how common in the nineteenth century it was for the rank-and-file Christian to refer regularly to the providence of God. And yet the only time you ever hear much about Providence today is that it's a city in Rhode Island. Back during the period of the Enlightenment when a whole awakening took place to the study of social sciences in terms of political theory with Montesquieu and so on, we saw the monumental work of Adam Smith in the field of economics in his classic work of The Wealth of Nations. And in that book, Adam Smith, in seeking to discern the basic natural laws that govern economic interaction, he was seeking to discover what he called the invisible hand of providence. And it was assumed by people like Adam Smith, people like John Locke, and many of the founders of this country in the eighteenth century that the affairs of humans and of human history and human events were governed ultimately by the hand of providence, but that that hand was more often than not invisible. Well, at least in the earlier centuries the church had this consistent grasp of the providence of God. We're living in an age, however, where that providence has been sorely eclipsed, and we live, even though we may profess faith in the existence of God, we live as if there were no God. We have a hypothetical theism, but a practical atheism as we've all but banished the idea of providence from our thinking. But with that in mind, let's take a look at what the Westminster Divines articulated in the seventeenth century regarding this doctrine. Chapter 5, section 1 reads as follows, God the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, comma, from the greatest even to the least, comma, by His most wise and holy providence, comma, according to His infallible foreknowledge, comma, we're still in the first sentence here, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will, comma, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, comma, power, comma, justice, comma, goodness, comma, and mercy.

You would think that the Westminster Divines were German rather than English with the length of the sentences that they employed to make their confession. But again, every word was carefully measured to include in this confession some vital theological idea that was important to our understanding of this doctrine of providence. Now notice that at the very beginning God is identified as the great Creator, and so historically in systematic theology the doctrine of providence has always been linked to the doctrine of God the Creator. And when we look at the concept of creation in biblical terms going all the way back to Genesis 1, we see that in the Hebrew idea of creation, in the very word to create, the word bara is an idea that creation is not something that is what I would call a staccato action, having used a term now from the world of music, I'm going to try to illustrate it over here. If you know how staccato notes sound, they sound like this, sharp, quick, not being held.

Now if I want to move from staccato to sostenato, I want to do this, so that you can hear the difference between a sustained note and a staccato note. Well, closely related to the biblical concept of creation is that what God creates He sustains. The very concept of creation involves not simply an instantaneous beginning whereby God calls the world into being. Christianity does not embrace the doctrines of deism that says God was the great clockmaker who set everything in motion, and once things were set in motion, He steps out of the picture and lets the universe operate by internal mechanistic laws. No, the God of Hebrew thinking is a God who is involved from the beginning of creation throughout all of eternity thereafter, that He sustains, or the word that is used here in the text of the Confession is the word upholds. That is, what He creates, He holds in creation.

He keeps it going, and that's critical to our understanding of the doctrine of providence. Now let's just look at the word providence for a second. We get the word providence from a Latin word, pro waderi, and the basic root of that word waderi is familiar to all of us. We have television, the word vision, the word video comes from that root Latin word. We remember the famous words of Julius Caesar during his Gallic Wars where he said, wene, wide, wici, I came, I saw, I conquered.

The wide, or vide we would say, means I saw. So obviously the verb waderi means to see, and you add this little prefix to it, pro, which means beforehand or in advance of. So that literally, etymologically, the word providence refers to God's foreknowledge, to God's seeing things in advance. But here is where our little examination of the word derivation doesn't do justice to the theological concept because the doctrine of providence means far more than to assert that God sees things or observes them before they happen. If that were all that was meant by the doctrine of providence, this would simply make God a celestial spectator who observes what is taking place in the world from a distance without being involved in any way Himself with what is happening.

But rather there's another English word that comes from the same root in Latin that may give us a greater insight into it, and that is the English word to provide or provision. The first time in the Old Testament that we meet the concept of providence spelled out is in the twenty-second chapter of the book of Genesis where you remember the extremely moving situation in which Abraham after going so many years awaiting the fulfillment of the promises that God had made to him that he would have an heir from his own loins, and finally after long last his son Isaac was born. And then in chapter 22, God puts Abraham to the test and says, take now thy son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac, and take him to the place where I will show you. He points him to Mount Moriah and tells him to take his son there and to offer him there as a sacrifice on the altar. And so we know the drama and the poignancy of that particular episode in Abraham's life and how we are told that he rose up early in the morning, saddled the beasts of burden and so on, and he had the wood for the fire and the rope and so on, and he leads his son towards Moriah, and Isaac looks at his father and he says, Father, we have the wood and the ropes and so on, and we forgot the lamb. How can we do a sacrifice without a lamb?

You remember that? And Abraham of course feels a spear in his soul when that question is raised by his son. He doesn't look at him and say, You're it. Instead he says to Isaac, And Jehovah Jireh, which being translated means the Lord will provide. There's the first mention of this idea in sacred Scripture, and of course what happens at the end of that episode when Abraham binds his son and places him on the altar and is ready to plunge the dagger into his heart, God stops him and says, Abraham, Abraham, lay not thy hand upon thy son and so on. And behold, he looks off to the side and he sees a ram caught by his horns in the thicket, and God had indeed provided the substitute for the sacrifice. And so we see the providence of God, God's provision for the need of Abraham and Isaac taking place on that account.

Also this idea of provision is emphasized in the teaching of Jesus in the gospels when He tells us, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, take no thought for tomorrow what you should eat, what you should drink, what you should put on. And then He talks about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and Solomon, all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And He talks about that God notices every time a bird lands on the ground and that the hairs of every person are numbered. He's talking there about God's providence, of God sustaining what He creates. And so the Creator of all things upholds or sustains them. He directs, disposes, and governs all creatures. And again here this word government is central to the doctrine of providence. Biblically, God is seen as the supreme governor over heaven and on earth. He is sovereign over everything that He makes.

