The Mystery of Providence
John Flavel, in modern English
A note before we start
Flavel built this whole book on one line from Psalm 57:2. The King James Version reads, "unto God that performeth all things for me." Most modern translations say something closer to "God who fulfils his purpose for me." We've kept the older wording, "performs all things for me," because Flavel's argument leans on that exact phrase.
"Providence" is Flavel's word for God's hands-on governing of everything that happens, especially in the lives of his people. He also calls believers "the saints." We've kept both words. Flavel writes in the first person, as a pastor talking to his congregation, and we've kept that too.
Scripture is quoted from the ESV unless the older wording matters to the point being made.
Author's Introduction
I will cry out to God Most High, to God who performs all things for me. (Psalm 57:2)
The greatness of God is a glorious mystery, and nobody can search it out. "The LORD, the Most High, is to be feared, a great king over all the earth" (Psalm 47:2, ESV). His kindness toward people is just as deep a mystery: "Though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly" (Psalm 138:6, ESV). When those two truths meet, as they do in this verse, you get a mystery with nothing to match it. Here is the Most High God performing all things for one poor, distressed creature.
That's the great comfort of God's people in every trouble that comes to them here. A wise Spirit sits in all the wheels of motion. He governs even the wildest creatures and their most vicious plans, and he steers them toward good and happy ends. Honestly, life in a world with no God and no providence wouldn't be worth living.
You can see how much this matters from the situation behind Psalm 57. David wrote it, as the title says, while he was hiding from Saul in a cave. The title carries two labels, "Al-taschith" and "Michtam." The first points to the psalm's purpose and the second to its worth.
"Al-taschith" means "do not destroy," or "let there be no slaughter." It may refer to Saul, since David told his men not to destroy him. More likely it's addressed to God, because David was pouring out his soul to him in this desperate moment: "Don't destroy." "Michtam" means "a golden treasure," and it fits. This psalm deserves that name far more than Pythagoras's "Golden Verses" deserve theirs.
Three things stand out in the first part of the psalm: David's extreme danger, his urgent prayer in the middle of it, and the arguments he uses as he prays.
1. His extreme danger
You can see it in both the title and the psalm itself. The cave was in the wilderness of Engedi, among broken rocks where wild goats lived. It was a bleak, out-of-the-way hole, and Saul's jealousy followed David even there (1 Samuel 24:1-2). He'd been hunted like a partridge on the mountains for a long time, and now it looked as if the net had closed. His enemies were outside the cave, and there was no other way out. Then Saul himself walked into the mouth of the cave, where David and his men were hiding in the hollows along its sides, and they watched him come in.
Think how desperate that was. No wonder David says, "My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts" (Psalm 57:4, ESV). What hope was left? What could anyone expect but immediate destruction?
2. His urgent prayer
Even so, this didn't frighten him out of his faith or his duty. With death's jaws open in front of him, he prays. He goes to God and begs for mercy: "Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me" (Psalm 57:1, ESV). This is a wonderful psalm, and he wrote it at a moment that would have rattled anyone. The repetition tells you two things at once: how bad the danger was and how intense his pleading was. Mercy, mercy, nothing but mercy, and mercy of an extraordinary kind, could save him now.
3. The arguments he uses
The arguments he brings to God for mercy are weighty ones.
First, he pleads his trust in God. "Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by" (Psalm 57:1, ESV). His trust doesn't earn mercy. The act itself isn't worth that much. But it's a real argument because of who he trusts: a compassionate God who won't leave anyone exposed who has taken shelter under his wings. It's also a real argument because of God's promise to protect those who run to him for safety: "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you" (Isaiah 26:3, ESV). So David encourages himself by thinking about the God he's trusting.
Second, he pleads what God has done for him before. His earlier experiences of God's help become the reason he can hope in this crisis: "I cry out to God Most High, to God who performs all things for me" (Psalm 57:2).
Two things need looking at in these words: the duty David resolves to do, and the encouragement behind that resolve.
The duty he resolves to do
"I will cry out to God." Crying out means more than ordinary prayer. It means intense, heartfelt prayer, prayer with holy passion in it. Prayers like that tend to get a quick hearing (Psalm 18:6; Hebrews 5:7).
The encouragement behind his resolve
It comes from two places: who God is, and what David has already seen God do.
Who God is: "I will cry out to God Most High." This is where his faith stands when the danger is at its worst. Saul is high, but God is the Most High, and Saul can't touch David without God's permission. David had nobody to help him. And if he had, he knew God would have to help the helpers first, or they couldn't help him at all. He had no way of defending himself and no way out, but the Most High isn't limited by methods or means. That's a singular support for faith (Psalm 59:9).
What God has already done: "To God who performs all things for me." The Hebrew word we translate "performs" comes from a root that means both "to complete" and "to stop," because when a job is done, the worker stops. God had brought all David's doubtful, difficult situations to a happy ending before. So David is encouraged to expect that God will keep being gracious and finish whatever concerns him now: "The LORD will fulfil his purpose for me" (Psalm 138:8, ESV). Older translations say, "The LORD will perfect that which concerns me."
The Greek Septuagint translates Psalm 57:2 as "the one who does good to me," meaning the one who benefits me. And it's certainly true that everything God's providence produces is good for his people.
Our English translation fills in the sense well: "who performs all things." It also gets as close as anything to the strict definition of providence, which is simply the performance of God's gracious purposes and promises to his people.
Other scholars have filled in the short Hebrew sentence differently. Vatabulus and Muis supply "which he has promised," so it reads: "to God who performs the things he has promised." That's a fair way to put it, because payment is the performance of a promise. Grace makes the promise, and providence makes the payment. Piscator reads it as "to God who performs his kindness and mercy," though that still assumes the mercy was promised. Mercy is sweet in the promise, and much sweeter when providence actually delivers it. Castalio reads it as "the God who handles my affairs," which comes close to ours.
Still, the English, which says "all things," best fits the scope of the verse. It would greatly strengthen David's faith to remember that God had handled all his affairs. That providence had never failed him in any of the tight spots he'd been in, and his life was full of them. So he could reasonably hope God wouldn't fail him now, even in this extraordinary and unmatched crisis.
What this verse shows us about providence
Let's look more closely at this verse. It gives us a good view of providence in four ways: it reaches everything, it gets things done, it benefits God's people, and it encourages them.
1. Providence reaches everything. It doesn't have a hand in just this or that. It's involved in all that concerns God's people. It has its eye on everything that touches them, from the first day of their lives to the last. This covers not only the great and weighty matters but the smallest, most ordinary details of life. Providence touches everything that touches us, whether closely or from a distance.
2. Providence gets things done. It doesn't only take a matter on, it finishes it. It carries out its plans and accomplishes what it begins. No difficulty is big enough to clog it, and no unexpected setback can throw it off. Its movements can't be resisted or overruled. "He performs all things for me."
3. Providence benefits God's people. This is the sweetest part. Everything it produces is good for the saints. It performs all things for them. We often judge its work too quickly and criticise its plans unfairly. In our troubles we say what Jacob said: "All this is against me" (Genesis 42:36, ESV). But providence doesn't, and can't, do anything that's truly against the real good of the saints. What is providence, after all? It's the carrying out of God's decree and the fulfilling of his word. There can't be more in providence than there is in those. And God's purposes and promises hold nothing but good for his people. So whatever providence does concerning them has to be "the performance of all things for them."
4. Providence encourages. If all this is true, think how cheering and supporting it must be in a day of distress. How much life and hope it can put into our hearts and prayers when heavy pressure bears down on us!
It did that for David. As far as sight and reason could tell, his situation was hopeless. There was barely a hair's breadth between him and ruin. A powerful, furious, relentless enemy had driven him into a hole in the rock and then followed him in. Yet while his soul was among lions, and he lay in a crack in the rock expecting at any moment to be dragged out and killed, he thought back over what the Most High had done for him from the beginning until now. That held up his soul, and it breathed hope and life into his prayer: "I cry out to God Most High, to God who performs all things for me."
The doctrine of this book
From this verse, the point I want to press is this:
It's the duty of God's people, especially in hard times, to reflect on what providence has done for them, in every situation and stage of their lives.
Remembering providence has always been the habit of God's people
The church, in every act of mercy, recognises God's hand: "O LORD, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works" (Isaiah 26:12, ESV). In every generation, believers have habitually kept the memory of the more remarkable providences that came to them, as a precious treasure.
Richard Baxter put it this way:
If you are a Christian indeed, I know you have, if not in your book, then certainly in your heart, a great many precious favours on record. Even remembering and retelling them is sweet. How much sweeter was it to enjoy them?
Look at how often Scripture shows people doing this.
- Moses, under God's direction, wrote down a memorial of the victory over Amalek as the answer to prayer, and he built an altar there with the inscription Jehovah-nissi, "The LORD Is My Banner" (Exodus 17:14-15).
- Mordecai and Esther took care to keep alive the memory of their rescue from Haman's plot. They set up the feast of Purim to be observed "throughout every generation, in every clan, province, and city," so that "the commemoration of them" would never cease among their descendants (Esther 9:28, ESV).
- Some psalms were written with the stated aim "to bring to remembrance" (the title of Psalm 70).
- Parents gave their children names that would refresh their memory of God's mercies every time they looked at them (1 Samuel 1:20).
- Places where striking providences occurred were given new names, for no reason except to preserve the memory of those providences. That's how Bethel got its name (Genesis 28:19). The well where the angel refreshed Hagar in her distress was called Beer-lahai-roi, "the well of the Living One who sees me" (Genesis 16:13-14).
- Even the names given to God himself come from this. Abraham's Jehovah-jireh ("The LORD will provide") and Gideon's Jehovah-shalom ("The LORD Is Peace") were given for exactly this reason. And sometimes God calls himself "the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans," or "who brought you out of the land of Egypt," or "who gathered you from the north country," to remind his people of the gracious providences he worked for them in all those places.
Two ways of looking at providence
When we reflect on God's providence, there are two ways to do it.
The first is the full view, the whole picture at once. That blessing is saved for the perfect state, on that mountain of God where we'll see the wilderness and Canaan together: the glorious kingdom we've arrived in, and the road that led us there. The saints will see all of it in one glance. Every part will be clear, with its own purpose and its connection to the other parts, and we'll see how smoothly and orderly they all worked together to bring about our salvation, just as the promise says: "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28, ESV). No ship at sea follows its compass more faithfully than providence follows that promise. It's the North Star it steers by.
The second view is partial and incomplete, and it's the one we have on the way to glory. We see only single events, or at most a few connected strands.
The difference between these two views is like the difference between looking at the loose wheels and scattered pins of a watch and looking at the whole watch put together and running in perfect order. Or it's like the difference between an untrained observer looking at one visible vessel in a dissected body, and a skilled anatomist who traces every vein and artery through the whole body and sees the exact place and purpose of each part and how they relate to one another.
What a thrilling thing it will be to see the whole design of providence in one view, and the exact place and use of every single act that we couldn't understand in this world! What Christ told Peter applies to many of the providences that puzzle us now: "What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand" (John 13:7, ESV).
All those dark, tangled, confusing providences that offended or amazed us will make sense then. We couldn't fit them together with the promise or with each other. We judged them unfairly and mourned them bitterly, as if they'd been working against our happiness. We'll see then that they were to us what the hard road through the wilderness was to Israel: "a straight way till they reached a city to dwell in" (Psalm 107:7, ESV).
Even a partial view is a little heaven
Even so, our present view, limited as it is, has so much sweetness in it that I can call it a little heaven. Jacob called his Bethel "the gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:17). Reflecting on providence is a real way of walking with God in this world, and a soul can have as sweet a fellowship with him in his providences as in any of his ordinances.
How often have people who pay attention to providence been moved to tears of joy by its wise and unexpected turns! How often has it persuaded them, as they looked back soberly over their lives, that if the Lord had left them to their own plans, they'd have been their own tormentors, or even their own executioners! Into how many disasters would they have thrown themselves if providence had been as short-sighted as they were! They've thanked it from the heart for caring more about their real interests than their loud demands, and for not letting them be ruined by what they wanted.
How this book is organised
The benefits of paying attention to providence are many, and I'll explain them in their place. To keep the thread clear, here is the plan.
1. First, I'll prove that the affairs of God's people in this world are certainly directed by the wisdom and care of a special providence.
2. Second, I'll show you which of their particular concerns this care is most clearly seen in.
3. Third, I'll show that it's the duty of the saints to pay attention to what providence has done for them in all their circumstances.
4. Fourth, I'll show how to do this.
5. Fifth, I'll show the particular benefits that come from doing it.
Part One: The Evidence of Providence
Chapter 1: The Work of Providence for the Saints
I want to begin by proving one thing: the affairs of God's people in this world aren't left to chance. They're carried along, step by step, by the wisdom and care of a special providence. I take this up gladly, because I owe it a debt. That same providence has "performed all things" for me throughout my own life, just as the psalm says.
Two kinds of providence
There are two ways to talk about providence. The first is general: God governs everything he has made, living and lifeless, rational and not. The second is special: his particular care for his own people.
Christ rules over everything, but his relationship to the church is different. God made him "head over all things to the church" (Ephesians 1:22, ESV), and he is "the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe" (1 Timothy 4:10, ESV). The church is his special charge. He governs the world for the church's good, the way a head looks after the welfare of the body.
Why some people deny providence
Pagan thinkers mostly denied providence, which isn't surprising, since they denied God. The same arguments that prove one prove the other. Aristotle, the greatest of the pagan philosophers, couldn't work out by reason how the world began, so he concluded it had always existed. The Epicureans allowed that a god might exist, but they kept him out of the world's affairs. Running things, they said, would disturb his peace.
That claim is so absurd you'd think they'd have blushed to make it. I suspect the real reason is one of them let slip, as Cicero reports it. If there's a god who plans, watches, and takes note of everything, then we have a master we'd have to fear day and night. They could see that admitting providence meant admitting accountability. Every thought, word, and action would be recorded and weighed by a God who sees everything. They'd have to live out their time "in fear" (1 Peter 1:17, ESV). So they talked themselves into believing what they wanted to be true. But foolish, atheistic ideas like these fall flat in front of the evidence for something this great and this clear.
Who I'm writing for
I'm not mainly trying to argue with open atheists. They deny God, so naturally they scoff at every account in Scripture of extraordinary things happening for God's people. I'm writing for those who say they believe all this, yet have never tasted real religion for themselves. In their hearts they suspect that what we call "special providences" are just natural events or coincidences. They say they believe in God and providence, but that's mostly how they were raised. They live like atheists. They think and act as if none of it were true. I'm afraid that describes most people today.
Suppose they were right. Suppose the world, and especially the lives of God's people, were run by nothing but the steady course of natural causes, and anything unusual were mere chance or some hidden cause in nature. If that's so, let anyone tempted to believe it answer these eight questions honestly.
Question 1: Why does nature sometimes stop to make way for God's people?
How has it happened that so many great mercies and rescues have come to God's people, above the power of natural causes and against their normal course? Nature has clearly been halted to make room for them.
Think about how natural causes work. No effect can be greater than its cause. Nothing gives more than it has. And whatever acts by its nature, acts necessarily. Fire burns as hard as it can. Water floods and drowns whatever it reaches. Hungry lions tear their prey. Wicked people are the same. When a wicked man has set his heart on harm, and he has the power and the chance, he'll carry it out. He has conceived trouble, and "gives birth to lies" (Psalm 7:14, ESV). That's the ordinary course of nature.
But suppose one of these agents, a thing, an animal, or a person, loses its power right at the moment of action. No natural obstacle is in the way. The plan is at the point of execution. They want to do harm, and they can't. What explains that?
It has happened again and again, wherever God's own interests were at stake.
- The sea. It divided in its own channel and stood like a wall on each side, so God's people could cross. It didn't do this while it was calm, but while its waves roared (Isaiah 51:15).
- The fire. It was blown to the hottest flame it could reach, and it couldn't singe a hair on God's three witnesses. At the same moment it killed the men standing near it who were carrying out the order (Daniel 3:22, 27).
- The lions. They lost their fierceness when Daniel was thrown among them (Daniel 6:22).
Are these things in line with the normal laws of nature? What hidden natural cause could explain them? We see the same pattern with people. By what secret cause in nature did Jeroboam's hand dry up and lock in place at the exact moment he stretched it out against the man of God (1 Kings 13:4)? Wicked people would tear God's people to pieces as hungrily as wild beasts do, if providence didn't hold them back. That's why David says in the very next lines of our psalm, "My soul is in the midst of lions" (Psalm 57:4, ESV). Christ sent his disciples out "as sheep in the midst of wolves" (Matthew 10:16, ESV).
Someone might object that these examples only rest on Scripture, which an unbeliever won't accept. But we can see the same thing today. A small, defenceless handful of people are kept safe, in a way nobody can account for, in the middle of powerful, furious enemies who would destroy them if they could. Nothing natural stands in the way. They simply can't.
It gets stranger. Sometimes events turn out for the good of God's people through the very hands and plans that were meant to ruin them. That wasn't what their enemies intended, and it was beyond what the saints themselves expected. Joseph's brothers' jealousy, Haman's plot, and the decree the officials got passed against Daniel all ended by raising up the people they were aimed at. Their enemies lifted them into every bit of honour they ended up with.
Question 2: Why do natural causes line up to help God's people?
If providence isn't running things, how do separate causes join together to help God's people in such strange ways?
It's plain that remarkable coincidences gather to bring about the good of God's chosen. When a work for the church comes onto the stage of the world, similar things start happening in several places at once.
- When the Messiah, the greatest mercy of all, came to the temple, providence had already brought Simeon and Anna there as witnesses (Luke 2:25-38).
- If you read Joseph's rise to rule Egypt carefully, you can count twelve distinct steps by which he got there. If any one of them had failed, the whole thing would likely have failed. But each one came in order, at exactly the right time and place.
- In the church's rescue from Haman's plot, there are at least seven separate acts of providence working together. It's as if they'd met by appointment to break that trap. Each one fits so neatly with the next that anyone paying attention has to conclude this wasn't accident. It was wise planning.
We know the human body is made of many parts, each with its own place, shape, and relationship to the others. That alone convinces people it was designed. In the same way, the way means and tools fit together for the good of God's people shows there's a skilled hand behind them. Providence's workshop has tools of every size. They can no more produce these results by themselves than an axe, a saw, or a chisel can carve a rough log into a beautiful figure without a craftsman.
These people and things don't talk to each other. They don't compare plans. Yet they meet and work together as if they had. It's as if ten men turned up at the same place, at the same hour, on the same business, with no prior arrangement. Can anyone doubt that an unseen, wise hand is secretly directing them?
Question 3: Why do strong means fail against God's people, and weak means succeed for them?
If nature were in charge, the stronger the means, the better the result, and the weaker the means, the worse. That's how reason figures it. But providence crosses its hands, as Jacob did when he blessed Joseph's sons, and brings about the opposite.
Pharaoh used enormous power and cunning against Israel. By any normal reckoning they should have been destroyed like dry thorns in a fire. Their survival is pictured by the burning bush that "was burning, yet it was not consumed" (Exodus 3:2, ESV). Rome's pagan emperors made the world tremble and used all their power against a poor, defenceless church. They couldn't finish it. Ten rounds of persecution spilled seas of blood, and the church still lives.
Then Rome itself became antichristian, and the beast was "drunk with the blood of the saints" (Revelation 17:6, ESV). It still didn't work. The powers of hell can't prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18). You can see the care and power of providence in this. If half that force had been used against any other people, they'd have been swallowed up at once, or worn away in a hundredth of the time. God keeps his promise: "I will make a full end of all the nations among whom I scattered you, but of you I will not make a full end" (Jeremiah 30:11, ESV); "no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed" (Isaiah 54:17, ESV).
Now look at the other side. Weak and unimpressive means have been wonderfully effective for the church. When Christianity was first planted, Christ didn't choose eloquent speakers or men with influence at court. He chose twelve working men and fishermen. He didn't send them out as one group either. He sent them to different countries. That looks like the most absurd way imaginable to carry out such a plan. Yet in a short time the gospel spread and churches were planted in kingdoms all over the world. The psalmist saw it coming: "Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger" (Psalm 8:2, ESV).
The walls of Jericho fell at the sound of ram's horns (Joshua 6:20). Three hundred men with jars and torches routed the huge army of Midian (Judges 7:19-22). And God's tools for protecting individuals have sometimes been smaller still. During the Paris massacre, a spider spun a web over the mouth of an oven where a servant of Christ was hiding, and his pursuers passed by.
So when we see the strongest means against the church fail, and the weakest and most ridiculous succeed for it, can we say anything other than that a special providence is at work?
Question 4: Why are people turned aside from the very evil they were rushing toward?
If everything runs on natural causes, why does a person get knocked off course, like a ball hit by another ball, just as they were heading full speed toward evil?
Good people have been walking toward their own ruin without knowing it. Providence has met them on the road and saved them by strange detours. They didn't understand why until it was over.
- When Paul was a prisoner in Caesarea, the Jewish leaders asked Festus to bring him to Jerusalem. They had set an ambush to kill him on the way. Festus knew nothing about the plot, but he refused. He said he'd rather go down to Caesarea and hear the case there himself (Acts 25:3-4). That turned the whole plot aside.
- Augustine's biographer tells us that when Augustine went to teach in a certain town, his guide took a wrong turn and led him down a side road. That saved his life, because a band of violent Donatists was waiting to kill him on the main one.
The same thing happens to the wicked in the middle of their plans. Laban and Esau both set out against Jacob with harm in mind, and the moment they got near him, something held them back, and neither could do what he'd intended. Balaam ran eagerly to curse Israel for pay and was blocked at the very start. Saul set out for Damascus with a murderous warrant to drag Christ's people to prison. Near the city he was stopped on the road, and he wasn't only turned aside. He was turned into a believer (Acts 9:1-4). Who can fail to see God's finger in that?
Question 5: Why does good and evil done to God's people come back on the doers?
Think of how kindness to God's people has been repaid, in full measure, into the lap of the one who did it.
- The Hebrew midwives refused Pharaoh's order to kill Israel's baby boys, and "God dealt well with the midwives... he gave them families" (Exodus 1:20-21, ESV).
- The Shunammite woman looked after Elisha, and God gave her a son (2 Kings 4:9, 17).
- Rahab hid the spies and was spared when Jericho fell (Hebrews 11:31).
- Publius, the chief man on Malta, took Paul in after the shipwreck, and Paul healed his father of fever and dysentery (Acts 28:7-8).
And harm done to God's people has been repaid to those who did it.
- Pharaoh and the Egyptians planned to destroy Israel's babies. God struck down every firstborn in Egypt in one night (Exodus 12:29).
- Haman built a gallows for Mordecai, and he was hanged on it himself (Esther 7:10).
- Ahithophel gave David's enemy brilliant advice for destroying him. The advice backfired like an overcharged gun. When it was rejected, he knew how things would end, and he took his own life (2 Samuel 17:23).
Sometimes the punishment fits the sin exactly. The arm Jeroboam stretched out to strike the prophet was the arm God struck. And God sometimes makes the place of the sin the place of the punishment: "In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick your own blood" (1 Kings 21:19, ESV), and so it happened (2 Kings 9:26).
Scripture says it plainly: "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling" (Proverbs 26:27, ESV), and "with the measure you use it will be measured to you" (Matthew 7:2, ESV). Who can look at all this and not say, "Surely there is a God who judges on earth" (Psalm 58:11, ESV)?
Someone may object that many enemies of the church have died peacefully in their beds. That's true. But as Augustine said, if no sin were punished in this life, nobody would believe in providence. And if every sin were punished in this life, nobody would expect a final judgement. These events are enough to remind us that God is in charge. Still, to make sure nobody calls them accidents, I'll press further.
Question 6: Why do events fit Scripture so exactly?
If these things were accidents, why do they match Scripture in every detail?
"Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to meet?" (Amos 3:3, ESV). If two people are on the same road, they're probably going to the same place. Providence and Scripture travel one road. If they ever seem to head in different directions, you can be sure they'll meet at the journey's end. They've agreed to.
- God stops the power of natural causes? That's what he promised: "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned" (Isaiah 43:2, ESV).
- Natural causes line up for your good? That's the promise that "all things are yours" (1 Corinthians 3:21-22, ESV). Every creature's use and service is yours as your needs require.
- Powerful plans against God's people fail? Read Isaiah 8:9-10 and 54:15-17 and watch them come true.
- A person is stopped in the middle of a sin or a plan? That proves what Scripture says: "I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps" (Jeremiah 10:23, ESV), and "The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps" (Proverbs 16:9, ESV).
- Kindness and cruelty come back on the people who showed them? Then "he who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands" (Isaiah 32:8, ESV) is coming true in front of you. And when you see the harm people plan against God's people land on their own heads, you'd have to be blind to miss the match with Psalm 7:14-16, 9:16, and 140:11-12.
How closely providence and Scripture keep step, and how little people notice it! Why did Cyrus, against all political sense, set the captives free? To fulfil what Isaiah had written (Isaiah 45:13). Someone has put it well: just as God stretched the sky over the natural world, he has stretched his word over the world of people. Creatures on earth are moved by the heavens above them. Everything in the world is moved by his word, and they fulfil it even when they're trying to resist it.
Question 7: Why does everything arrive at exactly the right moment?
A great many providences arrive so precisely on time that a little earlier or later would have made them nearly worthless. That can't be chance. It has to be planning. Chance doesn't keep a schedule.
- Saul was about to catch David when a messenger arrived: "Hurry and come, for the Philistines have made a raid against the land" (1 Samuel 23:27, ESV).
- The angel called to Abraham just as he raised the knife over Isaac (Genesis 22:10-11).
- A well appeared for Hagar just as she'd set her son down so she wouldn't have to watch him die (Genesis 21:16-19).
- The Assyrian commander heard a rumour that ruined his plans just as he was about to attack Jerusalem (Isaiah 37:7-8).
- When Haman's plot against the Jews was ready to go, "on that night the king could not sleep" (Esther 6:1, ESV).
