The Mystery of Providence

While the doctrine of providence does not relieve us from going through hard times, it reassures us that God knows what He is doing. Today, Sinclair Ferguson considers the perspective that the Lord’s sovereignty offers us.

Yesterday’s podcast ended with words about the mystery of providence. And maybe that expression is familiar to you because it’s the title of a well-known and wonderfully helpful book written by a man called John Flavel. He was a minister on the south coast of England in the seventeenth century, and he knew a great deal of suffering. If you’ve ever read any of his works—there are actually six large volumes of them—I think you’ll agree with me that it must have been a tremendous blessing to have had John Flavel as your minister. But like many of his colleagues in the seventeenth century, he went through very difficult times, and yet they were God’s investments in his ministry. So, it’s not surprising in a way that he was able to write a wonderful book on the providence of God.

And he describes God’s providence in what I think is a very clever and helpful way. He wrote that the providences of God are like Hebrew words: they can be read only backwards. Now you know that Hebrew is written from right to left, not as English from left to right. And so, if you get a Hebrew book, you might think that the back of the book is the front of the book and vice versa, and God’s providence is like that, isn’t it? In terms of the way we think, it sometimes seems back to front.

And you can’t second guess God’s providences in your life, although most of us, I think, do that at some point. The Lord leads us to do something, and we tend to assume that, therefore, certain things will follow. But that’s not always the case. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not ours. Sometimes, indeed, we assume that if we are obedient, then everything will then kind of follow out towards fulfilling our own expectations. And then sometimes it seems as though life crumbles in our hands. So, God’s providence is a very great mystery, and we can’t always second guess what He’s doing.

Now, that was certainly true of Joseph’s story. And yesterday I was commenting on the responsibility that Jacob had for the mess he introduced into his own family life. And then we saw something of the deceitfulness of his own sons. And yet, all of that seemed to be part of God’s ways of undeceiving him. It’s clear that, at first, he wasn’t completely untwisted, but by God’s grace, God was working in him through these messy circumstances to transform his life, to make him a person of integrity, and to bring about a reconciliation with his family. He deceived his father, and then his sons deceived him about selling Joseph into slavery. They, interestingly, dipped his colored coat in goat’s blood. Just as the father had deceived his own father by the way in which he covered himself, so they were deceiving their father in turn. But as I say, not even this really transformed Jacob because clearly Benjamin now became the favorite.

And then as the plot line unfolds, we notice something remarkable takes place. In order to be given back the son that he has lost, Jacob has to be willing to lose the son that he cherishes most of all. He doesn’t want to let Benjamin out of his sight. And you can’t help wondering if Joseph, who insisted on his brothers bringing the youngest brother to see him, sensed that God wanted him to be the instrument that would help break this family behavior pattern of favoritism. And what it led to was this beautiful family reconciliation.

That’s wonderful, isn’t it? But you can read the whole story of Joseph in under an hour, and it’s easy to forget that these events took a decade and a half to unfold in Jacob’s life. Not only are God’s thoughts and ways not ours, God’s sense of timing isn’t ours either. It’s only because we can look back over many years that we see how various strands of God’s purposes were actually being woven together. As Flavel said, like Hebrew words, the providence of God makes ultimate sense only when we read it backwards.

So, the doctrine of the providence of God doesn’t relieve us from going through difficult times, seasons when we wonder what God is doing. But what this doctrine of providence does do is it reassures us that God knows what He is doing. So yes, we can’t pre-guess God’s purposes, and we don’t understand the whole of God’s purposes either. And one reason for that is that He works in His providence in our lives, not only for our lives, but because of what He plans to do in the lives of others.

So, the answer to the question, “Lord, why is this happening to me?” may well be: “My child, My purposes in you are not simply for you. I work in you in order to work through you in the lives of others.” And that was wonderfully true of Joseph’s life. Yes, in God’s providence he was being chastised, but God had a purpose in that to do good to others. And so, as we yield to the Lord’s providence in our lives, we also learn to ask Him to make that providence work in and through us, not only for His glory, but also for the blessing of others.