It is the Lord God omnipotent who reigns. This is an interesting footnote to the culture in which we live in today where there are fierce struggles in the political arena about fears of intrusion into the public square of the Christian church. And even now the court is wrestling with whether it's legitimate to post the Ten Commandments in the public square and courthouses and so on, and all based on this concern about the separation of church and state, which of course isn't in the Constitution or a declaration.

It was a side made by Thomas Jefferson. But there's a big difference between separation of church and state where the church itself has agreed to this and understood that when God creates His church, He gives certain tasks for the church to undertake and perform other tasks that He gives to the civil magistrates, and the New Testament refers to the civil magistrates as God's ministers. We understand that. But both church and state historically were understood to be under God, because if God is the Creator of all things, then obviously His authority applies to all things. What kind of a God would it be whose authority was restricted only to the church but was impotent with respect to His sovereignty with reference to the rule of nations? That would be no God at all.

But what has happened in our culture is the concept of separation of church and state has now come to mean the separation of the state and God, so that now the state sees itself as being ultimately sovereign and not answerable or accountable to God. And that's a very serious crisis that we're struggling with right now, and in the final analysis, it's a crisis concerning our understanding of divine providence, because providence affirms the lordship, the sovereignty of God over His entire creation. We know that in the Old Testament, for example, in addition to the ineffable name of God, the tetragrammaton, the sacred name that He revealed Himself to, to Moses, the name Yahweh, still in addition to that name there are many, many titles that are given and ascribed to God, which titles normally call attention to some aspect or another of His character or of His work. And the most revered title that is given to God in the Old Testament is the title Adon or Adonai, where you find it closely linked to His personal name Yahweh, particularly, for example, in the Psalms where David will say, Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth. He's saying, Oh Yahweh, our Adonai, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth. Well, the name or the title Adonai means the one who is absolutely sovereign, the one who governs.

And we see that Hebrew title translated in the New Testament by the Greek word kyrios, which is called the name that is above every name, that is the name that is bestowed upon Christ in His exaltation when He is elevated to the role of King of Kings and Lord of Lords and reigns at the right hand of God over all creation. And so the idea of the reign of God in the Old Testament and the reign of Christ in the New Testament is never seen by the biblical writers as restricted to some narrowly defined sphere, the borders of which contain and limit the divine authority, but rather the realm of divine authority is the whole realm of nature, the whole realm of creation, that God reigns over the universe. His laws are things that He governed. I said to you before in this course that our thinking in many ways has been shaped by the secular culture in which we live, and one of the concepts that's profoundly influenced our thinking is the idea that we do in fact live in a universe where the laws of nature function and operate as independent powers, and that God is somehow relegated to a realm of faith, but He has nothing to do with nature. But biblically, the law of gravity is God's law.

The second law of thermodynamics is God's law. It's the regular way or the ordinary way in which God orders the universe and governs inanimate objects, inanimate objects, tides and seas and rivers and trees and seasons and all the rest, not to mention human history. And so in this lengthy sentence of the first section of chapter 5, it says, He directs, He disposes, and He governs all creatures. That means rocks and mountains and hills and trees and human beings, all actions and things from the greatest even to the least by His most wise and holy providence. Notice when it speaks of the wisdom of God, going back to the earlier chapters of the Confession, in using these terms to describe the attributes of God, the authors reach back and describe them in terms of superlatives. God is not only wise, nor is He wiser, He is wisest. That is, His wisdom is most wise, and His providence is most holy. His providence is maintained by His character, by His being, by His transcendent majesty. And it works out according to His infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of His own will. We've already looked at that in chapter 3, how that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass freely and immutably according to His will.

And all of this is to what end? His providence redounds not simply to the care of His creation and the provisions that He makes for our needs and the needs of nature, but it redounds to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, not ours, His power, not ours, His justice, His goodness and mercy. Now we can look at these as words of a creed and let them bounce off our brains without having any impact on our thinking. But if you want to have your Christian life revolutionized, begin to study and contemplate the problems of God, because in His hand is revealed and made manifest the perfection of His character that redounds to the praise of His glory. Again, we live in an age that denies the hand of problems.

You have a Suriname. You have a terrible hurricane. You have natural disasters and catastrophes, and everybody wants to say, oh, well, God is not involved in these things. If God isn't involved in those things, then we're alone in the universe, and we are simply at the mercy of impersonal forces that can crush us at any moment. Now we don't know why God does what He does, but we know from the Scriptures that He brings will and He brings woe. He brings prosperity. He brings calamity. He brings peace.

He brings conflict. And if you want to know who God is, you have to look for His hand in everything that comes to pass, the bad as well as the good, although for the Christian, ultimately there is no tragedy as we learn in the New Testament. What a comfort to know that there is purpose in our suffering and that ultimately for the Christian there are no tragedies.

That was R.C. Sproul teaching on the providence of God from the fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith. As you heard today, understanding topics like the providence of God is immensely practical, and although we'll spend all week in this chapter from the Westminster Confession, you can study the entire confession with R.C. Sproul as your guide when you request the hardcover edition of Truths We Confess. Simply make a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343 and we'll send you this commentary on the confession. Your support today will help the truths of biblical Christianity to continue to be broadcast through Renewing Your Mind and our other media efforts. So please give today at renewingyourmind.org or by using the convenient link in the podcast show notes. Thank you. Since God is the God of Providence, how does his providence work out in time and space? That's what R.C. Sproul will consider tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.