Here's a modern one. A woman I know, and I heard this from her own mouth, had been pushed to the very end. All her resources were gone. She was sinking into doubt and fear, with no idea where help could come from. Then, going through some things in a chest, she unexpectedly found a gold coin. It covered what she needed until God opened another door.
If these things happen by accident, why do they arrive so exactly on time that it's become a proverb in Scripture: "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided" (Genesis 22:14, ESV)?
Question 8: Why do events answer the prayers of God's people so directly?
In many providences, believers can see a clear answer to what they asked for. They're sure they have what they prayed for (1 John 5:15).
- The sea divided right when Israel cried out to God (Exodus 14:10).
- Asa won a great victory right when he prayed, "Help us, O LORD our God" (2 Chronicles 14:11-12, ESV).
- Ahithophel hanged himself just when David prayed against his advice (2 Samuel 15:31).
- Haman fell while Esther and Mordecai were fasting (Esther 4:16).
- Abraham's servant prayed for success in finding a wife for Isaac, and before he'd finished praying, Rebekah appeared (Genesis 24:45).
- The church was praying for Peter in prison, and an angel took him out (Acts 12:5-7).
I could add many more, but I don't think it's needed. Most Christians have a store of their own experience, and they know that many of the providences that come into their lives are nothing else than the answers to their prayers.
Now, after weighing all this, who can still be unconvinced? We have to conclude with Job that God "does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous" (Job 36:7, ESV), and with the Chronicler that "the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him" (2 Chronicles 16:9, ESV). His providences announce that he is a God who hears prayer.
Chapter 2: Our Birth and Upbringing
I've shown that the affairs of God's people are directed by a special providence. Now I want to show you where that providence is most clearly seen, which of its works for us are the most remarkable.
I'm not going to start with the inner, spiritual works of providence on the soul, though they all end up touching the soul. I'll look at the more visible ones, the ones you can see in the events of your life. I can't cover them all, because they're more than the sand on the shore. But I'll point out some of the most striking, and we'll start at the beginning.
The first work: formation and protection in the womb
Think about the first thing providence ever did for you. It formed you and kept you safe before you were born. The psalmist marvels at this: "My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth" (Psalm 139:15, ESV). The womb is the place where a skilled craftsman finishes a delicate piece in private before bringing it out into the light for everyone to admire.
Two things are wonderful here.
1. The body itself. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14, ESV). Think of the skill in a single part, the eye. People have come to believe in God just by studying it. The older translations of Psalm 139:16 read, "In thy book all my members were written" (KJV). Flavel builds on that reading: the Lord drew up the plan for your body in his own gracious purpose before you existed, and then formed you to match it.
Your body is a gift you didn't design. If you can see, hear, walk, and think, you owe that to providence. Luther tells a story of two cardinals riding in great pomp to the Council of Constance. On the way they heard a man weeping bitterly in a field. They found him staring at an ugly toad, and he told them his heart was breaking with gratitude that God hadn't made him such a creature. "This," he said, "is what I love to weep at." One of the cardinals said, "The unlearned rise and take heaven, and with all our learning we get thrown into hell." Nothing else in creation was shaped and finished like a human being. Even if all the angels had spent their time studying it, they couldn't have improved it.
2. The soul. And that's only the case around the jewel. Providence didn't just build the house. It moved the soul in, and the soul bears the image of God. Think of its powers and desires, its energy and its capacity. It's fit to keep company with angels. It can be joined to Christ and enjoy fellowship with God forever.
So look at yourself, not proudly, but with wonder. See what providence has done for you, and how well it did its first job.
It also kept you alive before you were born. If it hadn't, you'd have been among those "who never see the light" (Job 3:16). Many never make it to birth. Others die moments after. A life that short still settles an eternity. If that had been you, you'd never have done any of the good you've done, or received any of the good you've been given. The life you lived in the womb was fragile. A small accident could have ended it like a bird in the shell. So with the psalmist you can say, "you knitted me together in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13, ESV), and, "you are he who took me from the womb" (Psalm 22:9, ESV). He kept you there until the right time, and then brought you through many dangers into the place in the world he'd prepared for you before time began.
The second work: the place and time of your birth
Few of us think about this, but it matters enormously. Where you were born and when has affected your comfort in this life and your chances in the next. It's an ocean of mercy that most of us skim across the top of. Let me take it slowly, and try to stir up your gratitude.
Your comfort in this life. Not every part of the world is equally pleasant to live in. Scripture speaks of "the dark places of the land" that "are full of the habitations of violence" (Psalm 74:20, ESV). Large parts of the world are like that. You could have been born where people live exposed to harsh weather, hunger, and disease, with almost nothing to protect them. Millions live that way. You may have been given one of the healthiest, most fertile, best-ordered corners of the earth, a garden planted out of a wilderness. Flavel was thinking of England, and England at that time was a country other people envied. Even the poorest person there had provisions that many in the world never see.
Nobody has an advantage by nature. We're all made from the same clay, with the same abilities. What made the difference is mercy, and mercy alone.
Your soul's chances. All of that is small compared with the spiritual advantages of where you were born. Imagine a few different starting points for your life.
Suppose you'd been born among people who worship idols. That describes a great part of the world. If you'd been raised there, you'd have taken idolatry in with your mother's milk. Chances are you'd be worshipping demons today, speeding toward judgement along with those whom Scripture says don't know God: "Pour out your wrath on the nations that know you not, and on the peoples that call not on your name" (Jeremiah 10:25, ESV). "All worshippers of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless idols" (Psalm 97:7, ESV).
Suppose you'd been born where Islam is the only religion most people ever hear of. You'd have been raised to trust a false prophet and you'd have died with a false hope, deceived to your eternal ruin.
Suppose you'd been born in a country that called itself Christian, but where the gospel was buried under superstition and error. Scripture says what happens when people turn from the truth: "God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness" (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12, ESV).
Even if you'd been born in your own country, you might have been born at the wrong time. The one who set the boundaries of your home also set your times (Acts 17:26). Imagine being born in the centuries before the gospel reached these islands, or in the years when the faithful had to hide in woods and holes to escape persecution. Providence saved your birth for better days. If you'd been allowed to choose the time and place yourself, you couldn't have done better. The church of your country had been cleaned out of idolatry. The martyrs' blood had washed it. And the gospel was shining as bright as it has since the apostles' day.
You might object, "Plenty of people have all this and still perish. Some perish worse for having had it." That's true, and it's sad. But it's still a rare and special mercy to be born into a place with these advantages. Think about what you gain.
- The ordinary means of salvation. If anyone among the unreached is saved, it takes something extraordinary. "How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" (Romans 10:14, ESV). Even if one of them longed for the gospel, they might travel from sea to sea and never find it. You can hardly avoid it. Sermons find you.
- Fewer prejudices against the faith. In a land where Christianity is public and legally protected, it isn't the object of hatred and scorn that it is in many places. If you'd been raised among those who hate it, you'd probably have hated it too. People defend whatever's been handed down from their fathers.
- An early start. Christianity meets you as soon as you can take anything in. That blocks the door before a false religion can walk in. "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6, ESV).
- Help along the way. You can find other Christians to guide you, answer your doubts, and carry some of your burdens. In many places, a person who started to wonder about Christ would find family and neighbours turn against him.
Whether or not these privileges end up saving you, they're real privileges, and millions don't have them. When Plato was dying, he thanked the gods for three things: that he was a man and not a beast, that he was born in Greece, and that he lived in the time of Socrates. You have more reason to be thankful than he did. You were born a human being, in a land with the gospel, in days when the gospel is preached. "The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance" (Psalm 16:6, ESV).
The third work: the family you came from
Providence also chose the family you were born into. Whether they were rich or poor, great or small, if your parents feared God and brought you up "in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4, ESV), count that among your chief mercies. Two streams of blessing flow from it.
1. Blessing for this life. Godliness leaves a blessing on those who come after, and wickedness leaves a curse. "The LORD's curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous" (Proverbs 3:33, ESV). That depends, of course, on children following their parents' example. But wicked parents so often raise wicked children. It was said of Abijam, "He walked in all the sins that his father did before him" (1 Kings 15:3, ESV). Genesis 17:18-20 shows the blessing: God promises good to Abraham's children for Abraham's sake. Zechariah 5:4 shows the other side, a curse that enters a wicked man's house and stays there until it has consumed it. Flavel adds that both depend on children following their parents' example (see Ezekiel 18). To escape that curse is a real providence.
2. Blessing for your soul. This matters most of all. It's no ordinary mercy to come from godly parents. Some of us owe them our spiritual and eternal life as well as our natural life. Timothy's faith began with his grandmother and mother (2 Timothy 1:5). Augustine had Monica, who planted the teaching of life in his mind with her words, watered it with her tears, and fed it with her example. Think about what it means.
- They prayed for you. They prayed for you before you were born and in your infancy, when you couldn't pray for yourself. Abraham and Hannah did this. Some of us are the fruit of those prayers. It's a greater thing to come from praying parents than from a royal line.
- They checked your faults early. Youth is a dangerous time. Scripture speaks of "youthful passions" (2 Timothy 2:22, ESV). When David asks, "How can a young man keep his way pure?" (Psalm 119:9, ESV), the question itself assumes that a young man's natural road runs through the world's pollution. David prayed, "Remember not the sins of my youth" (Psalm 25:7, ESV), and Job complained that God made him "inherit the iniquities of my youth" (Job 13:26, ESV). If your parents held your sins back while you were young, thank God for it.
- They taught you about God early. Abraham did that with his household (Genesis 18:19). Some of us had parents who could say, like Paul, "my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19, ESV). They worked for your body's good, and they worked just as hard for your soul. They knew a day of parting would come, and they hoped it would be easier because you were in Christ. They wanted to say on the last day, "Behold, I and the children God has given me" (Hebrews 2:13, ESV).
- They showed you how. "What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practise these things" (Philippians 4:9, ESV). "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1, ESV). A parent's life is a child's copybook. It's a mercy to have had a good one to copy from, in the years when you were being shaped.
Compare that with the alternative. Some children are raised in homes where hardly any language is heard but that of hell. They learn to curse as soon as they can talk. Other homes aren't openly wicked, but the parents only care about their children's bodies and their futures in this world. They'd rather leave them land or money than point them to Christ. And some parents, more respectable on the outside, dislike the slightest sign of faith in their children. They do all they can to crush the first stirrings of interest in Christ. They'd sooner see them dead than following him. You can't know what a mercy it was if you had godly parents.
If you didn't, then be thankful that at least you weren't hindered. And if you were hindered, admire the grace that pulled you out and kept a small flame alive in the middle of opposition. And if God gives you children of your own, you'll know how much you needed what you missed, and you can give it to them.
A word to parents
I can't leave this subject without speaking to you who are raising children.
Think how close you are to them. Scripture shows what children mean to a parent: the longing for them before they come (Genesis 15:2; 30:1), the joy when they're born (John 16:21), their worth to you (Genesis 42:38), how you suffer with them in trouble (Mark 9:22), and the grief of losing them (Genesis 37:35). Why feel all this and not care where they spend eternity?
Think how God has charged you with their souls as well as their bodies. He lays it on you directly: "These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children" (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, ESV). "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4, ESV). He also tells children to obey you, which plainly implies your duty as well as theirs. What will comfort you at the parting if a child dies in a Christless state through your neglect? The cutting thought is this: my child is in hell, and I did nothing to prevent it. Duty done is the only root of comfort on that day.
If you won't teach them the way of holiness, don't imagine the devil will leave them untaught. If you won't teach them to pray, he'll teach them to curse, swear and lie. Ground left uncultivated grows weeds. Youth is the moulding age (Proverbs 22:6). How few are converted in old age! A young twig can be bent into any shape, but grown limbs won't bend.
And remember that you are the cause, in one way, of their spiritual misery. You passed on to them what you inherited, both by birth and by example. They lie spiritually dead of a plague you brought home among them: "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5, ESV). But no one is as well placed as you are to help them. You have what nobody else has: their affection, your daily time with them (Deuteronomy 6:7), and your knowledge of their character. If you neglect them, who will help?
Think of the last day. "And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne" (Revelation 20:12, ESV). What will it be like to see your child on Christ's left hand? "Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others" (2 Corinthians 5:11, ESV). Do all you can to prevent it.
A word to children
And you who are children, especially of godly parents, I urge you to listen to their advice and follow their example. When you disobey them you resist God's authority: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right" (Ephesians 6:1, ESV). That's a bigger thing than you think. And God will deal with you for it, even if your parents are too gentle to, or you've grown past their correction. Your sin is worse than that of a child who never heard the gospel, because you've had more counsel, more prayers, and more hopes to disappoint.
God often repays disobedience in kind. Your own children may treat you the way you treated your parents. I've read of a man who dragged his father across the floor. When they reached a certain spot, the father said, "Stop. I only dragged my father this far." That's a sad, fair return.
And if grace has taken root in you through a godly upbringing, thank God for it. Few children are given what you've been given. Honour your parents. Be their joy and comfort while they live. If they're gone, keep to the path they walked, so that you and they can rejoice together on the great day and bless God for each other forever.
Chapter 3: The Work of Conversion
Providence never shines more brightly than when it arranges the events, the people, and the means by which God's people are converted. Providence formed your body with great skill, kept you alive with great tenderness, and provided for you generously. But if it hadn't also arranged some way for you to come to Christ, none of that would have counted for much. Of everything providence has done for you, this is the best. You owe it more for this than for all your other mercies put together.
I can't explain this without expecting your heart to be stirred. It's a subject every believer loves to dwell on. It's the sweetest story they know, and they never tire of telling it. The places and the people God used become dear to them, so dear that years later their hearts melt when they pass the same spot or see the same face. Jacob never forgot his Bethel (Genesis 48:3), and other believers have their own. Those impressions are never wiped out of the memory or the heart.
If you can't remember how it happened
I don't want anyone to be discouraged because they can't recall the time, the place, or the person God used. So let me make one distinction.
Some people are converted in a way that's clear and memorable. Often these are people who lived wildly when they were young and came to Christ later in life. In their case you can see the Spirit's steps one by one: he opened their eyes, convinced them of sin, humbled them, drew them to Christ, and assured them.
Other people were raised by godly parents and had grace worked into them so gently they hardly noticed. They can remember liking godly people, caring about duty, and having a conscience about sin. But if you ask them when, where, or how, they can't say. If the work is real, they have no reason to be troubled that the details are fuzzier than someone else's. Let the substance be real, and don't torment yourself over the circumstances.
But if you do remember the time, the place, and the person God used, the memory is sweet. Each time you think about it, you'll feel fresh joy. A lot of the events that led up to it may have looked like minor events at the time. They were scouts sent ahead by the main army of providence.
How strange the road to conversion can be
What stands out most is how strangely and unexpectedly providence arranges even the smallest details.
- The Ethiopian official was reading Isaiah in his chariot when Philip, one man in a thousand, walked up beside him and could explain it (Acts 8:26-30).
- Naaman heard about God's prophet because a young girl from Israel had been carried off in a raid and ended up serving his wife (2 Kings 5:1-4).
- The Samaritan woman. Christ "had to pass through Samaria" (John 4:4, ESV). At noon he sat down at Jacob's well, apparently just to rest. But that led to the woman, and then to many others in her town believing (John 4:29, 41).
- A forgotten sermon. Augustine once forgot his planned subject while preaching and ended up speaking against the Manichees. A man in the audience, Firmus, fell at his feet weeping and confessed he'd been a Manichee for years. I also knew a minister who picked up the wrong Bible and couldn't find his notes or his text. He decided to preach on whatever he found, and it was "The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness" (2 Peter 3:9, ESV). He had nothing prepared, but God helped him speak well, and a man in the congregation was converted. He said later it was the only sermon that did it.
- A neighbourly visit. The Jews who went to Bethany to comfort Mary only meant to be polite. But they met Christ there and believed (John 11:45). Giles Firmin tells of a man who had sat under good preaching for years and was seventy-six years old. He went to visit a sick neighbour. A Christian friend happened to be there and began talking about how many people live on their own good works and never come to Christ. The old man listened from the bedside, and God showed him that this described him. "If I'd died before seventy-six," he said later, "I'd have perished, for I didn't know Christ."
- A runaway servant. Onesimus ran away from his master Philemon, probably just to live an easy life. By a strange providence he ended up in Rome, in Paul's hands, and was won to Christ (Philemon 10-16).
- Going to scoff. Firmin also tells of a notorious drunk, the leader of the local drinkers, who went to hear the preacher Wilson only to mock. During the prayer, his heart started to soften. When the preacher read, "Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you" (John 5:14, ESV), he couldn't hold back. That sermon changed him.
- A prison. Paul's imprisonment brought the jailer to Christ (Acts 16:27-34).
- A scrap of paper, a good book, a marriage, a death in the family, an illness. All of these and a thousand things like them have been used by providence to bring people to Christ.
It is just as the woman of Tekoa told David: God "devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast from him" (2 Samuel 14:14, ESV).
How providence moves God's messengers
Providence also directs preachers to places they never planned to go, because God has someone there he intends to call. Paul and Timothy were forbidden to speak in Asia and wouldn't be allowed into Bithynia. Then a man from Macedonia appeared in a vision and begged them, "Come over to Macedonia and help us" (Acts 16:6-9, ESV). That's where God opened Lydia's heart.
I knew a godly minister who had prepared a stirring sermon for his own congregation and felt strongly moved to preach it first to a rough, godless village five miles away that had no minister. After a good deal of inward wrestling, he went. God opened a door, several people there received Christ, and the minister was asked to give a weekly talk that won many more. The same man once passed a group of men wrestling on a green. One had just thrown his opponent and was strutting about. The minister rode up and said, "Friend, you're a strong man, but don't boast in your strength. You don't wrestle with flesh and blood, but with spiritual powers. How sad it would be if Satan tripped up your hope and gave you an eternal fall." After a quarter of an hour of serious talk, he went on his way. The man had no peace until he went to a godly minister and told him his trouble. He was changed.
When God uses even the darkest events
God has sometimes used the malice of Satan and the wickedness of people to bring someone to himself. I'll give one example from my own experience, in my own town.
In 1673 a young ship's surgeon, twenty-three years old, came into our harbour. He had sunk into a deep depression on the voyage, and the devil used it. Soon after arriving, he attempted to end his own life. I was called to him at once. The doctors didn't expect him to live through the day.
I found him close to death. I asked him what he hoped for. He told me he hoped for eternal life. I told him I feared his hope was ill-founded, because the Scripture says that "no murderer has eternal life abiding in him" (1 John 3:15, ESV), and what he'd done was self-murder. I pressed that on him, and his false confidence began to crack. He started weeping and asked if there could still be hope for someone who had done this. I told him the sin was serious but not unforgivable, that if God gave him repentance and faith, Christ would forgive him. He didn't know what faith and repentance were, so I explained them. He took them in eagerly and prayed hard that God would give them to him. I prayed with him, and God softened his heart.
I left him, expecting never to see him again. But he lived through the day, and he longed for Christ. He didn't want to talk about anything else. When I came back that evening, he said, "Sir, the Lord has given me repentance for this sin, and for every other. I see the evil of sin now as I never saw it before. I'm vile in my own eyes. I believe. Lord, help my unbelief. I'm willing to take Christ on his own terms. One thing troubles me: I'm afraid this sin can't be pardoned. Will Christ apply his blood to someone who has shed his own?" I told him Christ shed his blood even for those who, with wicked hands, shed Christ's own blood, and that was a deeper sin than his. "Well," he said, "I'll cast myself on Christ. Let him do with me what he will."
He recovered. And I trust the deeper wound in his soul was healed too. I spent many hours with him, and a minister in his home town later wrote to me that he thought "if a great work was ever done in this way, it's now."
O how unsearchable are God's ways in leading people to Christ! Don't let anyone read this and take it as a reason to sin so grace can abound. This is a rare and singular mercy, and no one has a right to count on it. I tell it only to honour the providence that works to save people in ways we don't understand.
Providence also carries the work forward
Providence doesn't only start the work. It carries it on, in two ways.
1. It keeps convictions alive. After a person is first awakened to sin, the sense of it can fade. Providence doesn't let it. Sometimes a preacher says exactly what you needed to hear, as if he'd studied your case. How often people have told me they were amazed to hear the thoughts of their hearts spoken aloud by a preacher who didn't know them! Sometimes a particular verse of Scripture finds you. Sometimes God lets you fall into a fresh sin that wakes your conscience up again. Most of you have felt this yourselves. Have you not found some rod ready to shake you out of your complacency? It happens so often that Christians can sense an affliction coming from the state of their own hearts.
2. It gives comfort when you're overwhelmed. Samuel Bolton tells of a man who was converted away from bad company and then slid back into it. Providence brought Proverbs 1:24-26 to his attention, and his trouble was worse than ever. He could hardly believe he could be forgiven. Then Luke 17:4 was set before him: "if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying 'I repent,' you must forgive him" (ESV). It settled him in a peace that lasted.
I should also mention Mrs Honeywood. She was a godly woman in a deep and dark spiritual depression who wouldn't accept any comfort. She seemed sure she was lost. When a minister reasoned with her, she picked up a glass from the table and said, "I'm as sure to be damned as this glass is to be broken," and threw it on the floor. It didn't break. The minister picked it up, and showed her that this was a gift from providence to her. It changed her whole outlook. "How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33, ESV). "Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him!" (Job 26:14, ESV).
What you owe to providence for your own conversion
Let me ask you directly. Have you thought about how much you owe providence for this? Of all the mercies it sends, none compares to this one. It brought you to Christ when you weren't thinking about it, and it arranged the means. The memory should melt you every time. Think about these three things.
1. How surprising it was. Providence had a plan for your eternal good that you didn't understand. The time had come. God's decree, which had been waiting from eternity, was ready to be carried out, and providence arranged every detail around it. Look at the examples above. In every one, the work began while the person was thinking about something else. Saul was only looking for his father's donkeys when he met the prophet who'd tell him he was to be king (1 Samuel 9:3, 20). Providence could have said to you what Christ said to Peter: "What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand" (John 13:7, ESV). "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" (Isaiah 55:8, ESV). Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Christ pass by. He had no idea Christ intended to stay at his house and save him (Luke 19:5-8). Some of you went to church out of habit or curiosity, or for worse reasons, and had no idea what providence had in mind.
2. How timely it was. You were brought to the means of salvation at just the right moment, like the sick man at the pool of Bethesda waiting for the water to stir. The hour had come, and the Spirit was at work. You might have heard hundreds of sermons before, and nothing stuck, because the time wasn't right. Many others heard that same sermon and got nothing. "And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian" (Luke 4:27, ESV). Many people in the room that day may have gone away unchanged. It may be that salvation was sent to you alone.
3. How weighty it was. Providence has all kinds of mercies to give: health, money, honour, comfort. Its left hand is full as well as its right. But the blessings of its right hand are the most valuable, and few receive them. Think about what you were given.
- It was a mercy that came through the greatest difficulties (Ephesians 1:19-20).
- It's a spiritual mercy, worth more than gold is worth more than the dirt under your feet (Revelation 3:18).
- It comes straight from the fountain of God's electing love, and no one has ever received it except those he chose (1 Thessalonians 1:4-5).
- It secures your salvation. We can reason back from conversion to election, and forward from conversion to final salvation (Hebrews 6:9).
- It's eternal. It will stay with you when father, mother, spouse, children, money, honours, health, and life itself have failed (John 4:14).
So mark that providence. It did for you what no minister on earth or angel in heaven could have done. And it gives weight and worth to even the smallest circumstance connected with it.
Chapter 4: Our Employment
There's another excellent work of providence, and it touches both your body and your soul. It's the work providence has arranged for you to do in this world. Providence cares about your well-being in the world to come, but it also cares about your well-being in this one. A good deal of that depends on the station in life and the kind of work you've been called to.
A quick note on words. Flavel calls your job your "calling". He separates your particular calling, the work you do, from your general calling, which is being a Christian. You'll see both in this chapter.
Five ways providence works in your employment
1. It directed you into work while you were young. It didn't let you drift into an idle, useless, sinful life, as many do. Those people are a burden on the earth. They're like a growth on the body of society, doing nothing but disfigure it and drain it, living off what others have earned. Sin brought sweat into the world ("By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread," Genesis 3:19, ESV), and now refusing to sweat only adds to the sin. Someone who lives idly can't live honestly (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). But when God puts you into honest work, and the labour of your hands or your head is enough to support you, that's a valuable mercy. You "earn [your] own living" (2 Thessalonians 3:12, ESV). Many a hard temptation is headed off that way. You're also able to help other people, since "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35, ESV).
2. It put you in work that suits you. Many people are employed in trades whose only purpose is to feed other people's lusts. They don't just sin at work. Their work is the sin. They trade for hell and act as agents for the devil. Demetrius and the craftsmen of Ephesus made their money from silver shrines of Diana, little cases with folding doors that held her idol, carried in procession in her honour (Acts 19:24-25). And today, how many wicked trades have been invented, and how many people kept in business by them, just to feed the pride and appetite of a corrupt age!
To have honest, lawful work, which benefits you without dishonouring God, is no small mercy. If it also suits your temperament and strength, it's a double mercy. Some people are stuck in jobs that swallow their time and strength and make life miserable. Those jobs leave them little or no time for their general calling as Christians, and all that effort only just keeps them and their families alive. So if God has given you honest work that costs you less toil than it costs others, and leaves you more time for spiritual things, put that down to providence's special care for you.
3. It settled you in work you couldn't have planned. Some of us owe this to providence in a special way. God put us on a path that neither we nor our parents ever planned. Think of the needle in a compass. It swings this way and that, and it doesn't stop until it settles on north. Settling into work in this world is like that. A child is planned for this trade, then that one, and at last he ends up in the work providence had designed for him. How strangely providence turns things! What happens isn't what we or our parents planned, but what God planned.
- Amos began with humble work, but God had a more honourable calling waiting for him. "I was no prophet... but I was a herdsman... the LORD took me from following the flock" (Amos 7:14-15, ESV).
