Practical Providence

God is so fully and completely in control of our lives it goes so far that he even micromanages the number of hairs on our heads and appoints the times that each of them will fall.

Now that I have your attention, I want to share with you a deeply contemplative and deeply practical teaching on the providence of God. Now some of you won’t believe this and thats fine and I wish you well, but this is a teaching that really enriches my life and I wanted to share it.

I have come to believe that God directs and governs all things, down to the smallest details of our lives. This God, who in the beginning brought order out of chaos in his grand act of first creation, is still creating today, and is sustaining order in all things through his wise governance.

God doesn’t just create as a one-time event and then step back, only to intervene again once every few hundred years or so. God is the ground of everything. Without his life constantly filling all, all is death. When God steps back, everything turns to dust. When he loosens his grip, everything falls to pieces. He is the constant maintainer and administrator. He is the gardener of all that exists.

If this isn’t your God, you cannot say God is your provider. To provide for your every need takes nothing short of complete divine providence. Think of what had to happen in the course of human history to even put a sandwich in front of you. If he’s behind the sandwich coming to you, he’s behind everything. Think about it.

From his hand comes the good and the bad in our lives. As Job said, “shall we accept only good from God and not evil?” When we recognize this, we rightly recognize the good in our lives as blessing from God, and the bad in our lives as trials that work to form good within us. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we can be content with the lot God has given us. “This person I find challenging has been put in my life by God! This line I’m having to wait in has been given to me by God!”

No longer focusing on how other people or our circumstances are harming us, but instead choosing to see God’s hand at work in all he sets before us, and surrendering ourselves to His will for our lives. As the Psalmist writes, “all the days ordained for me were written in your book, before one of them came to be.” Just take that sentence into your lives. Everything that happens to you today was first written in his book. Take a deep breath and relax! He is the author of your life! And He’s been doing this a long time.

We can be like Joseph, who chose to forgive his brothers who had sold him into slavery, because he chose to see what God was doing through these events, and not what his brothers had done. As he told them, “what you meant for evil, God meant for good.”

We learn to surrender and come into the rhythm of God’s plan, to slow down and align with his cosmic patience. Everything has been set in its proper order, as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, “there is a time for everything.” Everything happens in its God-appointed time. There is a time to live and a time to die. A time to speak and a time to be silent.

We let go and let God. We trust in his timing in all things, and invite a new peace and freedom from anxiety into our lives.

There is a great resistance to this teaching for many, even though it pervades the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers. There is a fear this means that God causes evil or chooses not to save some people, or that we don’t really have free will. But none of this is true, because the Bible affirms that God is good, that he desires all to be saved, and that humans are given a choice and are responsible for their actions.

How these things hold together is a mystery to me, but I choose to hold them together in tension, rather than insist that reality conforms to what I can currently understand, because the Bible teaches both. God is seated on his throne, and our choices still matter.