- David followed the ewes, and he probably never thought of anything higher in his youth. But God "took him from the sheepfolds" to be the shepherd of his people (Psalm 78:70-71, ESV).
- Peter and Andrew were fishermen. Christ called them from that to a higher calling: "I will make you fishers of men" (Matthew 4:19, ESV).
- David Pareus was fourteen when his stepmother had him placed with an apothecary. Providence drew him out of that and prepared him for the ministry, where he served the church fruitfully for many years.
- James Andreae's father couldn't afford to keep him at school, so he was meant to be a carpenter. Friends persuaded the family, and the church helped. He was sent to Stuttgart and then to university, and went on to serve the church with distinction.
- Oecolampadius's father planned for him to be a merchant. His mother pleaded until she kept him at his studies, and he became a blessed instrument in the Reformation.
I could easily give more examples, but that's a taste.
4. It protected your livelihood from ruin. "Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?" (Job 1:10, ESV). This is providence's fence. It protects what we gain by honest work, and we gain it only by providence's favour.
5. It made your work enough for you. Moses prayed for the tribe of Judah, "Let his hands be sufficient for him" (Deuteronomy 33:7, KJV), and it's no small mercy if yours are. Some people have work but not the strength to get through it. Others have strength and no work. Some have both, and it still isn't enough for them and their families. If God has blessed your labours so you and your family have what you need, with some comfort besides, that's a choice providence. Thank him for it.
If your work is hard
You might say, "I do have a calling, but it's hard and it takes too much of my time. I'd gladly use that time on better things."
I'd answer that the wisdom of providence probably saw this was the right work for you. If you had more ease and rest, you might have more temptations than you do now. The time and strength you spend on daily work, serving God in it, might otherwise have gone on lusts that served the devil.
Hard work may also be good for your health, and it makes your rest sweeter. "Sweet is the sleep of a labourer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep" (Ecclesiastes 5:12, ESV). And if your heart is spiritual, you can have a great deal of fellowship with God in the middle of your work, and you'll find gaps for it too. Honestly, don't you have more spare hours than you use for that purpose?
If your work barely covers your needs
You might say, "All my labour barely gets me and my family what we need. I'm kept short and low next to other people, and it's a hard burden."
Providence has given you a lower and poorer condition than others. But think how many people have less than you. You have little, and others have less (read Job 30:4 and what follows). If God has given you only a small portion of the world, he has still promised that if you're godly, "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, ESV). Providence has ordered for you the condition that's really best for your eternal good. If you had more, your head and your heart might not be able to handle it. A small boat needs a narrow sail. Up to now you haven't lacked the necessities. And you're told that with "food and clothing" we should "be content" (1 Timothy 6:8, ESV). "Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked" (Psalm 37:16, ESV). It's better in how it was gained, sweeter to enjoy, and more comfortable when the final account is made.
Thanking providence
So if providence has arranged things so you can earn your own bread, and has pointed some of you toward work that supplies not only your own needs and your families' but something extra to give to others, and has done it by a road you didn't plan, then honour God for it. Won't you say to him from now on, "My Father, you are the guide of my youth" (Jeremiah 3:4, KJV)? It was the Lord who guided you into your place in those early days. You're reaping the fruit of those early providences today, and you may go on reaping it to the end of your life.
Five cautions
Now live up to what providence has done for you here. In the fear of God, make sure you don't misuse for his dishonour anything he's given for your comfort. Here are five warnings.
1. Don't be lazy. The command to Adam reaches all his descendants, and the gospel binds it on Christians ("Do not be slothful in zeal," Romans 12:11, ESV; see also 1 Thessalonians 4:11). It's said that the emperor Augustus built a city with no business in it at all. God has never built a city, a town, or a household to that plan. If you're negligent, you can't be innocent.
2. Don't let your work crowd out your calling as a Christian. Make sure you don't lose your God in the rush and noise of earthly business. Remember the warning: "Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction" (1 Timothy 6:9, ESV). The people of Oenoe, a dry island near Athens, put a great deal of labour into channelling a river to water their land. When they opened the sluices, so much water poured in that it flooded the island and drowned them. You can see the lesson. Seneca put it well: "I don't give myself to business; I only lend myself to it."
3. Remember that success comes from God's blessing, not just your effort. "You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth" (Deuteronomy 8:18, ESV). Even the devil admitted it: "Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands" (Job 1:10, ESV).
4. Bring your affairs to God in prayer. "Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act" (Psalm 37:4-5, ESV). And don't get involved in anything you can't ask God to bless.
5. Be content where providence has put you, and don't even wish yourself into another place. "Each one should remain in the condition in which he was called" (1 Corinthians 7:20, ESV). Providence is wiser than you. You can be sure it has arranged things better for your eternal good than you could have if you'd been left to choose for yourself.
Chapter 5: Family Affairs
Providence has a special hand in marriage. You can see that from Scripture, and from the way godly people have looked back on this great turning point in their lives and recognised God's hand in it. Scripture says plainly that providence rules here: "a prudent wife is from the LORD" (Proverbs 19:14, ESV), and "He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favour from the LORD" (Proverbs 18:22, ESV). The same goes for children: "Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward" (Psalm 127:3, ESV). Holy men have always sought the Lord's direction when their circumstances were about to change. Abraham's confidence about finding a wife for Isaac came from prayer, and his servant both prayed hard for guidance and thanked God warmly when it came (Genesis 24:7, 12, 26-27). The same pattern appears with children (1 Samuel 1:20; Luke 1:13-14). So there are several ways providence is at work here, and each one is a reason to love the God of your mercies.
Providence in marriage
1. It brought you together. In choosing the people who marry each other, God often goes beyond what we thought and planned. He often crosses our wishes and designs, and it turns out for our great good. What happens isn't what we expected but what his infinite wisdom saw as best. That's why probabilities are so often overturned, and why things that seemed remote and unlikely happen in ways nobody could have predicted.
2. It made two different people fit together. A great deal of the peace and comfort of our lives comes from the harmony between husband and wife. Even when two people's temperaments and upbringing didn't match well beforehand, they usually grow together once they come under God's ordinance: "they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24, ESV). They're one by God's institution, and also one in love and affection. People who were strangers not long ago become dearer to each other than their closest blood relatives.
3. It makes each a help to the other's eternal good. "For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?" (1 Corinthians 7:16, ESV). That's why wives of unbelieving husbands are urged to win them by their conduct, which can do the work of a sermon (1 Peter 3:1). And where both are believers, what a help they are to each other as they live together as "heirs with you of the grace of life" (1 Peter 3:7, ESV). Blessed is the providence that brings two people into such a close bond on earth who will share the same salvation in heaven.
Providence in children
To have children, and not be left like a dry tree, and to find comfort and joy in them, is a special mercy. Where a family has suffered losses, it's a providence to be thankful for when God repairs the breaches: "The children of your bereavement will yet say in your ears: 'The place is too narrow for me'" (Isaiah 49:20, ESV).
Seeing it against the alternative
These mercies look sweeter when you compare what God has given you with what others have. Look around and you'll find many people badly matched, whose marriages have made their lives bitter. Their closest relationships get in the way of their work and their faith. Scripture shows us gracious people whose comfort in this world broke on this very rock.
- Abigail was a wise and good woman, married to a hard, foolish man named Nabal (1 Samuel 25:25).
- Moses was drawn into neglecting a known duty because of his wife Zipporah (Exodus 4:24-25).
- David had Michal, who despised him (2 Samuel 6:20).
- Job's suffering was made heavier by the very person who should have supported him (Job 19:17).
God turns even these trials to his people's good. The philosopher Socrates is said to have used his hard marriage to grow in patience, and those who walk with God can do far more. Even so, a bad marriage is a heavy blow. It cripples a person where they work and cuts off a great deal of life's comfort.
Some children, too, become the greatest grief of their parents. After every other sorrow, the closest relationships can bring the heaviest. Many a parent has felt like the tree in the old fable, split apart by wedges made from its own wood. Esau grieved Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 26:34-35). Absalom and Amnon were scourges to David.
How to respond
If God "settles the solitary in a home" (Psalm 68:6, ESV; older translations read "sets the solitary in families"), and has given you relationships that bring you daily comfort, you owe it to him to live accordingly. Here are some short hints.
- Give God the glory. You can see a wise, directing providence that arranged everything beyond your own plans: "I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself" (Jeremiah 10:23, ESV). What happened wasn't what you planned, but what a higher counsel decided. When God made Jacob the father of a family, Jacob marvelled: "I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps" (Genesis 32:10, ESV). Notice how the mercy humbled him.
- Do your duties in those relationships. Don't abuse the fruit of so much love and mercy. The Lord expects praise wherever he has given comfort. That made David's sin worse: he abused the very blessings God had given him in his own household (2 Samuel 12:7-9).
- Use your relationships for the purpose providence gave them. Walk together as co-heirs of the grace of life. Try to be a blessing to each other. Live in your relationships so that the day of parting will be sweet. Death will soon break up the family, and then only duty done, or neglects forgiven, will bring any comfort.
Providence in provision
Providence also provides for you and your family, again and again. I put this next to family on purpose, because Scripture does the same: "he raises up the needy out of affliction and makes their families like flocks" (Psalm 107:41, ESV).
You know the promises God has made: "The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing" (Psalm 34:10, ESV). And haven't you seen them kept? If someone asked you what Christ asked the disciples, "When I sent you out with no moneybag or knapsack or sandals, did you lack anything?", wouldn't you give their answer: "Nothing" (Luke 22:35, ESV)? Can't you say with Jacob, "the God who has been my shepherd all my life long" (Genesis 48:15, ESV; older translations read "fed me")? "He provides food for those who fear him; he remembers his covenant forever" (Psalm 111:5, ESV).
Think about it in these ways.
1. It's constant. His mercies "are new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23, ESV). This isn't the supply of one or two urgent needs. It meets all your needs as they come up, day after day, all your life. God says: "Listen to me, O house of Jacob... who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save" (Isaiah 46:3-4, ESV). God told Israel to remember "from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the righteous acts of the LORD" (Micah 6:5, ESV). In the same way, I urge you to write down the ways of providence from your first days until now, so you can see what kind of God he has been to you.
2. It's timely. "When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them" (Isaiah 41:17, ESV). Sometimes this comes in the ordinary way, with God quietly blessing a little and making it enough for you and yours. Job speaks of the time "when the secret of God was upon my tent" (Job 29:4, older translations), meaning God's hidden blessing rested on his household and kept it going, though he couldn't explain how. Sometimes it comes in an extraordinary way, as when the widow's jar of flour and jug of oil never ran out (1 Kings 17:9-16).
Two examples. Samuel Clarke tells how John Foxe, the author of the Book of Martyrs, was in great want in London late in Henry VIII's reign. He'd spent everything. One day he was sitting in St Paul's, weak from fasting, looking so ill that people avoided him. A stranger he had never seen came up, put a sum of money in his hand, told him to take heart, and said that within a few days a better situation would come. Three days later the Duchess of Richmond sent for him to be tutor to the Earl of Surrey's children.
Isaac Ambrose, a respected minister, described a time when he was suffering for conscience' sake and every usual source of income had dried up. He went to bed unsure whether the supply would ever come again. Before he woke the next morning, a letter arrived from a friend with unexpected help. He wrote, "One morsel of God's provision, especially when it comes in unexpectedly, and upon prayer, when wants are most, will be more sweet to a spiritual relish than all former enjoyments were."
3. It's wise. Providence measures the amount carefully. It doesn't satisfy our extravagant wishes. It answers our real needs: "my God will supply every need of yours" (Philippians 4:19, ESV). That matched exactly what the best and wisest people asked of him, such as Jacob (Genesis 28:20) and Agur (Proverbs 30:8-9). Providence treats us as the pilgrims and strangers we are, and provides what we need for the journey home. It knows how dangerous fullness and excess can be for us, even when we're believers, how easily they make us forget God (Deuteronomy 6:12). Our hearts, like the moon, are eclipsed when they're full. So providence arranges everything for our true good.
It's wise in the way it gives, too. Often it lets our needs pinch hard, and our fears grow, so that God's care will shine all the brighter when the help comes (Deuteronomy 8:3). Providence sees to it that faith and prayer come in between our need and its supply, so that God's goodness is magnified in our eyes.
So think about the good hand of providence that has supplied you and your family all your days and never failed you. And live in a way that fits what you've seen. Here are some warnings.
Six cautions
1. Don't forget what providence has done. God's charge against Israel was that "they soon forgot his works" (Psalm 106:13, ESV). A poor memory and an ungrateful heart rob you of the comfort of many mercies and rob God of the glory.
2. Don't distrust providence in the future. Israel said, "He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed. Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?" (Psalm 78:20, ESV). How unreasonable! They had just seen his power at work in extraordinary ways.
3. Don't grumble under new pressures. It's an ugly habit, and it comes naturally the moment need presses on us. If we understood what our sin truly deserves, we'd marvel at God's generosity before we'd complain about providence's stinginess. And if we remembered that God owes us nothing for anything we do, it would cure our grumbling.
4. Don't be discontented with the portion providence has set for you. I wish you could say, "The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance" (Psalm 16:6, ESV). What providence has appointed really is best for you, and one day you'll agree.
5. Don't neglect prayer when times get tight. Providence gives you everything, and you live on it. So take your needs to God. That's included in the promise (Isaiah 41:17) and stated in the command (Philippians 4:6). Remember God, and he won't forget you.
6. Don't eat away at your heart with anxious worry. "Look at the birds of the air," says Christ (Matthew 6:26, ESV). He doesn't mean the tame birds fed by hand at the door. He means wild birds that don't know where their next meal is coming from, and God feeds them. Remember your relationship to Christ and the promises he's made to you, and let that bring you to rest in everything providence gives.
Chapter 6: Preservation of the Saints from Evil
Here's another great mercy God's people receive from providence: it keeps them from the snares and temptations of sin. Many a deadly blow of temptation, and many a mortal thrust Satan aims at our souls, has been turned aside by providence. That's as plain as daylight. It's included in the promise: "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13, ESV). When your soul is shut up in the narrow place of temptation, providence opens a way out.
Two ways temptation is broken
There are two main ways the force of temptation is broken in believers. The first is inward grace: "the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh... to keep you from doing the things you want to do" (Galatians 5:17, ESV). In other words, sanctification gives sin a womb that miscarries after it has conceived in the soul. The second is the outward work of providence, and that's what I want to speak about here.
Providence as a barrier
God's providence is the great barrier against a world of sin that would otherwise burst out of our corrupt nature like a flood. It prevents a great deal of sin that wicked people would otherwise commit.
- The men of Sodom were greedily pursuing their lust, and God stopped them by striking them blind (Genesis 19:11).
- Jeroboam was about to strike the prophet, and providence withered his arm (1 Kings 13:4).
- When wicked people have planned something and are ready to carry it out, providence slaps on handcuffs, "so that their hands achieve no success" (Job 5:12, ESV).
There's so much corruption left in good people that they'd plunge into far more guilt than they do, if providence didn't care for them more than they care for themselves. Even when believers guard their hearts and watch their ways every day, sin is so deceitful that it would trap and defile them far more often than it does, if providence didn't put obstacles in the way. Providence does this in several ways.
1. It sends someone with timely advice. Abigail met David in the nick of time and talked him out of his evil purpose (1 Samuel 25:34). I've read of a holy man, Mr Dod, who was working in his study late at night when he felt a strong urge to visit a gentleman he knew. It was an odd hour, and he had no idea what providence intended, but he obeyed and went. When the man came to the door, Mr Dod told him he had no business with him, only that he couldn't rest until he'd seen him. "Sir," the man said, "God sent you at this hour. I was just about to take my own life." And so the harm was prevented.
2. It blocks the means. When good King Jehoshaphat teamed up with the wicked King Ahaziah to build trading ships, God broke the ships in a storm and ended the project (2 Chronicles 20:35-37). In the same way, Robert Bolton was once a poor young man at Oxford, and a friend offered him money and a new start if he'd join him in leaving the Protestant church. They arranged a time and place to meet and sail. The friend never turned up, and Bolton escaped the snare.
3. It sends an affliction. This is what God means by "I will hedge up her way with thorns" (Hosea 2:6, ESV). Basil of Caesarea suffered long from a violent headache, which he realised providence was using to restrain him from lust. Paul had "a thorn... in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited" (2 Corinthians 12:7, ESV). Whatever that affliction was, it was given to keep him from pride.
4. It corrects our thinking. When Asaph started to doubt, because the wicked were prospering and he was struggling, he began to think that all his religion had been wasted effort (Psalm 73:12-13). The temptation dissolved when he "went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end" (Psalm 73:17, ESV). God taught him to judge people and things by where they end up, not how they look now.
5. It brings a believer home early. This is one way to understand Isaiah 57:1: "the righteous man is taken away from calamity." That includes the calamity of sin as well as suffering. When the Lord sees his people worn down and unable to face the strong trials and temptations coming, an early release can be a mercy.
What you owe providence for this
Think about this, you who belong to God. Providence has cared more for your soul than you ever have. If it hadn't worked for you in these ways, you might be a ruin by now. When David was stopped from sin by Abigail, he was deeply moved. He blessed the Lord, the woman who came, and her counsel, because his soul had been kept from sin (1 Samuel 25:32-34). Think about a few things.
- Your nature has often driven you toward sin, so hard that all the grace you had couldn't have held you back if providence hadn't stepped in. "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire" (James 1:14, ESV). You found yourself a feather in the wind of temptation.
- You've been brought close to the edge and pulled back. Don't you want to say, "I was almost in all evil" (Proverbs 5:14, older translations), and, "my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped" (Psalm 73:2, ESV)? How merciful that providence stepped in so well-timed!
- Many others have been allowed to fall, to the shame of their faith and the wounding of their consciences, and they never recovered their peace.
- Think how bad it would have been if the Lord hadn't saved you from thousands of temptations that came at you. You can't measure what you have because of this. Do you value your good name and your clear conscience as much as your two eyes? You owe them, if not entirely then in large part, to the help providence gave you all the way through a dangerous, tempting world.
So live in a way that fits this. Thank God for it, and don't put your escapes down to luck, or to your own watchfulness or wisdom. And don't go to the other extreme, either, by relying on providence in a careless way, without taking proper care of yourself. "Keep yourselves in the love of God" (Jude 21, ESV). "Keep your heart with all vigilance" (Proverbs 4:23, ESV). Providence keeps you, but it keeps you as you do your duty.
Providence and the body
That's how much providence has cared for your soul, in preventing the spiritual dangers that would have come through temptation. Now I want to show you it has cared just as much for your body. It has carried you in its arms, with great tenderness, through countless hazards. "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4, ESV), and he is "the preserver of men" (Job 7:20, older translations).
Paul gives a list of the dangers he'd been through (2 Corinthians 11:26). What a wonder that our own lives haven't been put out in some of the dangers we've faced!
Sickness. Haven't some of us been so ill, more than once, that we've come to the edge of the grave? We might have said with Hezekiah, "In the middle of my days I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years" (Isaiah 38:10, ESV). Haven't we sometimes felt the sentence of death in ourselves? At those times our bodies were like a leaking ship in a storm, taking in water on every side and ready to sink. And God repaired us and sent us out again as good as new. It's no more wonderful to see a fine glass cup passed from hand to hand for forty or fifty years and still whole, despite the knocks and falls it has had. If you're healthy, or you've recovered from illness, it's because he puts "none of the diseases" on you, because he is "the LORD, your healer" (Exodus 15:26, ESV).
War. How many deadly dangers has God saved some of you from in the years of confusion and public disorder, when the sword was soaked in blood and your lives were given to you as a prize? David put a special mark on this: "O LORD, my Lord, the strength of my salvation, you have covered my head in the day of battle" (Psalm 140:7, ESV). Theodore Beza, who lived through the first French civil war, was tossed around for twenty-two months and recorded six hundred rescues from danger in that time. In his will he solemnly thanked God for them. If the sword didn't kill you, it's because God didn't give it a commission to.
The sea. Many of you have seen wonders on the deep, where God's hand was stretched out to rescue you. Psalm 107:23-27 describes it, and so, in plain truth, you can say what the psalmist says as a figure: "If it had not been the LORD who was on our side... then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us" (Psalm 124:1-4, ESV). (Many of Flavel's congregation at Dartmouth worked on the sea.) You've spent years where your lives hung in suspense. You've come home when you could count as neither alive nor dead. What reason you have to praise your great Preserver! Thousands of your companions have gone down, and you're still here. These many rescues call out for your thanks.
The dangers we never saw. What countless hazards and accidents, any one of which has killed others, has God carried us through! I think I can safely say the number of them outweighs the hairs on your heads. We never saw or knew about thousands of them. But our God saw them, and he brought us out of danger before he let us feel fear. Some were plain enough, and so remarkable that we can't speak of them to this day without being moved.
There's a story of Bishop John Jewel from the start of Queen Mary's reign. The inquisition was after him at Oxford, so he fled to London by night. He lost his way, which saved him from the men chasing him. But that same night he wandered in the snow, fainted, and lay on the road starving and gasping for life, until Latimer's servant found him and saved him. I could multiply examples. But most of us have plenty of our own, so I'd sooner press home what these providences mean. Think about three things.
1. What you owe providence for your protection. Your life has been prolonged to this day, with its usefulness and comfort. Look around the world and you'll see people in every place who are objects of pity, robbed by terrible accidents of life's comforts, while providence has tenderly preserved you. "He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken" (Psalm 34:20, ESV). Are your limbs whole? Is the shape of your body unspoiled? That's because providence has never let go of you since you came out of the womb. It's watched you with a careful eye and held you with a tender hand, and it's kept you as its charge.
2. How you've used what it kept. Every part of your body that has been so carefully kept has also been used as an instrument of sin. That's true of your unconverted days, when you gave your "members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness" (Romans 6:13, ESV). But it's true even after you gave them up to the Lord as instruments of service. You've often provoked him to strike you in every part, and yet providence has been so tender over them! How great his compassion has been, and how wonderful his patience!
3. What providence is aiming at. Why does it guard you so carefully and allow so little harm to reach you? So that you will use your body for God, and cheerfully give yourself to the work he's called you to. Why else are these mercies given? Your body is part of Christ's purchase as well as your soul (1 Corinthians 6:19). It's been placed in the care of angels, who have done many services for it ("Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" Hebrews 1:14, ESV). You've dedicated it to the Lord on the highest grounds (Romans 12:1). It has already been the subject of many mercies in this world, and it will share in great glory in the next (Philippians 3:21). Shouldn't it be used, and gladly worn out, in his service? How reasonable that is! Why would God so tenderly preserve it, if it weren't to be used for him?
Chapter 7: The Work of Sanctification
Providence does one more great favour for God's people, and we hardly think about it. It helps us in the work of mortification, which means putting sin to death.
Putting sin to death is one half of sanctification: "consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11, ESV). It's the clearest evidence that we belong to Christ (Romans 6:5-9; Galatians 5:24). It keeps us safe when we're tempted, because the corruption in the world comes through lust (2 Peter 1:4). And it makes us fit for service (John 15:2; 2 Timothy 2:21). So whatever advances this work is a great service to our souls.
Two instruments
Two instruments are at work here. The Spirit works from the inside (Romans 8:13). Providence helps from the outside. The Spirit is the main agent, and the work depends on him. All the providences in the world couldn't do it without him. But providences are real secondary means, and when the Spirit blesses them, they do a great deal.
God arranges the events of providence so they fit with the work of his Spirit. There's a sweet harmony between them. They all meet at the one blessed end God has chosen by the counsel of his will (Romans 8:28; Ephesians 1:11). That's why Ezekiel sees the Spirit in the wheels of providence, moving them (Ezekiel 1:20). They move together. Since one big part of the Spirit's work is to destroy sin in God's people, look at how closely providence follows his plan.
1. Providence holds sin back. Every believer has a strong pull toward sin, and a big part of sin's power lies in that pull. Paul complained of it: "I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members" (Romans 7:23, ESV). Every believer finds this out, and it grieves us. It's hard to hold back from what grieves God. God has put a hedge around us with his laws, but our nature wants to break through it, even against the Spirit's resistance inside us.
As the Spirit resists sin inwardly, providence puts bars and blocks in our way outwardly (Hosea 2:6; 2 Corinthians 12:7). Many a physical ailment is given for this very reason, to act as a brake on sin. Bear those ailments patiently, thinking of that. Basil, whom I mentioned in the last chapter, suffered from a bad headache for years. He prayed hard to be rid of it, and God took it away. As soon as he was free of it, he felt the stirring of lust, and he prayed to have his headache back. It might be the same for many of us if our brakes were off.
Someone might ask, "Is it right for a spiritual person to hold back from sin because of the rod? Surely a believer has better reasons than that. That sounds like a slave's attitude!"
It would be, if this were the only or the main reason. It would be if a person didn't hate sin for how foul it is, but only for how troublesome the results are. But that's not the case with believers under sanctified afflictions. They have higher motives and nobler principles, and they have natural feelings too, and those have their proper place and use.
Besides, affliction works differently on a believer's heart. What frightens them isn't mainly the sting of the rod. It's the sign of God's displeasure. "You renew your witnesses against me" (Job 10:17, ESV). "O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath" (Psalm 6:1, ESV). "Correct me, O LORD, but in justice; not in your anger, lest you bring me to nothing" (Jeremiah 10:24, ESV). Surely that's no low or common motive.
2. Providence cleanses us when we do sin. Even with this double fence, God's command and the afflictions that hold us back, sin is too strong for the best of us. Our corruption carries us right through. When that happens, the Spirit works inwardly, and providence works outwardly to bring us back. The ways of sin are made bitter for us, not only by a guilty conscience but by the rods God lays on us as well. One verse describes both: "He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall" (Ecclesiastes 10:8, ESV). If the wall is God's law, then the serpent is the sting of conscience and the sharp teeth of affliction, which a child of God soon feels.
The aim is to purge us of the pollution temptation has left. "Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for, and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin" (Isaiah 27:9, ESV). "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word" (Psalm 119:67, ESV). Affliction does for the soul what frosty weather does for clothes laid out to bleach: it changes the colour and makes them whiter. That seems to be the picture in Daniel 11:35: "some of the wise shall stumble, so that they may be refined, purified, and made white" (ESV).
But does that take credit away from Christ? Isn't it his blood that cleanses us? Yes, it is. Christ's blood is the only fountain opened for sin. No affliction, however many or strong or long-lasting, can wash away the stain of sin by itself. Look at wicked people, who are afflicted again and again and are still sinful. Even the torments of hell won't wash out the stain of one sin. But a sanctified affliction, working through the power of Christ's blood, can have blessed effects on the soul. A cross without a Christ never did anyone any good. Yet thousands have been helped by the cross, as it worked in the virtue of his death. That's the case I'm describing.
3. Providence breaks our grip on comforts. Even the best hearts, if God gives them something to enjoy, are tempted to get too attached to it. That shows how strong corruption is in God's people, and it has to be dealt with.
- Hezekiah was so taken up with his treasures that he showed them off, vain and proud (Isaiah 39:2).
- David, in his good days, said, "I shall never be moved" (Psalm 30:6, ESV). He thought his mountain, his kingdom and its glory, would stand for ever.
- David also set his heart too much on his handsome son Absalom, as we see from how he grieved when Absalom died, as if the boy were worth more than his own life.
- Jonah was delighted with the gourd that shaded him (Jonah 4:6).
Will God let this go on? Will he let a creature steal our affections from him? No. It's our corruption, and he'll cleanse it. So he sends providence to strike the things we love too much, or turns them into rods and strikes us with them.
- Hezekiah was puffed up over his full treasury. The very Babylonians he'd shown it to emptied it (Isaiah 39:6).
- David was congratulating himself on how secure he was. God hid his face, and David was dismayed (Psalm 30:7).
- Absalom was doted on and had crept too far into his father's heart. He became the son of David's sorrow, and he sought his father's life.
- Jonah was carried away with his gourd. God prepared a worm to attack it (Jonah 4:7).
God has sometimes taken a husband, a wife, or a child for this reason. Flavel puts it bluntly: they might have been spared longer if they'd been loved in a more measured way. It has also blasted many an estate and many a hopeful plan. It's a merciful arrangement for our good.
4. Providence humbles our pride. Our corruption shows in how proud and puffed up we get when people think well of us. When we're praised and admired for some gift or strength, the pride in our hearts comes out. "The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and a man is tested by his praise" (Proverbs 27:21, ESV). Just as a furnace shows what dross is in the metal when it's melted, praise shows how much pride is in the heart. A good man once said, "He who praises me wounds me." Strangest of all, this pride can still be felt when someone's dying. When those around a German minister were telling him, to encourage him, about all the good he'd done for God, he said, "Take away the fire. There's still the chaff of pride in me."
To crucify this pride, providence takes the bridle off ungodly people and lets them slander God's servants, as Shimei did David. It lets them lose the esteem of their friends, as Paul did among the Corinthians. All of this keeps down the swelling of their spirits. Its purpose is simply to "hide pride from man." It's worth noting that when some good men have taken on a public and prominent work and have, perhaps, sought a bit too much applause in it, God has withheld his usual help. They've stumbled in the work and come away with shame and pity, however well prepared they were at other times. I could give several remarkable examples, but I'll move on.
5. Providence deflates our big expectations. Corruption shows itself when we expect too much from the world, and plan on finding great happiness in the things we have. That was Job in his good days: "Then I thought, 'I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand'" (Job 29:18, ESV). How soon a dark providence turned his noonday to night! It was for his good, to take his heart further off created things. We often find the best people overcounting on earthly things and putting too much confidence in them. If you have great, well-founded hopes from heaven, you may also have great, unfounded hopes from earth. When that happens, providence undermines those hopes and teaches us by experience how empty they are. In Haggai, the people were set on prosperity, full harvests, and large increase, and ignored God's house. So providence ruined their hopes: "You have looked for much, and behold, it came to little" (Haggai 1:9, ESV).
6. Providence breaks our dependence on props. Corruption also shows in how we lean on created comforts and visible supports. How easily even the best of us lean on them! Israel leaned on Egypt like a weak man on his staff, and God let it fail them and wound them (Ezekiel 29:6-7). We do the same on a smaller scale.
- Relationships. We think they'll be springs of comfort to us all our lives. God shows us we're mistaken. A widow is taught to put her hope in him: "She who is truly a widow, left all alone, has set her hope on God" (1 Timothy 5:5, ESV).
- Children. We say of this or that child what Lamech said of Noah: "this one shall bring us relief" (Genesis 5:29, ESV). The wind passes over the flowers, and they wither, to teach us that our happiness isn't bound up in these things.
- Wealth. When the world smiles on us and we've made ourselves a warm nest, we plan on rest and peace. We think, like Baruch, of great things for ourselves. Providence, by some personal or public calamity, overturns the plans (Jeremiah 45:4-5). It's all to turn our hearts from the creature to God, who is our only rest.
7. Providence loosens our hold on this world. Even good people cling to things here, and don't want to leave. Often it's because of the pleasant things we enjoy. Providence deals with that by letting many of our pleasures die before we do. Or it makes the world bitter to us through its troubles, so that life seems less attractive, through the pains and weaknesses we feel in our bodies. That loosens our roots, so we're more easily pulled up when death comes.
A pause for wonder
Before I leave this, I have to stop and stand with you in holy amazement at how God deals with poor creatures like us. God deals with me as a friend. His condescension to his own clay is astonishing. I'll gather my thoughts under three heads, using the psalmist's words: "O LORD, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him?" (Psalm 144:3, ESV).
First, how great God is. He's infinitely above us and all our thoughts. "Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven; what can you do? Deeper than Sheol; what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea" (Job 11:7-9, ESV). "Heaven, even highest heaven, cannot contain him" (2 Chronicles 2:6, ESV). He is "terrifying in glorious deeds, doing wonders" (Exodus 15:11, ESV). Scripture compares him with the nations: "Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales... All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness" (Isaiah 40:15, 17, ESV). When the holiest people have come into his presence, how humbly they've spoken! "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" (Isaiah 6:5, ESV). Even the angels cover their faces and their feet, and cry, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3, ESV).
Second, how small man is, even the holiest of us. "Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!" (Psalm 39:5, ESV). Flavel notes that every person, even at their best, is not merely vanity but, in the Hebrew, "very vanity itself". Look at the best of people in their origin: "by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind" (Ephesians 2:3, ESV). The blood in our veins is as tainted as the blood of the lost. Look at our natural disposition, and it's no better. In many people it's worse than in those who've never been touched by grace. And though grace has dethroned sin in believers, how many offensive, God-provoking corruptions still break out from the best hearts! Look at our outward condition, and we're usually lower than others: "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children" (Matthew 11:25, ESV).
Third, how much God cares for us anyway. Isn't it amazing that this great and blessed God should be so concerned, as you've seen, in all his providences, with such small, weak creatures as we are? He doesn't need us. He's perfectly blessed without us. We add nothing to him. "Can a man be profitable to God?" (Job 22:2, ESV). Yet look at what he thinks of us.
- His eternal electing love. How ancient, how free, how astonishing! (Ephesians 1:4-5). All providences are heading toward that, and they won't rest until it's done.
- The gift of his Son. Never was humanity so honoured. David said, "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man?" (Psalm 8:3-4, ESV). How much more can we say, when we look at your Son, who lay in your bosom, "what is man, that such a Christ should be given to die for him?" It was for man, and not for fallen angels (Hebrews 2:16). It was for man while he was God's enemy (Romans 5:8).
- His constant care. "I, the LORD, am its keeper... lest anyone punish it, I keep it night and day" (Isaiah 27:3, ESV). "He does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous" (Job 36:7, ESV), not for a moment, all their days. If he did, a thousand troubles would rush in and ruin them.
- His tenderness. "As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13, ESV). He comforts his people with refreshing providences, as a loving mother comforts a small child. "Like birds hovering, so the LORD of hosts will protect" (Isaiah 31:5, ESV), as birds hover over their nests when their young are in danger. No tenderness in a parent can show how tender the Creator is.
- The variety of his mercies. They're "new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23). They're a fountain, with spiritual and physical, ordinary and extraordinary, public and personal mercies pouring out, more than we can count.
- The ministry of angels. "Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" (Hebrews 1:14, ESV).
And doesn't the providence we remember today show how much God cares for his people? (Flavel preached this on 5 November, when England remembered being rescued from the Gunpowder Plot.) If not, why weren't we "given as prey to their teeth" (Psalm 124:6, ESV)? If the LORD hadn't been on our side, wicked people, whom Scripture compares to fire, flood and wild beasts, would have swallowed us up alive. Thank God for that fruitful providence that has now brought more than seventy years of freedom and peace to his church! I urge you to do with this providence what the Jews did with Purim (Esther 9:27-28), all the more because we seem to be as close to danger from the same enemy as at any time since. If a mercy like this is forgotten, God may say: "I will save you no more" (Judges 10:13, ESV).
Part Two: Meditation on the Providence of God
Chapter 8: The Duty of Meditation on Providence
I've shown that the affairs of God's people are run by a special providence, and I've given examples of how far that providence reaches into their lives. Now I want to show that it's the duty of God's people to think carefully about what providence has done for them. We're to do it at all times, but especially when things are hard.
1. God has commanded it
God has told his people to take a serious look at his works, whether they're acts of mercy or of judgement. After the most terrible judgement ever to fall on his own people, when they'd turned away from him and he'd removed the signs of his presence among them, the rest were told to go, at least in their thoughts, to Shiloh and see what he'd done to it: "Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil of my people Israel" (Jeremiah 7:12, ESV).
He calls us to look back on his mercies too. "O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the righteous acts of the LORD" (Micah 6:5, ESV). In other words, if you don't think about that remarkable providence, God's righteousness will be hidden and your own unrighteousness will be uncovered. And he calls us to think about how he provides for the rest of his creatures, so we can prop up our own faith: "Consider the lilies of the field" (Matthew 6:28, ESV).
2. Neglecting it is condemned as a sin
Scripture treats carelessness about God's works as a sin. It's displeasing to God: "O LORD, your hand is lifted up, but they do not see it" (Isaiah 26:11, ESV). He warns against it. "Because they do not regard the works of the LORD or the work of his hands, he will tear them down and build them up no more" (Psalm 28:5, ESV; see also Isaiah 5:12-13). And he doesn't only threaten. He strikes people with visible judgements for it (Job 34:26-27).
That's why the Holy Spirit puts signs of attention, like "behold", in front of accounts of providence in Scripture. They invite us to look closely.
- In the great rescue of Israel from Egypt, there's a "behold" twice (Exodus 3:2, 9).
- When Rabshakeh frightened Hezekiah and the whole people, and providence defeated him, there's a "behold" in front of it: "Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumour and return to his own land" (2 Kings 19:7, ESV). Flavel's older version reads, "I will send a blast upon him."
- When God shows his wisdom and power by rescuing his people and trapping their enemies in their own plans, a double mark of attention is attached: "Higgaion. Selah" (Psalm 9:16, ESV). These are musical or reflective notes, and they mean something like "think about this, and pause".
- At the opening of each seal in Revelation, which brings a remarkable chain of events, John is called to attention each time. In the older translations it reads, "Come and see" (Revelation 6:1-7).
These would all be pointless additions if we had no duty to look. See also Psalm 66:5: "Come and see what God has done."
3. Without it, we can't praise him
You can't praise God for something you haven't noticed. Praise and thanksgiving depend on paying attention to what he's done. Psalm 107 is one long account of God's care for people, and at each stage people are called on to thank him:
- for his people in difficulty (vv. 4-6);
- for prisoners in chains (vv. 10-12);
- for people lying sick in bed (vv. 17-19);
- for sailors in a storm (v. 23);
- for people in famine (vv. 33-38);
- and for the way he brings the proud low and lifts the lowly up (vv. 39-41).
Verse 43 shows how necessary paying attention is: "Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the LORD" (Psalm 107:43, ESV). If we neglect this duty, God is robbed of his praise.
4. Without it, we lose the benefit of what he's done
That would be an enormous loss for us. This is the food our faith lives on when times are hard: "You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness" (Psalm 74:14, ESV). That is, it was food for their faith.
Believers argue from past providences to new ones.
- David: "The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine" (1 Samuel 17:37, ESV).
- Paul: "He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again" (2 Corinthians 1:10, ESV).
If we forget these things, our hands of faith hang limp. "Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember...?" (Matthew 16:9, ESV). Believers have often used this in prayer to ask for new mercies. Moses asked for new pardons by reminding God of old ones: "as you have forgiven this people, from Egypt until now" (Numbers 14:19, ESV). The church pleads for new providences on the same ground (Isaiah 51:9-10).
5. It's disrespectful to ignore him when he comes near
God draws near to us in providences. He does it in judgement: "Then I will draw near to you for judgement" (Malachi 3:5, ESV). He does it in mercy: "The LORD is near to all who call on him" (Psalm 145:18, ESV). Older translations say he "visits" us, both when he corrects (Hosea 9:7) and when he saves (Psalm 106:4). These visits keep us going (Job 10:12). It's amazing that the great God would visit us "every morning and test him every moment" (Job 7:18, ESV). To take no notice is a vile, brutish contempt for God (Isaiah 1:3; Zephaniah 3:2). You wouldn't do that to a man you had any respect for. It's the mark of the wicked not to regard God's favours (Isaiah 26:10) or his frowns (Jeremiah 5:3).
And we can't pray as we should without observing providence. Our prayers need to fit our situation. Sometimes we're called to praise, and sometimes to humble ourselves. In the path of his judgements, we wait for him (Isaiah 26:8) and prepare to meet him (Zephaniah 2:1-2; Amos 4:12). Sometimes our business is to turn away his anger as we see it coming, and sometimes it's to praise him for mercies received (Isaiah 12:1-2). But to do either, we have to have noticed.
6. David's psalms show the pattern
You can see this in the Psalms. Their themes keep changing with the providences that came to David. Someone who is careless and unobservant could never have written them.
That's the case for this duty, briefly stated.
Chapter 9: How to Meditate on the Providence of God
Next I want to show you how to think over what providence has done for you. It isn't enough to give it a quick, passing glance. A cold, factual run through the list won't count with God as doing this duty. It's a different kind of work from what most people take it to be. If we really knew this heavenly exercise, it would make our lives sweet and our burdens light. You're missing a great pleasure of the Christian life while you neglect it or don't understand it. So here are some directions to lead you into it.
Direction 1: Get as full a view as you can of God's providences towards you, from first to last
Fill your hearts with thoughts of God and his ways. If one act of providence can thrill us, think what many together would do. One star is beautiful. What is a whole constellation? So make your reflections full in two ways: wide and deep.
Wide. Search backwards through everything providence has done in your life. That's what Asaph did: "I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds" (Psalm 77:11-12, ESV). He went back over mercies from years before and drew fresh sweetness out of them by looking at them again.
Let me tell you, there is no more pleasant story to read anywhere than the story of your own life, if you'll sit down and write out what God has been to you and done for you from the beginning. Think of the times his mercy, faithfulness and love broke through, in every situation you've passed through. If your heart hasn't melted before you're halfway through, it's hard indeed. "My Father, you are the friend of my youth" (Jeremiah 3:4, ESV).
Deep. Don't let your thoughts float on the surface like feathers. Let them sink like lead. "Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them" (Psalm 111:2, ESV). I don't pretend we can reach the bottom of providence with our short line. "Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen" (Psalm 77:19, ESV). But we should dive as far as we can, and wonder at the depth when we can't touch the bottom.
It's like Elijah's servant looking for rain (1 Kings 18:43-44). He went out and looked, and saw nothing. The prophet sent him back seven times. At the seventh, he said, "Behold, a little cloud like a man's hand is rising from the sea." Keep your eye on it, and soon the whole sky is dark with cloud. It's the same with providences. You may look at one once or twice and see very little. Look "seven times", which means come back and think about it again and again, and you'll see its glory grow like that cloud.
Direction 2: Weigh the things that make up a single providence
There are several things to think over in one providence before you can judge how much it's worth.
1. How well-timed it was. A mercy that arrives exactly when it's needed is worth a thousand times more than the same mercy at another time. When our need has grown extreme and every visible hope has failed, relief is wonderfully precious (Isaiah 41:17-18). It's especially so when God's special care shows in what he spares us. In a general calamity, we're exempted and covered under his wings. "Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by" (Isaiah 26:20, ESV). In famine, he keeps his people alive (Psalm 33:18-19). Others who looked just as safe, or safer, are abandoned to misery while we're saved. How dear such providences should be to us! (Psalm 91:7-8).
2. What it opened the way for. Some providences look small and trivial, but they deserve first rank among your mercies, because they let in a whole train of other blessings. One was Jesse sending David with food to his brothers at the army camp (1 Samuel 17:17). Every Christian can find these in his own life if he'll think about the place he's in, the relationships he has, and how he was led into them.
3. The people God used. Look at who carried each mercy to you, and you'll see God's finger clearly. Great mercies often arrive by very unlikely hands, while the likely ones are set aside. A stranger is moved to do for you what your own family couldn't or wouldn't. Jonathan, a stranger to David, stuck closer to him than David's own brothers, who despised him. Ministers often find more kindness from strangers than from the people who owe them most. "A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household" (Mark 6:4, ESV).
Help has sometimes come from enemies. "The earth came to the help of the woman" (Revelation 12:16, ESV). God has bent the hearts of wicked people to be kind to his own (Acts 28:2). He has even used people who meant nothing but harm. Joseph's brothers helped to raise him in the very thing they'd planned to ruin him with (Genesis 50:20).
4. What it was aiming at. Ask what providence is heading towards. This, more than any other, warms and melts the heart. You have the general answer: "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28, ESV). A thousand friendly hands are at work to bring about the happiness of God's people. That's enough to sweeten the bitterest providence, to know it will turn out for your salvation (Philippians 1:19).
5. How it relates to your prayers. This is a sweet thing to dwell on. Prayer honours providence, and providence honours prayer. Scripture notices it often (Genesis 24:45; Daniel 9:20; Acts 12:12). You've received the very things you asked for. Providences have carried the stamp of your prayers on them. How sweet such mercies are!
6. How it relates to the Word. In all you observe of providence, look especially at which word of God it fulfils. Every providence is tied to the written Word. Solomon, in his prayer, said that God's promises and providences had gone step by step with his father David all his life: "You have kept with your servant David my father what you declared to him. You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand you have fulfilled it this day" (1 Kings 8:24, ESV). Joshua said, "Not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you" (Joshua 23:14, ESV). He'd carefully compared God's works with God's Word and found them in exact harmony. So can you, if you compare them as he did.
I'll spend longer on this one, because some interpreters think it's the very point of our text. They read it as, "unto God that performs the things he has promised for me" (Psalm 57:2). I don't think the meaning needs to be limited that narrowly, but this is certainly an important part of it. So in all our reviews of providence, ask which word of God it has made good to us, whether a threat, a warning, advice or a promise.
Doing this does us two great good things.
First, it confirms the truth of Scripture. If the Bible had no other proof, this alone would be an unanswerable argument that it is from God: in every age, people find God's works matching it exactly, so that we can say, "As we have heard, so have we seen" (Psalm 48:8, ESV).
Second, it directs us in our duty under every providence. Providences by themselves are not a perfect guide. They often puzzle and tangle our thoughts. Bring them to the Word, and your duty becomes clear. "Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law" (Psalm 94:12, ESV). You learn the voice and errand of the rod only from the Word. "Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end" (Psalm 73:17, ESV). Asaph learned their end, and he also learned his own duty, which was to be quiet when afflicted and not to envy the prosperity of the wicked.
Direction 3: See how providence fulfils the Word
So bring the providences you've passed through, or are under now, to the Word, and you'll find yourself surrounded with light. I appeal to your consciences: haven't you found the events of providence agreeing with the Word at every point? Here are some of the ways.
1. Obedience is wisdom. The Word says the way of holiness is the wisest way: "Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples" (Deuteronomy 4:6, ESV). Let providence say whether that's true. Whether you think of your comfort now or your happiness later, both are put at risk by leaving the path of duty and kept safe by sticking to it. Ask the drunkard, the adulterer and the man who swears, when sin has wrecked their body, soul, money and good name, whether it was wise to walk those forbidden paths. They can't help admitting that "this is the path of those who have foolish confidence" (Psalm 49:13, ESV). "What fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death" (Romans 6:21, ESV). Providence has made good on the warnings written in the experience of every age (Proverbs 5:9-10; 23:21; 23:29-30). Look at the ruined estates and bodies you can see on every side. That's the Bible being proved true in sad providences.
2. Sinful scheming never pays. The Word says that leaving the way of honesty and plain dealing for crooked tactics will never profit you (1 Samuel 12:21; Proverbs 3:5). Ask your own experience. Did you ever drop honesty, use sinful shifts to get your own way, and really prosper by it? God has cursed all the ways of sin, and even where others seem to thrive on them, his people won't. Israel wouldn't rely on the LORD and trusted in the shadow of Egypt instead. What did they gain by it? (Isaiah 30:1-5). David worked hard at sinful schemes to cover his sin. Did it prosper? (2 Samuel 12). "Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit" (Proverbs 10:2, ESV). Either God has quietly blown on it so it does the owner no good, or he's given them such a restless conscience that they've had to bring it up again before they could find peace.
David charged Solomon with this, and thousands have proved it true: the way to prosper is to keep close to the Word, and the reason people can't prosper is that they've left it (1 Chronicles 22:12-13; 2 Chronicles 24:20).
It's true that when God means to destroy someone, he may let them succeed in their sin for a while, so that they harden further (Job 12:6). But that isn't how he deals with those he loves. Their sinful shortcuts will never work for them.
3. Don't trust in people. The Word forbids putting your confidence in any creature, even the greatest and most powerful (Psalm 146:3). It says it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man (Psalm 118:8). It forbids trusting even those closest to you by nature (Micah 7:5), and it pronounces a curse on the man who gives to a creature the trust that belongs to God (Jeremiah 17:5).
See whether providence agrees. Did you ever lean on an Egyptian reed that didn't break, and pierce you as well as let you down? How often we've found it so! Whatever we've over-loved, idolised and leaned on, God has broken, to show us its emptiness. The quickest way to lose a comfort is to set your heart on it too much. Our God is a jealous God and won't give his glory to another. The world is full of people who lost a husband, wife, child or estate for this very reason. When Jonah is overjoyed with his plant, a worm is ready to destroy it. That's why so many graves are opened to bury our idols out of our sight. When David said, "I shall never be moved", the next thing he heard was of darkness and trouble (Psalm 30:6-7). Who can't put his seal to it and say, "Your word is truth"? (John 17:17).
4. Sin brings affliction. The Word says that sin and suffering are tied together. "Be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23, ESV). That is, the sad results of it will. "If his children forsake my law and do not walk according to my rules, if they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments, then I will visit their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with stripes" (Psalm 89:30-32, ESV).
Ask providence whether that's how it has been. When did you grow careless, vain and worldly, without some sharp, startling providence arriving to wake you? When did you wound your conscience with guilt and God didn't wound you for it somewhere you loved? It's so usual that many Christians, noticing their own state, have sensed trouble coming before it came.
I'm not saying God only ever afflicts his people for their sin. He may do it to test them (1 Peter 4:12). Nor do I say he follows every sin with a rod, for who could stand? (Psalm 130:3). But it is his usual way, and he does it in mercy to their souls. That's why the rod lay on David through a long run of troubles in his kingdom and family after his great sin (2 Samuel 12:10). And if we searched out the roots of the troubles we or ours groan under, we'd find our own turning away from the Lord (Jeremiah 2:19; 4:18). Haven't all these warnings been exactly fulfilled in your experience?
5. Nobody loses by following Christ. The promises are as sure as the warnings. Jesus said, "There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life" (Mark 10:29-30, ESV).
Thousands upon thousands have experienced this, and stand ready to put their seal to it today. God has made it good not only in spiritual things, in inward joy and peace, but in outward things too. Where family once cared for them, hundreds of Christians have stepped in. They've left all for Christ, and yet can say, "as having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (2 Corinthians 6:10, ESV). How tenderly providence cares for those who have given up everything for conscience's sake and thrown themselves on its care! Many are provided for even to the envy of their enemies and their own amazement.
6. God never leaves his people. "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, ESV). "I will be with him in trouble" (Psalm 91:15, ESV). Look back over your life. Where or when did your God leave you to sink under your burdens? Most of you have been plunged into difficulties where reason could see no way out. Some of them staggered your faith in the promises, as David's did when he said, "I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul" (1 Samuel 27:1, ESV). Yet look at him coming out of that sea of trouble, with the promises made good to the last detail. So with you. Has God abandoned you in the day of trouble? You'd have to deny your own experience to say so.
Yes, there were plunges where you saw no escape and thought you'd perish. There were times your faith wobbled and you wondered whether the fountain of all-sufficiency would open for you. There were times you grumbled and lost patience and provoked the Lord to leave you in it. But he didn't. He strengthened your back to bear it, or lightened the load, or opened an unexpected door, as he promised: "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13, ESV). The evil you feared never came.
7. The Word is a soul's only real comfort in affliction. "This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life" (Psalm 119:50, ESV). "If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction" (Psalm 119:92, ESV). It was written for this: "that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope" (Romans 15:4, ESV). No rules of common sense and no natural remedies can do what the Word does. A thousand experiences seal this truth. From this source the saints have drawn their strengthening cordial when fainting under the rod. One word from God does more to relieve a distressed soul than ten thousand words from people.
If providence has ever led you to a promise that assures you the Lord is with you in trouble (Psalm 91:15), or that helps you bear outward burdens cheerfully from inward peace (John 16:33), or that shows God's gentleness and restraint with you (Isaiah 27:8), or that shows you'll reap good fruit from it (Romans 8:28), or that makes clear your place in God and his love under affliction (2 Samuel 7:14), then you know what relief follows, and how light your burden becomes.
8. Generosity never loses. The Word says the best way to improve your finances is to give cheerfully for God, and that holding back when duty calls won't do you good (Proverbs 11:24-25; 19:17; Isaiah 32:8). Providence agrees. What people save, as they count it, with one hand, providence scatters with the other. What they give away freely and single-mindedly for God is repaid to them or their families. No one ever lost by giving for God. "Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD" (Proverbs 19:17, ESV). Some have seen providence double what they gave, in ways they never expected.
9. Pleasing God wins people's regard. "When a man's ways please the LORD, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him" (Proverbs 16:7, ESV). The three young men in the fiery furnace found it (Daniel 3:28-29), and so did Daniel (Daniel 6:20-22). It kept John the Baptist's standing in Herod's conscience (Mark 6:20). No one has ever lost in the end by being faithful.
10. Handing a matter over to God brings peace. The Word says the best way to find calm in confusing troubles is to commit yourself and your case to the Lord (Psalm 37:5-7; Proverbs 16:3). You've found it so. What a weight comes off your shoulders when you hand a matter over to God! Then providence settles your affairs comfortably, and the difficulty is soon over once the heart is brought to this.
You can see how providence fulfils Scripture in these few instances. Compare any other case and you'll find the same. All the lines of providence lead out from Scripture and return to it. That's where they visibly begin and end.
Direction 4: See God behind every providence
In all your reviews of providence, look to God as the author and orderer of it all (Proverbs 3:6).
In your comforts, remember that he is "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort" (2 Corinthians 1:3, ESV). No mercy reaches you without his order. And don't stop at a general acknowledgement of that. Look for these particular things.
1. His care for you. "He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7, ESV). "Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all" (Matthew 6:32, ESV). Tell him what you need and it's supplied. Don't torture yourself about it. You have a Father who cares (Philippians 4:6).
2. His wisdom in how he gives. See how suitably and seasonably your mercies are ordered. When one comfort is taken away, another is raised up in its place. Isaac was comforted in Rebekah after his mother's death (Genesis 24:67).
3. His free grace. See riches of grace in every gift to creatures as unworthy as you are. See yourself outweighed by the least of your mercies. "I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant" was Jacob's cry (Genesis 32:10, ESV).
4. His condescension to your requests. This is the sweetest bite in any enjoyment, tasting the answer to your own prayer, and it inflames the soul's love for God (Psalm 34:6; 116:1).
5. His purpose. A comfort isn't sent to feed your appetite. It's sent to give you strength and joy for your duty (Deuteronomy 28:47).
6. The way it came to you. Every mercy flows through the blood of Christ and the covenant of grace (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Mercies get their sweetness from the channel they run in.
7. His distinguishing goodness. Think how many people better than you are denied these comforts (Hebrews 11:37).
8. Where they're heading. They're meant to refresh you on your way to far better mercies than themselves. The best is kept till last.
In your afflictions, see God as the one who orders them too. He says of himself: "Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you" (Jeremiah 18:11, ESV). "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" (Amos 3:6, ESV). So look at these things.
1. His sovereignty. He's infinitely above you, and you and all you have exist at his pleasure (Psalm 115:3). This is the strongest argument for submission (Psalm 46:10). If we and all we have come from his will, it's right that we should be given up to it. Not many years ago we didn't exist. When it pleased him to bring us onto the stage, we had no say over the terms. He could have made us the lowest creatures, worms or toads. He could have made us the most wretched among men, and after all the miseries of this life, condemned us for ever, and done us no wrong. Shouldn't that quieten us under the ordinary afflictions of this life?
2. His grace and goodness. See him passing by in the cloudy, dark day, proclaiming his name: "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious" (Exodus 34:6, ESV). Two mercies are seldom hidden by even the darkest affliction: sparing mercy in this world, and saving mercy in the next. It isn't as bad as it could be, or as we deserve, and it will be better later. The church reasoned herself quiet this way: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end" (Lamentations 3:22, ESV). Has he taken some? He could have taken all. Are we afflicted? It's a mercy we're not destroyed. Think what temporal mercies are still spared and what spiritual mercies are still given, and we'll find more reason to wonder at mercy than to complain of severity.
3. His wisdom. Look at it in the choice of this affliction and not another, in the time, now and not another season, in the measure, this much and no more, in the support he gives you, so you aren't left helpless, and in where it's heading, to your good and not your ruin. Then ask yourself the question God asked Jonah: "Do you do well to be angry?" (Jonah 4:4, ESV). Think what need you had of these rods. Your corruptions need all this to put them to death, and perhaps much more. Without the loss of these things you might have been lost for ever. You'll see good reason to be quiet and satisfied under God's hand.
4. His faithfulness. David did: "In faithfulness you have afflicted me" (Psalm 119:75, ESV). It's part of his covenant faithfulness (Psalm 89:32-33). That's why the Lord won't hold back a rod when it's needed (1 Peter 1:6), and why he won't abandon his people under it: "struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4:9, ESV).
How quiet this makes the heart! My God won't lose my heart if a rod can prevent it. He'd rather hear me groan here than howl hereafter. His love is wise, not doting. He looks to my good rather than my ease.
5. His all-sufficiency. See enough in him still, whatever is gone. The fountain is as full as ever, though this or that pipe that used to bring some of it to you has been cut. Can't you make up the loss this way? Can't you see more in God than in all the comforts you've lost? How are you looking at God?
6. His unchanging nature. Look on him as the Rock of ages, "the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17, ESV). Look on Jesus Christ as "the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Hebrews 13:8, ESV). Two or three days may have changed your situation completely. A dear relative has died and turned everything upside down, and the place where he was is empty: "his place knows him no more" (Job 7:10, ESV). But God is what he was, and where he was. Time makes no change in him. "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever" (Isaiah 40:8, ESV). How calming those views of God are in dark times!
Direction 5: Match your affections to the providence
Work your heart up to the frame of mind each providence calls for (Ecclesiastes 7:14). God has planted many affections in you, many graces in those affections, and many providences to draw them out.
When providences are sad, whether for the church in general or for your family and yourself, that is the time for godly sorrow and humility. God is calling for it (Isaiah 22:12; Micah 6:9). Sensual pleasure and natural cheerfulness are out of season: "Or shall we make merry?" (Ezekiel 21:10, ESV). If there's a child's spirit in us, we can't be light and flippant when our Father is angry. If we have any sense of the evil of sin that provokes his anger, we'll be heavy-hearted when he's striking for it. If we have any compassion for the miseries sin brings on the world, we'll say with David, "I look at the faithless with disgust, because they do not keep your commands" (Psalm 119:158, ESV). And if we care at all about preventing utter ruin and stopping God on the road of his anger, we know how: "prepare to meet your God, O Israel!" (Amos 4:12, ESV).
Direction 6: Keep spiritual joy under every providence
However dark providence looks, keep your spiritual joy and comfort in God. "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (Habakkuk 3:17-18, ESV).
There are two kinds of comfort, natural and spiritual. There's a time for both (Esther 9:22). There's a time when the first is to be set aside (Psalm 137:2). But there is no time when spiritual joy in God is out of place (1 Thessalonians 5:16; Philippians 4:4). It's simply the cheerfulness of the heart in God, and the sense that we belong to him and to his promises. No providence can make that out of season for a Christian.
Take the worst state a Christian can be in. Why should sad providences make him lay his comforts in God aside? His troubles are for a moment. His comforts last for ever (2 Corinthians 4:17). Here are some reasons not to give up your joy.
- At their lowest, the saints have far more cause to rejoice than to despair. There's more in one of their mercies to comfort them than in all their troubles to cast them down. All your losses are like a prince losing a farthing (Romans 8:18).
- God is with them in it. Jesus said, "Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?" (Matthew 9:15, ESV). So I say: can the soul be sad while God is with it? That one promise, "I will be with him in trouble" (Psalm 91:15), should carry you under every burden. Let the people with no God to turn to be cast down.
- No outward event, however sad, is a sign of God's hatred. "It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked" (Ecclesiastes 9:2, ESV). If it were a mark of his wrath, our dejection would be justified. It isn't. His heart is full of love while the face of providence is full of frowns.
- God will do us good even through these things. All of it will turn to our salvation (Romans 8:28). He is only killing your lusts, weaning your heart from a vain world, heading off temptations and stirring your longing for heaven. That is all the harm they'll do you. Should that make us sad?
- The change is near. It's only a little while and sorrows will flee. You'll never suffer again: "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes" (Revelation 7:17, ESV).
So there's no reason from providence to give up your joy in God. But if you want to keep it under all providences, make sure of your claim to him. Faith can be separated from comfort, but assurance cannot.
Direction 7: Put to death your inordinate love of earthly things
It's this that makes the providences which deprive and cross us so heavy. Weaken your attachment and you'll lighten your affliction. It is strong affection that makes strong affliction. David's cry over Absalom shows it (2 Samuel 18:33).
Direction 8: Think often about the Lord's coming
Then all these things will seem small. "Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand" (Philippians 4:5, ESV).
Direction 9: Keep a heavenly mind under every providence
Keep your hearts on eternal things whatever the Lord exercises you with. Noah walked with God (Genesis 6:9), and he met with as sad providences as anyone since. But too often providences are stops rather than steps in our walk with God. When providences are comfortable, our hearts grow sensual, careless and worldly. When they're sad, we're cast down or thrown off balance. That comes partly from the narrowness of our hearts, and more from their deceitfulness. We're small, and we don't know how to handle two things as different as earthly and heavenly business without hurting one of them.
But a frame of mind is possible in which we keep an even, steady course with God whatever happens. Others have reached it, so why not us? Prosperity is mostly a dangerous state for the soul. The moon is only eclipsed when it's full. Yet Jehoshaphat's grace was not eclipsed by the fullness of his outward condition. He "had great riches and honour. His heart was courageous in the ways of the LORD" (2 Chronicles 17:5-6). David's life was as full of cares and troubles as most we read of, and yet the Psalms, written mostly in the middle of them, show how spiritual his heart was. The apostles suffered as much as anyone, and yet how lifted and heavenly their spirits were!
If it were not possible to keep a heavenly mind in such a state of affairs, God would never put his people through it. He'd never give you so much of the world that you lose your heart in loving it, or so little that you're distracted with worrying about it. If we were more deeply sanctified, with our hearts heading more strongly for heaven, if we were more dead to earthly things and kept our proper distance from them, our outward circumstances wouldn't draw out our inward corruptions like this. We wouldn't risk losing something as sweet as fellowship with God for the sake of anything our bodies need on earth.
Direction 10: Be content with what God gives you
Whatever the Lord gives, more or less of the things of this world, keep a contented heart. This grace has to run alongside all providences. "I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound" (Philippians 4:11-12, ESV). Everyone needs this duty at all times and in every state, not just God's people but the unbelieving too. So I'll speak to both. First to those who don't know Christ, to stop their mouths from complaining and charging God foolishly when providence crosses them. Think seriously about these four things.
1. Hell is your portion. By the plain terms of the law and the gospel, eternal punishment is what's due you. Anything short of it is the fruit of God's astonishing patience. Poor souls, don't you know you're condemned to wrath by the plain sentence of the law? (John 3:36; Mark 16:16; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-7). Then you have far greater things to think, fear and care about than these. If you can't bear one frown of providence, one light cross, how will you bear everlasting burning? A man who is to lose his head tomorrow doesn't much mind what bed he sleeps in or how his table is laid the night before.
2. You still have many mercies. Even as a condemned person with no promise to claim, you hold many mercies today. Is life nothing, especially considering where you'll sink when that thread is cut? Is the food and shelter that keep you alive nothing? Providence provides them though you daily provoke God. Above all, are the gospel and the means of salvation nothing, when through them you can still escape hell? What would the damned say if they could be put in your place again? And you're fretting against God because everything else doesn't suit you!
3. These crosses are your best hope. If you're ever to be rescued from the misery you're in, the very crosses you complain of are the most likely means. Prosperity and success aren't the way to save you, but to destroy you (Proverbs 1:32). You must be held in cords of affliction if your ear is ever to be opened to instruction (Job 36:8-10). Woe to you if you go on smoothly and meet no crosses.
4. Your own sins brought them. You turn God's mercies into sin, then fret against God because he turns your sins into sorrow. Put your hand on your mouth and say, "Why should a living man complain, a man, about the punishment of his sins?" (Lamentations 3:39, ESV).
Now to the Lord's people. They have the least excuse of anyone to be dissatisfied with any of God's providences, and yet they too often are. I offer these thoughts.
1. Think of your spiritual blessings. Complain about your providential lot if you can. Any one of them is enough to sweeten all your troubles. When Paul thought of them, he was so astonished that he couldn't help crying out in the middle of his outward troubles, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 1:3, ESV). Who can see such an inheritance settled on him in Christ and ever open his mouth again to complain about his lot?
2. Think of your sins. Consider two things in sin: what it deserves from God, and what it takes to put it to death in you. It deserves eternal ruin. The merit of hell is in the least vain thought. Every sin forfeits every mercy you have, so wonder that your mercies are so many, rather than that you haven't more. And you can't doubt that your corruptions need all the crosses and wants and troubles you have, and probably a good deal more, to subdue them. After all the rods that have been on you, don't you still find a proud heart, a vain and earthly heart? How many bitter medicines does it take to purge out so stubborn a disease!
3. Think how near the change is. Have a little patience and all will be as well with you as your heart could wish. It's no small comfort to the saints that this world is the worst place they will ever be in. Things get better for them every day. A traveller who has spent all his money isn't much troubled when he knows he's a few miles from home. If there are no candles in the house, we don't mind when we know it's nearly daybreak, because we won't need them. That's our case: "For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed" (Romans 13:11, ESV).
Cautions: Don't misuse providence
That's all the directions. Before I go on, I want to leave two cautions to stop providence being misused.
Caution 1: If providence delays a mercy you've long waited and prayed for, don't lose heart or grow weary of waiting on God.
The Lord often tests his people this way and makes them cry, "How long, O LORD?" (Psalm 13:1-2, ESV). These delays are frequent, for spiritual reasons and for practical ones. When they come, we're too ready to read them as a refusal and fall into sinful despair, though there's no cause for it (Psalm 31:22; Lamentations 3:8, 44). It isn't always that the answer to prayer is sent in the same hour. Sometimes it is (Isaiah 65:24; Daniel 9:23). But even when the Lord means to give us what we want, he will usually make us wait for it, for these reasons.
- Our time isn't the right season. The season of a mercy adds a great deal to its value. God doesn't judge as we do. We're all in a hurry and want it now (Numbers 12:13). "For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him" (Isaiah 30:18, ESV).
- The affliction hasn't done its work yet. When we're pressing and impatient for it to end, it may not yet have done in our hearts what it was sent to do. Then the rod mustn't be taken off (Isaiah 10:12).
- The more prayer and heart-searching between need and supply, the sweeter the supply. "Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation" (Isaiah 25:9, ESV). That pays us back for all the cost of our patience.
Still, we find it hard to bear. Our hands hang down and we faint. "I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God" (Psalm 69:3, ESV). We judge by what we see and forget that God's heart may be towards us while the hand of his providence seems against us. If things stay as they are, we think our prayers are lost and our hopes gone. Much more when they get worse, as they usually do just before daybreak and the change. Then we decide God is angry with our prayers. Hear Gideon: "If the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us?" (Judges 6:13, ESV). Even Moses' faith staggered (Exodus 5:22-23). What groundless suspicions of God our own children carry at such times (Job 9:16-17; Psalm 77:7-9)! To guard against it in future trials, here are some considerations.
1. The delay is really for your good. "Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you" (Isaiah 30:18, ESV). It's the time he spends preparing mercies for you and your heart for mercy, so you get it with the greatest comfort. The foolish child pulls the apple while it's green. When it's ripe, it drops on its own, and it's sweeter and better for you.
2. A heart willing to leave everything with God is a greater mercy than getting the thing at once. In one, God pleases you. In the other, you please God. A mercy may come as the fruit of common providence. This attitude is the fruit of special grace. As the glory of God is better than the pleasure of a creature, so such a frame of heart is better than the enjoyment.
3. Mercies are never nearer than when your hopes are lowest. So it was in the deliverance from Egypt and from Babylon (Ezekiel 37:11). So we've found it ourselves: "At evening time there shall be light" (Zechariah 14:7, ESV). When we expect deeper darkness, light rises.
4. Our own unfitness is the reason for the delay. We put the blocks in the way of mercy and then complain that it's slow to come. "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear" (Isaiah 59:1-2, ESV).
5. The mercies you wait for are pure grace. You don't deserve them or have any claim on them. So you have reason to wait in a patient and thankful spirit.
6. Think how many people as good as you by nature are cut off from all hope of mercy for ever. Nothing remains for them but "a fearful expectation of judgement" (Hebrews 10:27, ESV). That might have been you. So don't be impatient while you wait.
Caution 2: Don't pry too curiously into the secrets of providence, and don't let your shallow reason arrogantly judge its purposes.
There are hard texts in the works of God as well as in his Word. We should reverence them modestly and humbly, and not dogmatise too boldly about them. A man can easily strain himself by overreaching. "But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task" said Asaph (Psalm 73:16, ESV). "When I thought" was the arrogant attempt of reason. He pried into the mysteries of providence. It was "too painful" for him, and as Calvin says of it, a useless labour. He probed that puzzle of the afflictions of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked until it bred envy towards them and despair in himself (Psalm 73:3, 13). That's all he got from summoning providence to the bar of reason. Holy Job was guilty of the same and was honestly ashamed of it (Job 42:3).
I know nothing in the Word or the works of God goes against sound reason. But some things in both go against sinful reason, as well as above right reason. Our reason is never more unreasonable than when it summons things beyond its reach to its bar. Many harms follow.
- It leads us to suspect and distrust God's faithfulness in the promises. Sarah laughed at the news of the promised son because reason told her it was naturally impossible (Genesis 18:12-14).
- It brings despair and a faint heart under afflictive providences. Reason can see no good fruit in them and no way out, so our hands hang down in sinful discouragement, saying all these things are against us (1 Samuel 27:1).
- It tempts us to rescue ourselves by sinful means (Isaiah 30:15-16). When our own reason fills us with distrust of providence, it naturally prompts us to sinful expedients, and leaves us tangled in snares of our own making.
So take care that you don't lean too much on your own reasonings. Nothing is more plausible, and nothing is more dangerous.
Chapter 10: The Advantages of Meditating on Providence
I've given you directions for doing this duty properly. What's left is to set our hearts to it, and to make it the daily work of our whole lives. Think what peace, pleasure, steadiness, courage and confidence would follow from watching providence the way I've described. But we have to say of the voice of providence what Scripture says: "For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it" (Job 33:14, ESV). Again and again providence has taught us our duty, convicted us of sin, and encouraged us when we were low, and we haven't listened. We lose so much comfort and so much of our duty by this neglect.
So I want to set before you how lovely and how rich it is to walk with God by watching his providences day by day. I hope that will win your hearts to it. Here are ten advantages.
Advantage 1: It keeps up sweet, conscious fellowship with God from day to day
Is there anything in this world worth comparing with that? "For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy" (Psalm 92:4, ESV). Your heart can be refreshed by the works of God's hands as truly as by the words of his mouth. Psalm 104 is spent entirely on the works of providence, and it filled the psalmist so full that he broke out, "May my meditation be pleasing to him" (Psalm 104:34, ESV).
Fellowship with God, strictly speaking, has two parts: God showing himself to the soul, and the soul's answering response. God shows himself to his people through providences as well as through ordinances. And there's no grace in a renewed soul that these providences can't touch.
Sometimes the Lord shows his displeasure at our sins by correcting and rebuking us. His rod has a voice: "Hear of the rod and of him who appointed it" (Micah 6:9, ESV). This kind of providence melts a gracious heart and does two things. It makes us sorry for sins already committed. David's heart broke over his sin when God's hand was heavy on him (Psalm 32:3-5). The exiled church, under the saddest providence that ever fell on God's people, was broken over her sin (Lamentations 2:17-19). And it makes us careful about sin in future (Ezra 9:13-14; Psalm 85:8).
At other times the Lord cheers his people with smiling providences, public and private. The scene changes, the winter is over, and they take off their mourning clothes. And what sweet answers rise to heaven from gracious hearts! When God lifts them up, they lift him up in praise (Psalm 18, title and verses 1-3). Moses and the people sang to him after they were rescued from Pharaoh (Exodus 15), and that song is so spiritual that it's used as a picture of the praise the saints give God in glory (Revelation 15:3).
Whatever effects fellowship with God has on your heart in any ordinance, you'll see the same effects when you meet him in his providences. Let me give you four.
- It humbles you. Wherever a believer really meets God, he is brought low by the thought that God would stoop to a poor worm like him. So Abraham says, "I am but dust and ashes" (Genesis 18:27, ESV). When God had prospered Jacob, he lay at God's feet, overwhelmed: "I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps" (Genesis 32:10, ESV). David was the same: "Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?" (2 Samuel 7:18, ESV). I'm sure some of you have found this in yourselves. Can't you remember when God lifted you up in providence, and you threw yourself down before him, feeling smaller in your own eyes than ever? What am I, that the Lord should do this for me? That so great and holy a God should care for so sinful a worm!
- It melts you into love. Does fellowship with God in ordinances melt the heart in love? (Song of Solomon 2:3-5). So does watching his providences. No one has ever dealt with God's works aright without finding his heart melted at some point into love for the God of his mercies. When God delivered David from Saul and all his enemies, he said, "I love you, O LORD, my strength" (Psalm 18:1, ESV). Everyone loves God's mercies, but a saint loves the God of his mercies. The mercies of God are fuel for a wicked man's lusts, and they are fuel for a good man's love. His love to God doesn't rest on these outward gifts. "Not thine, but thee, O Lord" is the motto of a gracious soul. Still, these gifts blow the flame up, and believers feel it.
- It sharpens your hatred of sin. Fellowship with God does that. Look at Moses. He came down from forty days with God on the mountain and saw the calf, and holy anger flared in him (Exodus 32:19-20). It works the same way in providence. What drove David into such deep shame over his sin that Psalm 51 is full of it? Look at the title, and then at 2 Samuel 12:7-10. It was Nathan setting before him the goodness of God in the many kind providences of his life, and how badly he had repaid the Lord. That broke his heart. I'm sure some of us have found the same when we've set God's ways and our own side by side.
- It makes you ready to serve. Fellowship with God is like oil on a wheel, so that it runs freely. When Isaiah saw the Lord and heard, "Whom shall I send?" he said, "Here I am! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8, ESV). Sanctified providences do the same, as you see in Jehoshaphat (2 Chronicles 17:5-6) and in David: "What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me?" (Psalm 116:12, ESV). When a soul thinks about what God has done for him, he can't help asking, how can I answer all this?
You can see what sweet fellowship a soul can have with God in his providences. How much of heaven you might find on earth this way! The Lord will never regret doing you good when his mercies work like this in you. He will say of every favour used well, that it was well given, and he'll delight to do you good for ever.
Advantage 2: It makes up a great part of the pleasure of the Christian life
"Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them" (Psalm 111:2, ESV). Studying providence is so sweet that it draws the soul on to search it out. Here are some of the pleasures.
The harmony of God's attributes. Sometimes they seem to clash and go opposite ways. But in the end they always meet and embrace. "Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other" (Psalm 85:10, ESV). That was written about Israel's return from Babylon. God's truth and righteousness in his promises seemed for seventy years to be far from his mercy and peace. Then they met, like two dear friends who have been long parted, who smile and embrace and kiss. Believing souls rejoice to see it. I think there's a pointer to Christ in the verse too. In him, attributes that seemed to contradict each other in the matter of our salvation have a sweet agreement. Truth and righteousness meet mercy and peace.
If only we would stand on our watchtower (Habakkuk 2:1) and take our observations of providence, what views we'd have! Luther took this to mean looking into the Word and seeing how God's works fulfil his promises. Calvin took it to mean a believer's own quiet thoughts, where he watches how God's truth and righteousness work through every difficulty until they meet in the saints' mercy, peace and happiness. Take it either way. Every believer has his watchtower as Habakkuk had his, and it is an angelic work to stand there and watch God's attributes agree and his purposes come to pass. That is the very joy of the angels and saints in heaven (Revelation 14:1-3).
The resurrection of your prayers and hopes. You hope and pray for some mercy for the church or for yourself. God delays, and seems to say, "For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end... If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay" (Habakkuk 2:3, ESV). But we've no patience to wait. Our hopes die off in the meantime, and we say like the despairing church, "My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD" (Lamentations 3:18, ESV). How sweet it is, then, to see those prayers answered after we'd given up! It's life from the dead. That was David's case. He said, "I am cut off from your sight," and then lived to see his prayers answered (Psalm 31:22). It was Job's case too. He gave up on better days, and lived to see his lost comforts return with interest (Job 42:10-12). It's like our giving to the poor: "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days" (Ecclesiastes 11:1, ESV). Or Jacob, who had given up all hope of seeing Joseph again, and when providence brought him back, how overwhelming it was (Genesis 46:29-30).
Good coming out of what threatened to ruin you. Joseph never imagined that being sold into Egypt was the road to his promotion. But he lived to see it and thank God for it (Genesis 45:5). Watch and wait, and you'll find Romans 8:28 working its way through all providences. How often you've said with David, "It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes" (Psalm 119:71, ESV). What a difference between meeting an affliction and parting from it! We greeted it with sighs and tears, and we leave it with joy, blessing God for it. Our fears and sorrows turn into songs of thanks.
Seeing how much God values you. What a comfort for a poor soul who sees nothing but sin and vileness in himself, to see at the same time what high value the great God puts on him! You see it in providence. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life" (Psalm 23:6, ESV). Other men chase good and it flies from them. Goodness and mercy chase the people of God, and they can't escape it. It tracks them down even when sin has taken them out of its way. Sometimes a believer melts as he thinks: Will God's goodness never be discouraged from following me, after all my insults to it in earlier mercies? Lord, what am I, that mercy should chase me, when wrath chases others as good by nature as I am?
God would not follow a man like this with sanctified providences, comforts and crosses, if he didn't value him. "What is man, that you make so much of him... that you visit him every morning and test him every moment?" (Job 7:17-18, ESV). God's people are his treasure, and he doesn't take his eye off them (Job 36:7). I don't say that God's favour can be read from providences alone. But sanctified providences can make it very clear, and when they do, the joy is enormous. What else in the world can give a soul such joy as to find that everything is pushing him along his way to heaven?
However contrary the winds and tides of providence seem, they all work together to hurry sanctified souls to God and fit them for glory. Paul knew his chains and the trouble added to them would "turn out for my deliverance" (Philippians 1:19, ESV). Not by themselves, but "through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ". When prayer, the outward means, and the Spirit, the inward means, are joined to them, even afflictions become excellent means of salvation. Haven't we gladly noticed how the very things that sense and reason say are opposed to our happiness have been the best tools to promote it? God has used crosses to put sin to death, wants to kill our wantonness, and disappointments to wean us from the world. We little think how comforting these will be to look back on, when they weigh so heavily now.
Advantage 3: It overpowers the atheism in your heart
I beg you to think how effective this is at overpowering the natural atheism in your hearts. Even the best hearts have a seed of it, and it grows when we pass rash, false judgements on providence. We see the wicked prospering and the godly crushed in the way of righteousness, and we're tempted to think religion doesn't pay and that all our self-denial is wasted. That was Asaph's case: "Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches" (Psalm 73:12, ESV). And what did his flesh conclude? "All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence" (Psalm 73:13, ESV).
But watch carefully how providence deals with the wicked, either in this world or in the next, and you have strong support for faith. "The LORD has made himself known; he has executed judgement" (Psalm 9:16, ESV). Psalm 58 describes the most flagrant sinners, whose wickedness is made worse by planning (verse 2), by habit (verse 3) and by stubbornness (verses 4-5). Providence is invited to break their power, either by slow, unseen wasting (verses 7-8) or by a sudden blow (verse 9). The result for the righteous is joy (verse 10) and a stronger faith: "Surely there is a God who judges on earth" (verse 11, ESV).
On the other side, how clearly providence shows the being, wisdom, power, love and faithfulness of God when he supports, preserves and delivers the righteous in their dangers and fears. In these the Lord shows himself to his people, as plainly as the sun shows itself by its own beams. "His brightness was like the light; rays flashed from his hand; and there he veiled his power" (Habakkuk 3:4, ESV). This is about the Lord going out to deliver his people. The rays coming out of his hands are his providential acts, and the rays are the shining of his attributes. In the rescue from Egypt, he made himself known by his name, the LORD, giving existence by his providences to the mercies he'd promised (Exodus 6:3). When Christ gives his people their last great deliverance, he will appear "clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God" (Revelation 19:13, ESV). Before, he was the Word making the promises and truths of God known. Then he is the Word fulfilling them. "We give thanks to you, O God... your name is near. People recount your wondrous deeds" (Psalm 75:1, ESV).
Let's bring it home to our own experience. Sometimes we're attacked by atheistic thoughts. We're tempted to think God has left the world to run by nature, that our prayers don't reach him (Lamentations 3:44), that he doesn't care what happens to us. But, saints, haven't you enough to silence those thoughts? Ask your own hearts these questions.
- Haven't you seen the all-sufficient God in his provision for you and yours? Who supplied your needs in all your difficulties? Was it not the Lord? "He provides food for those who fear him; he remembers his covenant forever" (Psalm 111:5, ESV). Think how steady, how well-timed and sometimes how extraordinary these supplies have been, and how they came in answer to prayer, and shut your eyes if you can to the evidence that "he does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous" (Job 36:7, ESV).
- Haven't you seen his care in preserving you? How have you survived so many mortal dangers, sicknesses, accidents and plots of enemies? I take it you have no doubt that the very finger of God was in these things. When God delivered David from a dangerous disease and from his enemies' plots, he said, "By this I know that you delight in me: my enemy will not shout in triumph over me" (Psalm 41:11, ESV).
- Haven't you seen his hand in the answers to your prayers? Nothing is plainer to a thoughtful man. "This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him and saved him out of all his troubles" (Psalm 34:6, ESV). Thousands of Christians today know that they have the very petitions they asked. The mercy carries the stamp of the prayer on it. They can say, this is the very mercy I've so often sought God about.
- Haven't you seen him guiding you to advantages you didn't plan? Things you never planned have come about beyond all your thoughts. Which of the saints hasn't found that verse true, "I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps" (Jeremiah 10:23, ESV)? Look over the mercies you hold today. I expect three in four, perhaps nine in ten, were worked for you in ways like this. No argument in the world satisfies like these experiences that there is a God to whom his people are dear, who "performs all things for them" (Psalm 57:2).
- Haven't you seen his promises kept? In all the temptations and difficulties of your lives, haven't you seen "I will be with him in trouble" fulfilled (Psalm 91:15)? And "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13, ESV)? Hasn't providence made these as plain before your eyes as the sun at noon?
With all that, what room is left for atheistic thoughts in your heart?
Advantage 4: It supports your faith in future troubles
Remembering and recording what providence has done will be a great help to faith in future need. This use of it is right in the text. David never faced a greater strait than the one in Psalm 57, and his faith would surely have staggered if he hadn't had former providences to lean on. Faith argues strongly from them. That's how David encouraged himself when he faced Goliath (1 Samuel 17:37), and how Paul used his experiences (2 Corinthians 1:9-10). The whole of Scripture is full of it.
I don't want to leave this as a common saying that every Christian repeats. So let me show where the usefulness of recorded experience actually lies.
1. What we've tasted is easier to believe than what we haven't. What is experience but bringing the objects of faith under the test of spiritual sense? When something has been tasted and felt and tested once, it's much easier to believe the next time. It's easier for faith to walk a path it knows than to cut a new one. That's why, though every act of faith is hard, none is like the first venture on Christ. In later acts faith has all its earlier experience to help it. In the first it has none. To trust God with no trial is a nobler act of faith, but to trust him after we've often tried him is easier. What a help it is to a soul in a new deep to say, "This isn't the first time I've been in deep water and come out." That's why Christ reminded his disciples of what providence had done before: "O you of little faith, why are you discussing among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember...?" (Matthew 16:8-9, ESV). In other words, haven't you been without bread before? Is this the first difficulty your faith has met? You've experienced God's power and care in supplying you before, so I can only call you men of little faith. A very small faith, with so much experience behind it, would be enough to trust God. The difference between believing before and after experience is the difference between swimming with a float and your first plunge into deep water without one.
2. It answers the objections unbelief raises about God. Unbelief stumbles at two things in God: his power and his willingness to help.
- His power. Unbelief says relief is impossible in deep trouble: "Can God spread a table in the wilderness?... Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?" (Psalm 78:19-20, ESV). What an unworthy thought, to measure God's boundless power by our own line! Because we can't see how help could come, we decide none will. But a serious look at our experience beats all that. God has helped, so he can. "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save" (Isaiah 59:1, ESV). His power is what it was.
- His willingness. Unbelief asks whether God will be gracious now, though he has been before. But after so many experiences of his readiness to help, what room is left for doubt? Paul reasoned from what God had done to what God could do (2 Corinthians 1:10), and so did David (1 Samuel 17:36). If a man had never tasted God's goodness, it would be less serious to doubt it. But after so many trials, what excuse is there?
3. It answers the objections unbelief raises about ourselves. These are of two kinds.
- Our unworthiness. How can a creature as sinful as me expect God to do this or that? It's true that he did great things for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses, but they were men of eminent holiness who lived more to God's glory in a day than I have in all my days! But what does that matter to a soul who, under all its sense of vileness, has tasted God's goodness as they did? Unworthy as I am, God has been good to me. His mercy first came to me when I was worse than I am now, so I'll expect his goodness to continue though I don't deserve it. "For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life" (Romans 5:10, ESV).
- The extremity of our condition. If troubles and dangers grow and reason sees nothing but ruin, unbelief becomes loud. Where are your prayers now? Where are your hopes? Where is your God? But all that is easily answered by asking what happened before. This isn't the first time I've been in such straits, or had the same doubts, and God has carried me through all of them (Psalm 77:7-9). That keeps a Christian from losing all hope in the hour of temptation.
Advantage 5: It gives you endless matter for praise and thanksgiving
Praise is the work of angels in heaven and the sweetest part of our lives on earth. If God prepares mercy and truth for David, David will prepare praises for his God, and daily (Psalm 61:7-8). "Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you" (Psalm 71:6, ESV). There the mercies from the beginning are recognised, and the natural result is stated.
Five things belong to praising God, and each of them is tied to providence.
1. Carefully noticing the mercies we receive (Isaiah 41:17-20). Everything else rests on this. God can't be glorified for mercies we never noticed.
2. Faithfully remembering them. "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits" (Psalm 103:2, ESV). The Lord brands his people's ingratitude: "They soon forgot his works" (Psalm 106:13, ESV).
3. Valuing every providence that does us good (1 Samuel 12:24). The manna was a remarkable providence, but the people didn't value it at its worth, so God didn't get the praise he looked for (Numbers 11:6).
4. Stirring every power of the soul to acknowledge them. "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!" (Psalm 103:1, ESV). Soul-praise is the soul of praise.
5. Making a fitting return. David was careful about this (Psalm 116:12-14). The Lord charged Hezekiah with neglecting it (2 Chronicles 32:24-25). It means handing over to him everything providence has given us, and being willing to part with all of it for him when he asks.
And every reason to praise is found in providence too.
- His kindness. It isn't so much what providence gives us as the goodness and love of God in giving it that makes a gracious soul praise. "Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you" (Psalm 63:3, ESV). To give, keep and preserve our life are choice acts of providence, but to do it in a way of love is far better than the gifts. Without it, life is only the shadow of death. This is the mercy that crowns the rest (Psalm 103:4). It is what a sanctified soul asks God to show in every providence (Psalm 17:7), and praising God is just showing forth the love he shows us (Psalm 92:1-2).
- Its freeness. This is what melted David into thanks: the free, undeserved favours poured out on him by providence. "Who am I, O Lord GOD...?" (2 Samuel 7:18), raised from the sheepfold to shepherd God's people (Psalm 78:70-71). That is what engages thankfulness (Genesis 32:10).
- Its number. David came before the Lord surrounded by a multitude of mercies (Psalm 5:7). "Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up" (Psalm 68:19, ESV). What a heap one day's mercies would make, laid together!
- Its tenderness. "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him" (Psalm 103:13, ESV). He is "full of compassion" (James 5:11). There is a mother's tenderness in our God (Isaiah 49:15). He feels our pains as if the apple of his eye had been touched (Zechariah 2:8), and all this is shown in his providences. Which of God's children hasn't found it? And who can see it without being filled with thanks?
All these are bands that providence puts on the soul to bind it to a life of praise. That's why the prayers of the saints are so full of thanksgiving. It's sweet to recount these things to the Lord, lying at his feet in holy amazement at his kindness to poor worms.
Advantage 6: It makes Jesus Christ dearer to you every day
Christ is the channel of grace and mercy. Every stream of mercy from God to us, and every return of praise from us to God, goes through him (1 Corinthians 3:21-23). Everything is ours on no other ground than that we are his. So providence has many things in it that endear the Lord Jesus to his people, and these are the sweetest parts of our enjoyments.
1. Every mercy was bought with his blood. Not only our spiritual and eternal mercies, but our temporal ones as well. Sin forfeited everything, and Christ restored everything by his death. Sin had so closed the womb of mercy that, unless Christ had made atonement by dying, it would never have borne a single mercy for us. "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32, ESV). Included in "all things" is the care and help of providence. So whatever good comes from providence, put it down to the account of Christ's blood. When it comes, say: this is the price of blood. It was free to me, but it cost him dear. It is sweet to have and costly to win.
Did Christ die so that these mercies could live? Did he pay his priceless blood to buy the comforts I enjoy? What love! You have known parents who spent all their money buying an estate for their children. But when did you hear of any who spent all the treasure of their blood to make the purchase? If his life hadn't been so painful and sad, ours could not have been so sweet. "Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9, ESV). The sweet mercies born of providence every day are the fruit of "the anguish of his soul" (Isaiah 53:11, ESV).
2. Every mercy is sanctified through union with him. We enjoy providence's gifts as blessings only because we are united to him. They are additional to the great mercy, Christ himself (Matthew 6:33). They are given with him (Romans 8:32). That is how we hold them (1 Corinthians 3:21-23). What we lost in Adam is restored in Christ, and better. Right after the fall, the curse (Genesis 2:17) fell on all Adam's miserable children and all their comforts, outward and inward. For people outside Christ, all providence does is feed condemned prisoners until the sentence is carried out. It may be generous to many of them and fill them with earthly comforts, but not one sanctified, special mercy is found among their enjoyments. These gifts only deceive, defile and destroy them through their own corruption and their lack of union with Christ. "The complacency of fools destroys them" (Proverbs 1:32, ESV). But once a man is in Christ, every providence is sanctified and sweet. "To the pure, all things are pure" (Titus 1:15, ESV). "Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked" (Psalm 37:16, ESV).
3. Christ is the head who directs everything. He is head of influence as well as of dominion, and in everything he looks after his own members (Ephesians 1:22). Our comforts and mercies are all handed out by his direction. The angels have their part in providence. They move the wheels, so to speak, in all the changes of this lower world. But they take their orders from Christ, as the vision in Ezekiel 1:25-26 shows. How endearing! Whatever creature does you good, it's your Lord Jesus Christ who gave that creature the order, and without it they could have done nothing for you. Your Head in heaven plans your peace and comfort on earth.
It's the same in holding evil back. He bridles the wrath of devils and men, and holds the reins in his own hands (Revelation 2:10). It was Christ's care for his sheep at Damascus that stopped the raging enemy who was on the road to destroy them (Acts 9).
4. He keeps your mercies coming by his intercession. The offering of the Lamb of God for sin opened the door of mercy at first, and his appearing before God as the Lamb who was slain keeps it open (Revelation 5:6; Hebrews 9:24). Through his intercession our peace and comforts are prolonged (Zechariah 1:12-13). Every sin we commit would end the mercies we hold, if it weren't for the plea he makes. "If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:1-2, ESV). That silences every accusation and wins new pardons for new sins. "He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him" (Hebrews 7:25, ESV). New sins don't cancel our earlier pardons or cut us off from the privileges settled on us in Christ.
5. He gets the answers to your prayers. Every answer to your cries about afflictions or needs is won for you by Jesus Christ. He is the master of your requests. If God didn't look to him, he'd never listen to your cries, however great your distress (Revelation 8:3-4). His name gives our prayers their welcome (John 15:16). The Father can refuse him nothing, so your prayers aren't refused. When God hears you in your day of trouble, and your own experience shows you that your prayers have power with God, see how much you owe your dear Lord Jesus Christ for this privilege!
6. All your mercies are in the covenant, and the covenant is in Christ. Your mercies, even your daily bread (Psalm 111:5), are comprised in the covenant of grace, as well as your justification and other spiritual mercies. They are secured by your covenant interest, which is why they are called "the sure mercies of David" (Isaiah 55:3). It is the covenant that sanctifies them and makes them special. One such mercy is worth a thousand common mercies. That's why David rejoiced in his covenant, though he was weighed down with troubles (2 Samuel 23:5). And all this hangs on Christ. The new covenant is in his blood (1 Corinthians 11:25), and whatever mercies you gather from it, you have the Lord Jesus to thank for them. Put all that together and think how dear it will make Christ to you!
Advantage 7: It melts the heart and makes it yield before the Lord
How can a sanctified heart do anything but melt into tears when it thinks over God's dealings with it, or sets his mercies beside its sins, or compares how providence has treated it with how it has treated others? Let a man think slowly and closely over the ways of providence towards him, and follow its leading along the whole road he's walked. If there's any tenderness in him, he'll find plenty to draw it out.
Go back to the beginning. Think of the mercies that broke out early in your youth, the firstborn mercies of providence. You'll say, what need is there to go further? This is enough to overwhelm my heart. "Have you not just now called to me, 'My Father, you are the friend of my youth'?" (Jeremiah 3:4, ESV). Youth is a critical time. It's the moulding age, and the providences of those years usually set the course for the ones that follow. What lightness, rashness, ignorance and pull towards sin came with that age! How many, left to their own lusts then, ran into sins and miseries they never recovered from to their dying day! Did the Lord guide you by providence when you were a child? Did he keep you from the follies that blight the very blossom and leave no fruit to hope for? Did he put you in the sort of family, or among the sort of company and acquaintances, that shaped your spirit for the better? Did he direct you into the employment that has brought such a train of happy results ever since? Then will you not say from now on, "My Father, you are the friend of my youth"?
Look at the later turns of your life. Think how every change and move has been ordered for you. Things you never foresaw or planned, much better than what you did plan, have been ordered for you all along. "The way of man is not in himself." God's thoughts haven't been our thoughts, nor his ways our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). How many of your greatest mercies were complete surprises! Your own plans were pushed aside to make room for better ones. Watch the springs and autumns of providence, how they've flourished and faded with you in turn, and you'll be overwhelmed by his wisdom and goodness. When you needed it, a friend was stirred up to help, a place opened to take you in, a relative raised up or kept to refresh you. No sooner did providence take any of these away than either your need for them stopped or another way opened. What a depth of wisdom and goodness!
Compare yourself with others. Compare providence's dealings with you and with others who grew up in the same generation, perhaps in the same family, perhaps in a richer and more flourishing family than yours, and see what a difference it has made. I knew a Christian who was visited after many years by his own brother. The sight of him moved him as the sight of Benjamin moved Joseph, and he fell on his neck and wept for joy. But after a few hours, he found his brother's spirit utterly strange to anything spiritual or serious, and vain and profane. He hurried to his room, shut the door, threw himself down at God's feet and, with flowing eyes and a melting heart, marvelled at God's distinguishing grace. "Is not Esau Jacob's brother?" (Malachi 1:2, ESV). Grace, grace, astonishing grace!
Compare providence's behaviour with your own. What place have you lived in where you can't remember great provocations committed and yet many mercies received? How many "notwithstandings" and "nevertheless" the Lord has done you good with, in every place! Is there a relationship that sin hasn't abused, and that providence hasn't both raised up and kept for your comfort? In every place God has left the marks of his goodness, and you have left the memory of your sinfulness. Give yourself time to think about this, and it will be strange if your heart doesn't melt.
Compare your dangers with your fears. Set both beside the strange ways out that providence has opened. Dark clouds have risen over you, judgement at your door, threatening your life, your freedom, your money, or the dearest people in your life. Remember how faint-hearted you were then, and how guilt stirred up fears of the outcome. You turned to the Lord in that distress, and hasn't he made a way out and "delivered me from all my fears" (Psalm 34:4, ESV)?
Is your life such a throng, such a mad rush, that Christians have no time to sit alone and think over these things and press God's wonders on their own hearts? If these things could lie on our hearts, talk with our thoughts by day and lodge with us at night, they would force their way down to our very depths.
Advantage 8: It creates and keeps inward peace in an unstable world
"In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety" (Psalm 4:8, ESV). David decided that fear of what might happen wouldn't rob him of his inner quiet or torture him with anxious forebodings. He'd hand everything to the faithful, fatherly hand that had worked all things for him till now. He didn't mean to lose a night's rest, or to bring tomorrow's evil on today. He knew whose hand he was in, and he wisely enjoyed the sweetness of a surrendered will.
This peace of mind is produced and kept by thinking about providence as much as by anything. That's why Christ, to cure the disciples' anxious cares about a living, told them to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, how providence feeds one and clothes the other without any anxious care of theirs, and to reason themselves into a calm, sweet peace from that (Matthew 6:27-34).
Two things destroy the peace of our lives: grieving over past disappointments and fearing future ones. If only we'd learn that foreseeing and providing are divine prerogatives. Watch how often providence makes fools of those who claim them. The good they foresaw flies from them, and the evil they felt safe from invades them. Learn that, and it will do a lot for the peace of your life. There is no face of adversity so frightening that it doesn't turn friendly when you view it from this standpoint.
Several things about providence settle a Christian's mind while events hang in doubt.
1. Its supremacy and unstoppable power. It often brings us good in ways beyond our thoughts, cares or labour. "I never expected to see your face; and behold, God has let me see your offspring also," said Jacob (Genesis 48:11, ESV). Providences often coincide in ways that surprise us, with no sign in outward causes, and sometimes against everything in our present plans. Nothing shows us the folly of our anxieties more.
2. Its deep wisdom. The wheels are "full of eyes" (Ezekiel 1:18), meaning an intelligent and wise Spirit governs the world's affairs. This wisdom shines in unexpected, even contrary, events. How often we've been drawn to some attractive appearance and trembled at the thought of something frightening, only for providence to show that our danger lay in what we courted and our good in what we avoided! It's a comfort to know that what looks like ruin may be meant for my good. Israel's many distresses in the wilderness were to humble them, "to do you good in the end" (Deuteronomy 8:16, ESV). The exile to Babylon looked terrible, and it too was meant for their good (Jeremiah 24:5). How often we've withdrawn our hasty judgements and learned to bless our afflictions in the name of the Lord! Often we've kissed at parting the troubles we met with trembling.
3. Its faithfulness over the years. "Till now the LORD has helped us" (1 Samuel 7:12, ESV). We never found him failing us. This isn't the first strait we've been in, or the first time our hearts and hopes were low. He is the same God now. His hand isn't shortened, and his faithfulness doesn't fail. Recount the extremities in which experience has taught you not to despair.
4. What its usual ways suggest. Christians compare one time with another and guess how one providence will end from another. We know providence's usual course, and we can reasonably infer what to expect. Look at your own heart. When your heart has secretly turned from God and grown vain, careless and sensual, or your steps have turned aside to iniquity, God usually prepares some smart rods (Psalm 89:30-32). Once those rods have been blessed to humble and purge you, the sad providences are usually about to change. Then the Lord changes the voice of his providence: "Return, faithless Israel, declares the LORD. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the LORD; I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt" (Jeremiah 3:12-13, ESV). So if I find the rod has done its work, breaking my hard heart, bringing down my proud heart, waking my drowsy heart, quickening my sluggish heart, I can reasonably expect a more comfortable face of providence soon. The refreshing time is near.
5. How he treats creatures with no reason. Does he care for the birds of the air, for whom no one provides? Does he clothe the grass of the field and hear the young ravens when they cry for food? Can it be thought he'll forget his own people, who are worth far more? (Matthew 6:26, 30). Or consider the care providence takes of God's enemies, feeding, clothing and protecting them even while they fight against him with his own mercies. That should quieten us. He surely won't fail the people he has set his love on, to whom he gave his Son, and for whom he has designed heaven.
6. What he did for us when we were his enemies. Did he not look after us when we didn't know him, provide for us when we didn't acknowledge him in any mercy, and give us thousands of mercies when we had no claim to Christ or any promise? Will he do less for us now that we're reconciled and his children?
Considerations like these fill the soul with peace and keep it steady under the most disturbing providences.
Advantage 9: It advances holiness in your heart and life
God's holiness is shown in everything he does. "The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works" (Psalm 145:17, ESV). The people providence uses may be very sinful, and may aim at base ends by wicked means. But God's designs are perfectly pure, and so is his working. He permits, limits, directs and overrules many unholy people and acts, and in all of it he works like himself. His holiness is no more stained by their impurity than the sunbeams are by the fumes from a dunghill. "The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he" (Deuteronomy 32:4, ESV). So in all his providences he sets before us a perfect pattern, that we might be holy in all our ways as our Father is in all his.
Providence blocks your way to sin. If men noted God's purposes in his preventing providences, it would keep them upright. Why does the Lord so often "hedge up her way with thorns" (Hosea 2:6, ESV), except so we don't find paths to sin? Why does he hold us back, except to stop us wandering from him? "To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me" (2 Corinthians 12:7, ESV). It's good to attend to these works and study what they mean. Sometimes providence ruins a promising scheme to improve our condition and frustrates all our labours and plans. Why? To hide pride from us. If you prospered, that prosperity might be your snare and make you proud, sensual and vain. The Lord Jesus sees this and withdraws the food and fuel from your corruptions. You may have a weak, sickly body and many infirmities. This shows God's wisdom and care for your soul. Without it, how much more guilt you might pile up! Poverty holds back pride, reproach holds back ambition, want prevents wantonness, and bodily sickness helps prevent many of the inward gripes of conscience and groans under guilt.
Providence purges sin once we've fallen into it. "Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for, and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin" (Isaiah 27:9, ESV). Afflictions do for us what fire and water do for cleansing (Daniel 11:33-35). Not by their own power. If they did, those with the most afflictions would have the most grace. It's by the power of Christ's blood and God's blessing on them. A cross without a Christ never did anyone any good. Several things in God's afflicting providences tend to purge sin.
- They show God's displeasure with us. The Lord frowns. Our Father is angry. Nothing melts a gracious heart more. Won't a child's heart break when his father is angry? That is more bitter to us than all the pain of the affliction to our flesh. "O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath! For your arrows have sunk into me... There is no soundness in my flesh because of your indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin" (Psalm 38:1-3, ESV).
- They show us the evil of sin. We see it more clearly in the mirror of affliction than we ever did before. "Your wickedness will discipline you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God" (Jeremiah 2:19, ESV). What gall and wormwood we taste in sin under God's rebukes for it!
- They blast the sinful schemes of God's people. Others may thrive in them, but they won't (Isaiah 30:1-5). That convinces them of the folly of sin and keeps them to simplicity and integrity.
- They warn us off sin in future. "I have borne chastisement; I will not offend any more" (Job 34:31, ESV). Happy providences, however painful, that make the soul forever afraid of sin! Such rods are well spent. This gives God what he is after. If we've ever sorrowed in a godly way in our troubles, it will produce this carefulness: "See, what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you" (2 Corinthians 7:11, ESV). When a man has been under a sanctified rod that showed him the evil of sin and humbled him for it, and a temptation comes again to the same evil, he thinks: what madness to buy repentance at so dear a price again! Haven't I smarted enough? You might as well ask whether I'll run into the fire again after being scorched.
Providence draws you into God's presence. Comfortable providences melt a man's heart in love to the God of his mercies and press on him so that he can't rest until he finds a place to pour out his thanks (2 Samuel 7:18). Afflicting providences drive us to God's feet and make us judge and condemn ourselves. All this helps to destroy sin and promote holiness.
Advantage 10: It helps you in your dying hour
Finally, thinking over providence will be a great help at the end. You store up something that will sweeten death and help your faith in the last struggle. When Jacob died, look at what he reflected on: God's dealings with him through the providences of his life (Genesis 48:3, 7, 15-16). Joshua, at the edge of the grave, recounted God's providences as his dying message (Joshua 24). I can't think of a sweeter close to any Christian's life. It must sweeten a deathbed to recount the remarkable passages of God's care and love from the beginning to that day, and to look at the mercies that went with us all the way, now that we've reached the end of it. Store these up, Christians, for that time, so that you can leave the world blessing God for "all the goodness and truth" he has shown you all your life long.
Think what this does for you at death.
1. It is when Satan attacks hardest. As is said of the serpent, he never uses his worst rage until the last encounter. His great aim is to persuade the saints that God doesn't love them and doesn't care about them or their cries. They pray for ease and cry for mercy and see none come. He handles them as roughly as others, or more so. Many of the vilest, most dissolute wretches suffer less and are treated more gently: "For they have no pangs until death" (Psalm 73:4, ESV). You have to go through a long lane of sickness to the grave and die many deaths in one.
But what credit can Satan's plausible stories win with a Christian who has spent his life storing up reminders of God's tender regard for his needs and prayers, and who has carefully noted the answers to his prayers and God's kindness to him from the beginning until now? His faith is helped by thousands of experiences that back it up and won't let the soul give up so easily what it has so often felt and tasted. He says: I am sure God has had a tender, fatherly care for me ever since I became his. He never failed me yet in any former difficulty, and I can't believe he will now. I know his love is like himself, unchangeable. "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1, ESV). "This is God, our God forever and ever. He will guide us forever" (Psalm 48:14, ESV). Did he love me in my youth, and will he cast me off in my old age? "O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me" (Psalm 71:17-18, ESV).
2. It is the last great work of faith. At death, believers are engaged in one of the greatest works of faith, which is to commit themselves into God's hands as they launch out into eternity and enter a new state that changes everything in a moment. Christ gives us the pattern: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Luke 23:46, ESV). So does Stephen: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59, ESV), and he fell asleep at once.
There are two notable acts of faith, both very hard: the first and the last. The first is a great venture of the soul upon Christ, and the last is a great venture too, casting itself into the ocean of eternity on the strength of a promise. But I know that the first venture on Christ is much harder than the last on death. And what makes it so is largely the many recorded experiences the soul has gathered from the day of its engagement to Christ until its dying, which is in a sense its wedding day. What courage a soul can have as it throws itself into the arms of a God with whom it has long walked and talked in this world, whose visits have been sweet and frequent, and with whom it has grown so close! It has committed all its affairs to him, and he has proved faithful. Now it has no reason to doubt it will find him so in this last trouble too.
3. It is the time of the last accounts. At death, God's people receive the last mercies they'll receive in this world by providence's hand, and they're about to give an account to God for all the mercies he ever gave. What is more fitting for a dying man than to recount the mercies of his whole life? And how can he, without watching and recording them now? I know the best of Christians forget thousands of mercies. A memory of brass couldn't hold them all. I know also that Jesus Christ must make up the account for us or it will never pass with God. Still, it's our duty to keep account of our mercies and how we used them, for we are stewards and will give account of our stewardship.
4. It is the time to leave a testimony. At death we owe an account to others as well, if there is opportunity, to tell the people we leave behind what we have seen and found of God in this world, so that we leave a witness for God and bring a good report of his ways. Dying Jacob, when Joseph came to say goodbye, gathered his strength and sat up in bed to tell him of the remarkable appearances of God to him, and where they happened, and of his afflictions (Genesis 48:2-3, 7). Joshua's last speech to the people was to prove the promises true by telling how God's providence had fulfilled them to the last detail: "Behold, today I am about to go the way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed" (Joshua 23:14, ESV).
It matters a great deal to the world to hear the judgements and experiences of dying men. They are presumed to be the wisest and most serious of all. And it's our last chance in this world to speak for God. What a sweet thing it would be to close our lives with an honourable account of God's ways, and to go out blessing him for all the mercy and truth he has shown! How that would encourage weak Christians and convince the unbelieving world that there is a reality and an excellence in God's ways and people!
5. It is the start of the angels' life of praise. At death we begin the everlasting, sweet work of praise and thanksgiving. I don't doubt the providences we've known in this world will be part of the song we sing in heaven. So it suits us to tune our hearts and tongues for it while we're here, and especially when we're about to enter that blessed state.
Closing
So let it be your daily meditation and study what God has been to you and done for you from the beginning until now. I have set before you some encouragements to this blessed work. I wish you would be persuaded to take up this lovely and richly beneficial practice. One thing I'll be bold to say: whoever finds a careful and thankful heart to record and treasure up the daily experiences of God's mercy will never lack new mercies to record to his dying day. And where is the head or heart equal to this subject? "Who can utter the mighty deeds of the LORD, or declare all his praise?" (Psalm 106:2, ESV).
Part Three: Application of the Doctrine of Providence
Chapter 11: Practical Implications for the Saints
If God performs all things for you, then you owe it to him to recognise his hand in everything that happens to you in this world, whether it comes as success and comfort or as trouble and affliction. It's your duty to see his hand and his ordering of events. Here are six ways that truth should shape how you live.
1. Own God's hand in everything
When God gives you comforts, it's a great wrong not to see his hand in them. That was the charge against Israel: "And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold" (Hosea 2:8, ESV). In other words, she never warmly thought about my care for her and my goodness to her in these gifts. It's the same with afflictions. It is a great wickedness not to see God's hand when it is lifted up (Isaiah 26:11). "The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib" (Isaiah 1:3, ESV). Even the dullest animals know who feeds them. So look for God's hand in all of it. Your comforts and your afflictions don't come out of the dust or spring up from the ground.
2. Marvel at his care for you
If God performs all things for you, think how far he stoops to look after his people. "What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment?" (Job 7:17-18, ESV). His care for you is so tender that he doesn't take his eye off you (Job 36:7). Lest anyone harm you, he himself guards you "night and day" (Isaiah 27:3, ESV). If he took his eye or his hand off you for one moment, that moment would be your ruin. Ten thousand evils are waiting for the chance to rush in on you and destroy you and all your comforts. You are too dear to him to be left in anyone else's hands. "All his holy ones are in your hand" (Deuteronomy 33:3, ESV).
3. Do all your duties for him
If God performs all things for you, you're bound to perform every duty and service for God. A good man once said, "I wish I could be to God what my hand is to me," meaning a useful, serviceable tool. Will God do everything for you, and you do nothing for God? Is providence at work for you every moment, and will you sit idle? What was the point of everything God has done for you? Wasn't it to make you fruitful? If God plants you, fences you and waters you by providence, surely he expects fruit (Isaiah 5:1-4).
I wish that, in return for all providence's benefits, you would say to God what Elisha said to the Shunammite: "See, you have taken all this trouble for us; what is to be done for you?" (2 Kings 4:13, ESV). And with David: "What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me?" (Psalm 116:12, ESV). He is always doing you good, so always be busy in his work. Providence stands by you in your greatest distresses and dangers, so don't flinch from God when his service and your duty are surrounded by difficulties. Be active for the God who is active for you every moment.
4. Don't distrust him when new difficulties come
Why should you think that the God who has done so much for you will now do no more? "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear" (Isaiah 59:1, ESV). If anything stops his mercy, it is your sins, your distrust and your unbelief. How long will it be before you believe him?
If thousands and tens of thousands of trials of his tender care, faithfulness and love can cure your unbelief, you have them at hand. If the many times your distrust has been proved wrong by unexpected mercy in the same kind of discouragement can cure it, look back and you'll see them. Providence has often forced you, with shame and repentance, to take back your hasty judgements of his care. And will you fall into the same unbelief again?
I wish you would learn this one great truth: no one ever lacked a mercy he didn't first lack the heart to trust and quietly wait on God for. You never yet sought God in vain, except when you sought him vainly.
5. Seek him in prayer for everything
If God performs all things for you, seek him for all things in prayer, and never start any plan without him. If he doesn't do it for you, you'll never have what you want and work for. And though he may have planned to give you some mercy, he will still "be inquired of by the house of Israel to do it for them" (Ezekiel 36:37, ESV).
I count that business as good as done, that mercy as good as in hand, that trouble as good as over, for which we've engaged God by prayer, whether it's the doing, the enjoying or the removing. It's our folly to enlist this instrument and that, to try this way and that to reach our goal, and all the while forget the one on whose pleasure every instrument and means depend. What doesn't begin with prayer seldom ends in comfort. "The way of man is not in himself" (Jeremiah 10:23), and if it were, prayer would be lost labour. So acknowledge the one who does everything, in everything.
6. Make it your chief concern to please him
If God performs all things for us, we should care more than anything about pleasing the one we depend on for everything. Chrysostom made a weighty observation: nothing should grieve or embitter a Christian except provoking God's displeasure. Avoid that, and no affliction can cast down a wise soul. As a spark is quickly put out in the sea, so God's favour puts out our troubles. A soul is like the sky. We think the sky suffers when it's covered in clouds, and the sun suffers when it's eclipsed. But they don't suffer when they seem to. Everything is well and will be well when all is well between us and God.
The great comfort of the saints is that everything that concerns them is in their Father's hands. Luther said, "I would have utterly despaired, had Christ not been head of the Church." When the one who performs all things is our God, who delights in our prosperity and rejoices over us to do us good, what ample security we have in the greatest confusions and dangers! When someone told Charles Borromeo that there were people plotting against his life, he answered, "What! Is God in the world for nothing?"
Some find it hard to believe, but unless we give up the Scriptures we must accept that the surest rules for building a secure life are given there. A good man can be his own carver, shaping his course by the maxims of the Bible. I wish we would steer by them. Fear nothing but sin. Study nothing so much as how to please God. Don't turn from your integrity under any temptation. Trust God in the way of your duty. These are sure rules for securing yourself and your interests through all the changes of this life.
Chapter 12: Practical Problems in Connection with Providence
In this chapter I want to take up six practical questions that believers often face when they try to live by what I've been saying about providence. Each one is a real difficulty, and each deserves a careful answer.
Question 1: How can a Christian discover God's will and his own duty when providences are dark and uncertain?
To answer this, we need to ask what we mean by the will of God, what we mean by doubtful providences, and what rules help us find God's will when providences are puzzling.
The will of God. It has two sides, his secret will and his revealed will. Scripture draws the line: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever" (Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV). The first is the rule of his own actions, and the second is the rule of ours. Only the second concerns this question.
His revealed will shows itself in his Word and in his works. In the Word it is his commanding will, and in his works it is his effecting or permitting will. The one concerns what is good, and the other what is evil. God reveals his will with great variety. The great duties of religion are plain in the Word, with no room for hesitation. Smaller matters are less clear. People differ too. Some are strong and some are babes (1 Corinthians 3:1). Some have trained senses and some have dull and weak understanding. So one man's way is plain before him, while another is always at a loss.
God also reveals his will in different ways. Some were given special, personal guidance. Samuel was told who to anoint king (1 Samuel 9:15-16). David asked the Lord, probably by the Urim and Thummim, and was told his duty and what would happen (1 Samuel 23:2, 4, 9-12). But now we are all tied to the ordinary rule of the written Word, and we shouldn't expect revelations like these. In hard cases we search the Scriptures. Where we find no rule for the particular case, we apply the general rules and follow their pattern.
The difficulty. Often in doubtful cases we get tangled in our own thoughts and don't know which way to go. We pray with David that God would make his way straight before us (Psalm 5:8). We're afraid of displeasing him whichever way we choose. That comes partly from the difficulty of the case, partly from our own ignorance and carelessness, and very often from the providences in front of us, in which God seems to hint his mind one way or the other. Is it safe to be guided by those hints?
God does give secret hints of his will by providence, and I don't doubt it. But providences in themselves are no fixed rule of duty, and they don't show God's will by themselves. We can say of them what Job said: "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him" (Job 23:8-9, ESV). If providence alone told us God's will, we'd often condemn and justify the same cause, since "the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked" (Ecclesiastes 9:2, ESV). And if success were the test, a wicked plan would stop being wicked as soon as it worked. But sin is still sin, and duty is still duty, whatever the outcome.
So the safest way to use providences is to read them alongside the commands and promises of the Word, never on their own. Search the Scriptures with an honest and unbiased mind. Pray for counsel. Listen to your conscience. When you've done all that, you'll find God's providences falling out in line with your conscience and the best light you have from the Word. Then you may take them as encouragement in the path of duty.
But the clearest providence is never to be accepted against a Scripture rule. No smile or success of providence should encourage us to go ahead against the Word. And no frown or discouragement should turn us back from our duty, however many we meet. Job couldn't find the meaning of God's works, but he would not go back from "the commandment of his lips" (Job 23:12). David had the same resolve: "For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, yet I have not forgotten your statutes" (Psalm 119:83, ESV), and "They have almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts" (Psalm 119:87, ESV).
Paul is a good example. He was bound by the Spirit to go to Jerusalem (Acts 20:22). After that clear revelation, how many hard and discouraging providences met him on the road! The disciples at Tyre told him, "through the Spirit" (though they were following their own spirits), not to go (Acts 21:4). At Caesarea, the prophet Agabus told him what would happen there (Acts 21:10-11). The brothers begged him with tears to give it up (verses 12-13). He knew his rule and he stayed faithful to it, and he went on.
So providence in step with the Word may encourage us. But no testimony of providence may be accepted against the Word. If Scripture and conscience say a way is sinful, you may not venture on it, however many opportunities providence allows. Those are permitted for your testing, not your encouragement. Take this as a sure rule: no providence can make a moral evil right. It will never be a plea before God to say, "Providence gave me encouragement, though your Word didn't."
So here are the rules for finding God's will in doubtful cases.
1. Get the true fear of God on your heart. Be really afraid of offending him. He won't hide his mind from such a soul. "The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant" (Psalm 25:14, ESV).
2. Study the Word more, and the world's concerns and interests less. The Word is "a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105, ESV). It shows what to do and what to avoid. Store up its rules in your heart and you'll walk safely: "I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you" (Psalm 119:11, ESV).
3. Put into practice what you know. Then you'll know what your duty is. "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God" (John 7:17, ESV). "All those who practise it have a good understanding" (Psalm 111:10, ESV).
4. Pray for light and direction. Ask the Lord to guide you in difficulties and not let you fall into sin. That was Ezra's holy practice: "Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods" (Ezra 8:21, ESV).
5. Then follow providence as far as it agrees with the Word, and no further. Providence has no use against the Word, only in service of it. It serves in two ways.
- As a sign of God's faithfulness when it follows promises and prayer. When David was ill and his enemies were rejoicing, he prayed to be raised up (Psalm 41:10), and he said, "By this I know that you delight in me" (verse 11). He took it as a token for good (Psalm 86:17).
- As a loud call to duties the commands already lay on us, telling us when those commands are in force. When sad providences strike the church or ourselves, they call us to humble ourselves. "The voice of the LORD cries to the city... Hear of the rod and of him who appointed it" (Micah 6:9, ESV). The rod has a voice, and what it says is: now is the time to humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. And when comforts refresh us, it's the time to rejoice: "In the day of prosperity be joyful" (Ecclesiastes 7:14, ESV). Those commands always bind, but not at every moment. It's our wisdom to tell the seasons apart, and providence is the pointer that shows them.
Question 2: How can a Christian be supported in waiting on God while providence delays the mercies he has long prayed and waited for?
Providence may well delay the mercies we've prayed for, and meanwhile our hearts and hopes may be very low. To understand this, notice that there are two timetables. One is fixed by the Lord our God, "in whose hand are times and seasons" (Acts 1:7). The other is fixed by us, when we raise our own expectations, sometimes from the sheer eagerness of our desire and sometimes from uncertain signs of encouragement.
God's timetable is exact. However long, and however many obstacles, mercy is performed at the time he has set. Take the deliverance from Egypt: "At the end of the 430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt" (Exodus 12:41, ESV). Compare Acts 7:17, and you see why it couldn't be a day later. "The time of the promise drew near." Promises are like a woman with child. They have to complete their months, and when they have, providence will deliver the mercy they were carrying, and not one will miscarry.
But the times we set for ourselves bind neither God nor his providence, and that is where our disappointments come from. "We looked for peace, but no good came; for a time of healing, but behold, terror" (Jeremiah 8:15, ESV). We fret at the delays and suspect God's faithfulness, but his thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8). "The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness" (2 Peter 3:9, ESV). It is slow only by our clock. God doesn't compute his seasons by our arithmetic. Habakkuk puts both side by side: "For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end... If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay" (Habakkuk 2:3, ESV). How can it tarry and yet not tarry? It may tarry far beyond your expectation, but not a moment beyond God's appointment.
During the delay, hearts and hopes can sink very low. Scripture records it, and we find it in ourselves. In Isaiah, God promised to comfort his people and have compassion on his afflicted (Isaiah 49:13). That should have raised their hearts. But the mercy was slow and the burden stayed, and "Zion said, 'The LORD has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me'" (verse 14, ESV). David had the most secure promise ever made, "the sure mercies of David" (Isaiah 55:3). Yet providence delayed its fulfilment so long, with so many difficulties in between, that he despaired of seeing it and even concluded God had forgotten him: "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 13:1, ESV). Elsewhere he turns the question into a conclusion: "All mankind are liars" (Psalm 116:11), and "I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul" (1 Samuel 27:1).
These sinkings of heart come partly from ourselves and partly from Satan. In ourselves, they are the direct fruit of unbelief. We don't rely on the Word with the full trust due to the unchanging word of a faithful God. Look at David again: "I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living" (Psalm 27:13, ESV). Without faith he would have fainted. Faith is the only cordial against these faintings. We also judge things by sense and appearance, and conclude that things will end as they look. If Abraham had done so, he'd have lost his footing, but "in hope he believed against hope" (Romans 4:18, ESV), and "grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God" (verse 20). If Paul had done so, he'd have fainted. "We do not lose heart... as we look not to the things that are seen" (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18, ESV). What kept him up was looking away from what is present and visible, and measuring everything by the power and faithfulness of God pledged in his promises.
In all this, Satan is working against us. He suggests hard thoughts of God and tries to beat our souls away from any trust or expectation. He's the great troublemaker between God and the saints. He reports and exploits the difficulties and fears in our way, and tries to weaken our hands. His suggestions gain credit because sense and feeling seem to confirm them. There is a desperate design under a plausible cover. We need to be watchful and keep up our faith and hope. "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD" (Lamentations 3:26, ESV).
To help the soul in this difficulty, consider these things.
1. You may have no ground to expect the mercy at all. Though providence hasn't yet given you what you're waiting for, you have no reason to think hard thoughts of God, because he may never have promised it. If you've no promise to build on, why suspect and dishonour God in a matter where his truth was never pledged to you? If our outward plans are thwarted, our hopes of prosperity dashed and some comfort we promised ourselves taken away, why blame God? Where did he promise you prosperity and the continuing of those comforts? Show me the promise, and show where he's broken it.
It isn't enough to say there are general promises that he will withhold no good thing, and these are good things. That promise (Psalm 84:11) has its limits. It is for those who "walk uprightly". Examine whether you have, before you quarrel with providence. Search your own heart. Don't you see so many flaws in your integrity, so many turnings away from God in heart and life, that God would be justified not only in withholding what you want but in removing everything you have?
The promise is also limited in what it promises, as all promises about outward things are. It is measured by God's wisdom and will: such mercies, in such measure, as he sees good for you, at times of his choosing and not yours. God has never tied himself absolutely to give any of us outward comforts. Who told us to expect rest, ease and delight in this world? He never told us we'd be rich, healthy and comfortable. He has often told us the opposite: "In the world you will have tribulation" (John 16:33, ESV), and "through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22, ESV). All he binds himself to by promise is to be with us in trouble (Psalm 91:15), to supply our real needs ("When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them," Isaiah 41:17, ESV), and to bring good out of all of it in the end (Romans 8:28). Not one word of that has ever failed or will.
2. Think about which spiritual mercy you're waiting for. If you've long waited on God for spiritual mercies and they're still delayed, consider what kind they are. Some belong to the essence of the new life, without which it can't exist. They are put in absolute promises: "I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me" (Jeremiah 32:40, ESV). Others belong to its well-being and to the comfort of the inner man, and they are given in such measure and season as the Lord sees fit. Many of his people live a long time without them. The Spirit's giving and keeping, to quicken, sanctify and unite us with Christ, is essential. His joys and comforts are not. A child of light may walk in darkness (Isaiah 50:10). He lives by faith, not feeling.
3. Check your aims. Are your desires for these mercies right? Maybe that's why you "ask and do not receive" (James 4:3). A bad aim is why we so often lack success in prayer. We may pray for prosperity to please the flesh. We beg for deliverance from some trouble, not so we can be readier for obedience but so we can be free of what spoils our pleasure in the world. If that's how it is, you have more need to judge yourself than to criticise God's care.
4. Is your will surrendered? You wait for good and it doesn't come. But have you brought your will to submit to God's? God will have you come to that before you get what you want. Enjoying your desires pleases you, but giving up your will pleases God. If your heart can't come to this, mercies can't come to you. David waited long for the promised mercy and had to be content without it before he had it. He was made to be "like a weaned child" (Psalm 131:2, ESV), and so must you.
5. Better people than you have waited. David waited until his "eyes grew dim" (Psalm 69:3). The church waited for God "in the path of your judgements" (Isaiah 26:8, ESV). Are you better than all the saints before you? Is God more in debt to you than to all his people? They waited quietly, so why shouldn't you?
6. You lose nothing by waiting. It actually works to your double advantage. While you don't yet have what you're waiting for, you're exercising grace, and it is better to act grace than to enjoy comfort. All this time the Lord is training you in faith and patience and bending your will to his, and what do you lose by that? When the mercy comes, it will be all the sweeter. The more faith and prayer went into getting it, and the more wrestlings you had with God for it, the more sweetness you'll find in it. So don't faint, however long God delays. Aren't the mercies you expect worth waiting for? If not, it's folly to be troubled at not having them. If they are, why not keep waiting? That is all God expects from you for the mercies he gives. You haven't deserved the least of them. You're looking for them as a free favour, not a wage, and so the least you can do is wait on his pleasure.
7. Think how many promises are made to those who wait. "Blessed are all those who wait for him" (Isaiah 30:18, ESV). "None who wait for you shall be put to shame" (Psalm 25:3, ESV). "They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength" (Isaiah 40:31, ESV). You need to use that last promise especially in a fainting time. With so many cordials prepared to revive us, will we faint at this rate?
8. God has waited for you. How long has he waited for you to obey him, and to keep your own engagements and promises? You've made him wait long for your reformation. So don't think it much if he makes you wait long for your comfort. We have our "how longs", and doesn't God have his? We cry, "But you, O LORD, how long?" (Psalm 6:3, ESV). "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?" (Psalm 13:1-2, ESV). But we shouldn't count these long, when we think how long the Lord has exercised patience with us. We have made him say, "How long will they not believe in me?" (Numbers 14:11, ESV). "How long shall your wicked thoughts lodge within you?" (Jeremiah 4:14, ESV). "How long will they be incapable of innocence?" (Hosea 8:5, ESV). If God waits for you with so much patience for your duties, well may you wait on him for his mercies.
Finally, your impatience and unbelief, shown in being weary of waiting, is a great evil in itself. It may well be the very thing that blocks the way of the mercy you expect. You might have it sooner if your spirit were quieter and more submissive.
Question 3: How can a Christian tell whether a providence is sanctified and comes from God's love?
Two kinds of providences come to people in this world, and the results are vastly different, even opposite. For some, all providences are overruled for good, according to the promise (Romans 8:28). That covers things good in themselves, like ordinances, graces, duties and mercies, and things evil in themselves, like temptations, afflictions and even their own sins and weaknesses, which will turn out for their benefit in the end. Sin is so evil in itself that it can't be sanctified, but God can bring good out of the worst of evils. He never makes sin the tool of good, but his providence can make it the occasion of good, so that spiritual benefits come by his wise overruling. As for afflictions of every kind, even the greatest and sorest, under providence they bring a great deal of good to the saints, not only as occasions but as instruments. "By this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for" (Isaiah 27:9, ESV). That is, through this sanctified affliction.
For others nothing is sanctified, either as a tool or an occasion of any spiritual good. As the worst things work for the saints' good, so the best things the wicked enjoy do them no good. Their prayers become sin (Psalm 109:7). Ordinances are "a fragrance from death to death" (2 Corinthians 2:16, ESV). God's grace is turned into licence (Jude 4). Christ himself is a rock of offence (1 Peter 2:8). Their table is a snare (Psalm 69:22), and their prosperity their ruin (Proverbs 1:32). As people are, so things work for good or evil. "To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure" (Titus 1:15, ESV).
Since providence falls so differently on the godly and the ungodly, with everything helping the eternal good of the one and the ruin of the other, it is a vital question for every soul whether the providences he is under are sanctified to him or not. Two things first.
First, we can't tell from the things themselves. "No one knows whether love or hatred awaits him. Everything before them is vanity, since the same event happens to all" (Ecclesiastes 9:1-2, ESV, in sense). We can't read God's mind from what he gives with his hand. If we prosper, we can't say, this is a sure sign God loves me, because who has more of these providences than the people of his wrath? "Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies" (Psalm 73:7, ESV). That's weak evidence for heaven which goes with so many of the world to hell. By these things we can show our love to God, but from ten thousand such enjoyments we can't get solid assurance of his love to us. And from afflictions we can't know his hatred. If great, many, long afflictions marked a person as hated by God, where would we find God's people? We'd have to look among the proud and sensual who spend their days in pleasure, and say, these are the ones God loves. Outward things are handed out without distinction, and no one's spiritual state shows from his outward one. When God draws the sword, it may cut off "righteous and wicked" alike (Ezekiel 21:3, ESV).
Second, the manner and the fruits make the difference. Even though providences considered in themselves give no proof of God's love, the way they come to us and the effects they have in us distinguish them very plainly. These fruits don't always show at once. We must allow time for the soul's exercise under them. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11, ESV). The benefit of a providence is seen as the benefit of a medicine is. For the moment it gripes and makes us sick, but afterwards we find the benefit in recovered health. So I'll take both kinds of providence in turn.
Signs that an affliction is sanctified
We can reasonably conclude that afflictions of any kind or size are blessings from God's love when they show these marks.
1. They come in season, when we need them. They come either to prevent a sin we're about to fall into, or to recover us from a careless state we've already slipped into. "If necessary, you have been grieved by various trials" (1 Peter 1:6, ESV). It's a good sign that God means good by troubles which are so well fitted to the need. If you see a gardener pruning a tree at the right season, he aims at its fruitfulness. If he does the same in midsummer, he means to destroy it. When our troubles are fitted in kind and degree to work on our strongest corruptions, they look like sanctified strokes. God's wisdom shows in his choice of rods. Not every kind of trouble will purge every sin. When God chooses afflictions that, like a medicine, match the soul's disease, that shows divine care and love. It's usual with God to strike us in the very comforts that stole too much of our love from him, and to cross us in what we raised too great expectations from. This shows his jealousy over us, and his care to head off far worse evils by these painful but needed strokes.
The degree is fitted to our strength too. "Measure by measure, when you send her away, you contend with her; he removes her with his harsh blast in the day of the east wind" (Isaiah 27:8, ESV). It is like a physician weighing out each ingredient of a potion so it suits the patient's strength and no more. The next verse says it: "Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for."
2. They turn our hearts against sin, not against God. Most great afflictions make people quarrelsome and discontented. Wicked people quarrel with God, as in Revelation 16:9: "They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who has power over these plagues." But godly people under sanctified afflictions justify God and fall out with sin. They blame themselves and give God the glory. "To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame" (Daniel 9:7, ESV). "Why should a living man complain, a man, about the punishment of his sins?" (Lamentations 3:39, ESV). Happy afflictions that make the soul quarrel only with sin!
3. They purge the heart and leave heart and life purer, more heavenly and more humble. Sanctified afflictions cleanse. They pull down pride, refine away earthliness and purge out vanity. Daniel 11:35 says they make people "pure and white". They are compared to a furnace that separates dross from metal: "Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction" (Isaiah 48:10, ESV). But wicked men, however long in the furnace, lose no dross (Ezekiel 24:6). How many Christians can bear witness to this! After some sharp affliction, the earthliness of their hearts is purged. They see no beauty in the world and find it as tasteless as the white of an egg. How serious, humble and heavenly they are, until the impression wears off and their deceitful lusts tangle them again! That's why we're so often under the rod. One writer said that a Christian two or three years without an affliction is almost good for nothing. He can't pray, meditate or talk as he used to. But when a new affliction comes, he finds his tongue, gets down on his knees again and lives at another rate.
4. They draw us near to God. A wicked man under affliction "revolts more and more" (Isaiah 1:5, ESV) and "the people did not turn to him who struck them" (Isaiah 9:13, ESV). He gets worse than before, and formality turns into stupidity. But when God afflicts his own people with a sanctified rod, it wakes them to seek him more earnestly, and they pray more often, more spiritually and more fervently than ever. When Satan buffeted Paul, he "pleaded with the Lord three times" (2 Corinthians 12:8, ESV).
5. They don't push our hearts away from God but fire our love for him. This is a sure rule: whatever ends in more love for God comes from God's love for us. A wicked man finds his heart rising against God when he's struck, but a gracious heart clings closer. He can love as well as justify an afflicting God. "All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way, that you should have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with deep darkness" (Psalm 44:17-19, ESV). This is the true picture of a gracious soul under the greatest afflictions. To be broken in the place of jackals and covered with deep darkness is the most dismal state of affliction, and yet his heart doesn't turn back. He doesn't lose a grain of love to God. God is as good and dear to him in affliction as ever.
6. They come with God's teaching. "Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law" (Psalm 94:12, ESV). Sanctified afflictions are eye-salve. When the Spirit goes with them they teach us effectively the evil of sin, the emptiness of created things, and the need to secure what cannot be shaken. A Christian never measures his corruptions and his graces more truly than under the rod. Then he sees the filth that has built up in prosperity, how much hold the creature has on his heart, and how little faith, patience, surrender and self-denial he finds when God calls for them. It's a blessed sign when a man turns in on his own heart under trouble, searches it, and humbles himself before the Lord for what he finds.
Signs that a comfort is sanctified
Now for pleasant providences, when providence smiles on us with success, prosperity and the fulfilling of our desires. How do we know these are sanctified? I'll give two kinds of rules, negative and positive.
Negative signs: a comfort is not sanctified when...
- It doesn't ordinarily come through prayer. "For the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul, and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the LORD. In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 10:3-4, ESV). Providence may give a man his heart's desire while he never opens those desires to God in prayer. Such gifts are given to the worst of men and are not the fruit of love.
- It comes by sinful means. "Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice" (Proverbs 16:8, ESV). It's better because it comes God's way, with his blessing, which never follows the way of sin. God has cursed the ways of sin, and no blessing can follow them.
- It makes you forget God and drop your duty. Unsanctified prosperity lulls people into deep forgetfulness of God. Look at Israel: "But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked; you grew fat, stout, and sleek; then he forsook God who made him and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation... You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth" (Deuteronomy 32:15, 18, ESV).
- It feeds the flesh. When prosperity is abused for sensuality and only serves as fuel for fleshly lusts, it's not sanctified. "They send out their little boys like a flock, and their children dance. They sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol" (Job 21:11-13, ESV).
- It swells your heart with pride. Nebuchadnezzar "was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, and the king answered and said, 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?'" (Daniel 4:29-30, ESV).
- It takes you off your duty. "Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of thick darkness? Why then do my people say, 'We are free to roam; we will come no more to you'?" (Jeremiah 2:31, ESV).
- It swallows your whole soul in your own enjoyment and makes you careless of public sins and miseries. "Who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp... who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph" (Amos 6:4-6, ESV).
Positive signs: a comfort is sanctified when...
- It humbles you in a sense of your own vileness and unworthiness. Jacob said, "I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant" (Genesis 32:10, ESV).
- It turns into warnings against sin (Ezra 9:13). Sanctified mercies are bands of restraint on the soul that has them, to keep it away from sin.
- It engages your heart in love to the God of your mercies (Psalm 18:1). It never satisfies a man as his portion, and the soul won't take all the prosperity of the world on that footing. Moses was "esteeming the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward" (Hebrews 11:26, ESV).
- It doesn't make you careless of public sins or miseries (Nehemiah 2:1-3, compare Acts 7:23).
- It makes you readier and more free for God in duty. "Therefore the LORD established the kingdom in his hand. And all Judah brought tribute to Jehoshaphat, and he had great riches and honour. His heart was courageous in the ways of the LORD" (2 Chronicles 17:5-6, ESV).
What is obtained by prayer, and returned to God in praise, carries its own proof that it came from God's love and is a sanctified mercy to the soul.
Question 4: How can we keep an even, steady spirit as providence changes and shows opposite faces to us?
This question assumes three things. First, that providence shows various and even opposite faces to God's people. Second, that believers commonly suffer great disorders of spirit under these changes. Third, that these disorders can in large part be prevented by using the rules and helps God has given us.
The first needs no proof. Which of God's people hasn't felt it? Providence rings the changes all over the world. "He makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away" (Job 12:23, ESV). It does the same with persons: "For you have taken me up and thrown me down" (Psalm 102:10, ESV). Look at the sad change in the church: "How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave" (Lamentations 1:1, ESV). "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of his fierce anger" (Lamentations 1:12, ESV). Job is a great example (compare Job 29 and 30). Many have complained like Naomi, so changed that the women of Bethlehem said, "Is this Naomi?" (Ruth 1:19, ESV).
These changes commonly upset even the best. As extreme heat and cold test the soundness of our bodies, the changes providence makes in our conditions test the strength of our graces, and too often reveal the weakness and corruption of holy men. Hezekiah was a good man, but his weakness showed up under the changes providence made. When sickness summoned him to the grave, he made bitter complaints (Isaiah 38). When providence lifted him up again, he showed off in vanity (Isaiah 39:2). David had more than a common supply of grace, and still not enough to keep an even spirit: "As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved.' By your favour, O LORD, you made my mountain stand strong; you hid your face; I was dismayed" (Psalm 30:6-7, ESV). Not everyone can say with Paul, "I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need" (Philippians 4:12, ESV). He is truly rich in grace whose riches or poverty neither stop the working of his graces nor drain his stock of them.
Still, these disorders can largely be prevented by the right use of what God has given us.
Under comforting providences. The great danger is that the heart is lifted up with pride and vanity and falls into a drowsy, careless state. To prevent that, press humbling, awakening thoughts on your own heart.
- These gifts are common to the worst of men and are not special marks of God's love. The vilest have been filled to the full with them. "Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies" (Psalm 73:7, ESV).
- They're unstable. What you're proud of today may not be yours tomorrow. "Do not toil to acquire wealth... When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven" (Proverbs 23:4-5, ESV). As a bird's wings grow out of its own body, the cause of the creature's passing is in itself. It is subject to vanity, and vanity carries it off like wings. They are fading flowers (James 1:10-11).
- The change of providence is never nearer to God's people than when their hearts are lifted up or grown careless in prosperity. When Hezekiah boasted of his treasures, the next news he heard was of poverty coming (Isaiah 39:2-7). Others may be left to perish in unsanctified prosperity, but you won't be.
- It reveals how carnal your heart is. It shows a heart little set on God, little dead to the world, and little aware of how empty and how snaring these things are. You don't know what hearts you have until such providences test them. Isn't that a matter for deep humbling? Wasn't it better with you when you were low than now? Compare state with state and time with time. How has the frame of your heart changed with your condition? God complains of Israel: "It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought; but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me" (Hosea 13:5-6, ESV, in sense). You and I were better acquainted when you were low, he's saying. Prosperity has made us strangers. How sad that God's mercies should become the reason we drift away from him!
Under painful, adverse providences. Here the danger is the opposite: sinking in despair under the frowns and strokes of providence. To steady the heart, consider these things.
- Afflictions are very useful to God's people. They can't do without them. The earth doesn't need more frosts to break it up and more snows to soften it than our hearts need these sharp providences. Let the best Christian go a few years without them and he'll know the need. He'll find a sad slackening in all his graces.
- No blow can separate you from Christ. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation...?" (Romans 8:35, ESV). There was a time when Job could call nothing in this world his own but trouble. He couldn't say my estate, my honour, my health, my children. All were gone. Yet he could still say, "my Redeemer" (Job 19:25). So there's no cause to sink while your interest in Christ is sure.
- All your troubles will soon end. The longest day of the saints' troubles has an end, and then there'll be no more. The wicked's troubles are for eternity, but you will suffer only "a little while" (1 Peter 5:10, ESV). If a thousand troubles are appointed for you, they'll come down to one at last, and after that no more. "For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17, ESV). Let that hold up your heart in every suffering.
Question 5: How can our hearts be quieted when our dearest concerns hang in doubt, and we don't know which way providence will decide them?
Even the best hearts get anxious and distracted about the outcome. Here are some helpful thoughts.
1. Anxiety is useless. "And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?" (Matthew 6:27, ESV). We can break our own peace and waste our strength, but we can't change the case. We can't turn God out of his way: "He is unchangeable, and who can turn him back?" (Job 23:13, ESV, in sense). By fighting against God we can increase our troubles, never avoid or lighten them. How often we torment ourselves with restless thoughts when there is no real cause! "And have you forgotten the LORD, your Maker... and you fear continually all the day because of the wrath of the oppressor, when he sets himself to destroy? And where is the wrath of the oppressor?" (Isaiah 51:13, ESV). How much disquiet we could avoid by waiting quietly to see what providence does, instead of bringing tomorrow's evil onto today!
2. Everything is in your Father's hand. What a ground of quietness that the whole disposal of our affairs is in the hand of our own God and Father. No creature can touch us without his commission or permission. "Jesus answered him, 'You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above'" (John 19:11, ESV). Neither men nor devils can do anything without God's leave, and you can be sure he will sign no order to your harm.
3. God's faithfulness is pledged to every line of Scripture. How great a comfort for those who believe its divine authority! And how many blessed lines in the Bible concern even our outward affairs and their happy outcome. On these two grounds, that our outward concerns with their steady direction to a good end are covered in the Word, and that the Word is of divine authority so that God's faithfulness and honour stand behind every word of it, our minds can rest with the greatest security even on the cloudiest day. Your eternal salvation and your temporal interests are both secured there. Be quiet in the confidence of a good outcome.
4. Commit it all to the Lord. What a sure way to peace the saints have always found it, to hand over every doubtful outcome of providence to the Lord and roll all their cares on him! "Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established" (Proverbs 16:3, ESV). "Work" here means any doubtful, tangled, puzzling business that racks and torments our thoughts. Roll all of it onto the Lord by faith, leave it with him, and the immediate benefit you'll have, besides the comfort at the end, is calm and peace in your thoughts. Who of any standing in religion hasn't found it so?
Question 6: How can a Christian bring his heart to resign itself to God's will when sad providences are coming and seem to foretell great troubles?
To answer this properly, I need to say what the question does not mean, what it does assume, and what help we need for this hard duty.
What it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that a Christian's heart and will are at his own command in this. We can't surrender ourselves to God's will whenever we choose. The duty is ours, but the power to do it is God's. We act as the Spirit acts on us. Our hearts are like meteors hanging in the air by the sun's influence. While it lasts they stay up, and when it fails they fall. "I can do all things through him who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13, ESV), but "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5, ESV). He doesn't say we can do little without him, or can do nothing without great difficulty, or nothing perfectly. He says "nothing". And every Christian has a witness in his own heart. There are times in providence when, for all their prayers and desires, reasonings and strivings, believers can't quiet their hearts under God's will. All their efforts are like rolling a stone uphill. Until God says to the heart, "Be still", and to the will, "Give up", nothing can be done.
What it does assume. First, that God's people can see troubles coming. Not always, because many afflictions, like many comforts, come as surprises. But often we have warning of troubles, public and private, before we feel them. We can read the weather from the face of the sky. A red, lowering morning is a natural sign of a stormy day (Matthew 16:3). In the same way there are signs of the times, by which we can tell when trouble is near, even at the door. God gives these warnings to wake us to our duties, so that the trouble may be prevented (Zephaniah 2:1-2) or sanctified and sweetened when it comes. We gather the signs partly from comparing parallel cases in Scripture, since God keeps one steady course in his dealings in every age (1 Corinthians 10:6). We gather them partly from looking at our own hearts, which badly need awakening, humbling and purging. Let a Christian go a few years, or even months, without a rod, and how formal, earthly, dead and vain his heart grows! That condition foretells affliction for those the Lord loves, as surely as the sweating of the stones foretells rain. And partly from the way providence arranges the nearest causes in readiness for our trouble. When signs of sickness show in our own body, or in a wife or child as dear as our own soul, providence is waking us to expect death and sad parting. When enemies combine to plot the ruin of our liberty, estate or life, and God seems to loosen the bridle on their necks, we can't help being alarmed at trouble drawing near, especially when our conscience at the same time reminds us how we abused the comforts now threatened.
Second, the question assumes that these warnings usually disturb the peace of our souls. The mind is thrown off balance, thoughts are scattered, and the affections riot. How unwilling we are to give back the loan the Lord lent us! How unwelcome the messengers of affliction are, even to the best. We're ready to say to them what the widow said to Elijah: "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!" (1 Kings 17:18, ESV).
This comes partly from the remains of corruption in the best souls. Every sanctified person has come by his own consent under Christ's rule, and every thought of his heart should be taken captive to him (2 Corinthians 10:5). But the conquest of grace is only partial. Natural corruption, like Jeroboam with his worthless men, rises against it, and grace, like young Abijah, is too weak to resist. It comes partly from Satan, who takes advantage of the season to stir up and help our corruptions. He knows that what is already in motion is more easily moved. In the confusion and rush of thoughts he slips in his temptations. Sometimes he exaggerates the feared evils with every sinking detail. Sometimes he makes us forecast events that never happen. Sometimes he makes us resent God's dealings as harder on us than on others, and sometimes he makes us think unworthy, unbelieving thoughts about God's promises and faithfulness. By all this the affliction sinks into the soul before it actually arrives. Our thoughts are so disordered that duty can't be done properly, and the soul is weakened for the trial when it comes. It is like a man kept awake all night by thinking about tomorrow's hard journey, who then faints halfway because he lacked rest.
Third, the question assumes that it is the Christian's duty, when he sees troubles coming, to give up his will to God's and quietly commit the outcome to him, whatever it proves to be. That's what David did in a like case. "Then the king said to Zadok, 'Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favour in the eyes of the LORD, he will bring me back and let me see both it and his dwelling place. But if he says, "I have no pleasure in you," behold, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him'" (2 Samuel 15:25-26, ESV). What a lovely and truly Christian spirit! It is as if he were saying: Go, Zadok, take the ark back to its place. Though I haven't the symbol, I hope to have the real presence of God with me on this sad journey. How he will order the outcome of this dark providence I don't know. Either I'll return to Jerusalem or I won't. If I do, I'll see it again and enjoy the Lord in his ordinances there. If I don't, I'll go to the place where there is no need of those things. Either way it will be well for me. I am content to leave it all to the divine pleasure and commit the outcome, whatever it is, to the Lord. Until our hearts come to a resolve like that, we can have no peace within.
"Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established" (Proverbs 16:3, ESV). "Work" means not only every project we undertake but every puzzling, tangled, doubtful event we fear. Once these are committed by an act of faith, and our wills handed over to his, then besides the comfort we'll have in the outcome, we'll have the present benefit of a calm and peaceful spirit. The difficulty is in the surrender. There's no doubt about peace, if we could only bring our hearts to that. So here are helps and directions that, by God's blessing and faithful use, may make this great and hard work easier.
Help 1: Get a deep, settled sense of God's infinite wisdom and your own folly and ignorance. That will make surrender easy. Whatever the Lord does, he does "according to the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11, ESV). "His understanding is beyond measure" (Psalm 147:5, ESV). "Your thoughts are very deep" (Psalm 92:5, ESV). As for man, even the wisest, how little his understanding can enter into the works and designs of providence! How often we've had to take back our rash opinions and admit our mistakes, and to confess that if providence hadn't seen with better eyes than ours and looked farther than we did, we'd have rushed into a thousand troubles which its wisdom and care have kept us from. It's well for us that the "seven eyes" of providence are always awake and looking out for our good.
If one creature can and should be guided and governed by another who is wiser and more skilful, as a client by his lawyer or a patient by his doctor, how much more should we all give up our weak reason and shallow understanding to the infinite and all-knowing God! Nothing but our pride and arrogance, overvaluing our own understanding, makes surrender so hard. Carnal reason thinks itself a wise debater on the concerns of the flesh, but how often providence has made a fool of it! The more humility, the more surrender. How few of our mercies and comforts did we foresee! Our own plans have come to nothing, and what we never thought of has happened. It's like a game of bowls. It wasn't our choice of ground or our skill in weighing and delivering the bowl, but some unforeseen bump in the green that decided the cast.
Help 2: Think deeply about the sin and uselessness of torturing your thoughts over the outcome of doubtful providences. There is much sin in it. Our anxious, agitated feelings are the direct fruit of pride and unbelief. There is no greater display of pride in the world than our wills contending with the will of God. It's a presumptuous invasion of God's prerogative to dictate to his providence and prescribe to his wisdom. And there's a great deal of vanity in it. All our worrying can't make one hair white or black. All our discontent won't persuade God to call back, or as the word may be put, to make void, his word (Isaiah 31:2). He "is unchangeable" (Job 23:13), and "the plans of his heart to all generations" (Psalm 33:11, ESV).
Help 3: Set before yourself the Scripture patterns of submission to the Lord's will, in points of self-denial as deep as this one, or much deeper, and shame yourself out of quarrelling with providence. You know what a close trial it was for Abraham to be called from his native country and his father's house to go he knew not where. Yet he came to God's foot, as readily as a servant when his master knocks with his foot (Isaiah 41:2). Paul's voyage to Jerusalem looked dismal for himself. He could expect nothing but chains and prison, as he told them (Acts 20:23), and it was a great trial to the saints, who couldn't bear to lose such a minister. Yet he gave up his will to God's (Acts 20:22), and so did they: "The will of the Lord be done" (Acts 21:14, ESV).
And far beyond these and all other patterns, look at the example our dear Lord Jesus set before us in the deepest point of self-denial the world has ever seen. When the Father put the cup of suffering into his hands in the garden, a cup of wrath, the wrath of the great and terrible God, with nothing mixed in it, the very taste of which threw his nature into agony and astonishment, a bloody sweat, and drew from him that vehement and sad cry, "Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me", yet still in submission, "Yet not what I will, but what you will" (Mark 14:36, ESV). What a blessed pattern of obedience and surrender to God's pleasure! What is your case compared to this?
Help 4: Study the benefits of a will given up and melted into the will of God. Such a spirit has a continual Sabbath within itself. Its thoughts are established (Proverbs 16:3). Until a man comes to this, he resembles the devil, a restless spirit seeking rest and finding none. Luther said something excellent to a man who was deeply troubled about the doubtful outcome of his affairs: "The Lord will do all for you, and you will do nothing but be the Sabbath of Christ." That's how the Lord "gives to his beloved sleep" (Psalm 127:2, ESV). He doesn't mean sleep of the body but of the spirit. As one writer put it, though believers live in the midst of many troubles here, they keep themselves, with quiet and settled minds, in the silence of faith, as though they were asleep.
It also fits a man's spirit for fellowship with God in all his afflictions, and that eases and sweetens them beyond anything else in the world. And a man is never nearer the mercy he longs for, or the deliverance he expects, than when his soul is brought to a submissive frame. David was never nearer the kingdom than when he became like a weaned child.
Help 5: Think how contradictory an unsubmissive spirit is to your prayers and your profession. You pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and yet when it seems against your will or interest you struggle and fret. You profess to have committed your soul to his keeping and left your eternal concerns in his hands, and yet you can't commit things infinitely less valuable to him. How contradictory! You profess as a Christian to be led by the Spirit, and yet this behaviour shows you follow the perverse counsels of your own spirit.
So stop regretting, stop arguing, and lie down meekly at your Father's feet. Say in every case and at all times, "The will of the Lord be done."
Flavel's closing words
So I have, by the help of providence, done what I set out to do from this Scripture. I admit my work has been full of weakness. But I have tried to speak of providence the things that are right. Blessed be the Lord, who has helped and protected me thus far in this work. How providence will order my life, liberty and labours for the time to come, I don't know. But I cheerfully commit all of it to the one who has "performed all things" for me until now (Psalm 57:2).
Chapter 13: The Advantages of Recording Our Experiences of Providence
Watching providence carefully and humbly does us a great deal of good. So I think it's the concern of every Christian who has the time and ability to keep written records, or journals, of providence, for their own use and for the good of others. For lack of collecting and sharing such observations, we ourselves, and the whole church of God, are much poorer.
Learning from shared experience
Some say the art of medicine grew up like this. Whenever someone came across a rare herb and found by accident what it could do, he posted the discovery in a public place. Physicians gained their skill from a collection of those posted discoveries and recipes.
I'm not saying a Christian should post up everything he knows or has been through. As I've said before, religion doesn't lay everything open. But there is a wise, humble and well-timed way of sharing our experiences and observations of providence, and it does great good to us and to our brothers and sisters.
Suppose Christians, as they read the Scriptures, would carefully collect and record the providences they find there. And suppose that, where they lacked other helps, they would add those that have happened in their own time and experience. What a precious treasure that would make! It would be an antidote for their souls against the atheism spreading in these days. And it would convince them better than many other arguments that "The LORD, he is God; the LORD, he is God" (1 Kings 18:39, ESV).
While I was working on this book, I was both cheered and helped by a devout and useful essay by an unknown author, who made good use of many Scripture passages about providence that lie off the beaten track. I noted some of them, and they were sweet to me. I wish Christians everywhere would set themselves to this kind of work!
Why write it down
Providence holds our lives, our freedom and all our concerns in its hand every moment. Your bread is in its cupboard, your money in its purse and your safety in its arms. The least you owe it is to record the favours you receive from it.
Don't trust your slippery memory with the multitude of remarkable providences you've had, and will have, on your way to heaven. It's true that things which move us deeply aren't easily forgotten. But how often new impressions wipe out old ones! A worthy man, Dr Harris, said, "My memory never failed me in all my life, for I never dared to trust it."
Written records protect us from that risk. They also make our experiences useful to others after we're gone. You won't carry all your treasure with you to heaven. You can leave these choice legacies to the friends who survive you. Losing your silver and your goods would be a smaller loss than losing the experiences God has given you in this way.
Use what you've written
Don't lock these treasures up in a book and think it's enough to have written them down. Go back to them often, whenever new needs, fears or difficulties attack you. That's the time to stop and ask: have I never been in distress like this before? Is this the first time I've been plunged in so deep? Let me think of the days of old, the years long past, as Asaph did (Psalm 77:5).
Be careful not to make light of past troubles and dangers compared with present ones. What's closest always looks biggest. As time carries us further from earlier mercies and dangers, they shrink in our eyes, just as land does to people sailing away. Remember that your earlier dangers were as great, and your fears no smaller, than they are now.
So make it as much your business to keep alive the sense and the value of past providences as to keep the memory of them, and the fruit will be sweet to you.