Providence

The God who upholds and provides

Christians confess that God made the world, as the lesson on creation in the next unit explores. But Scripture never pictures him as a clockmaker who winds up the universe and walks away. The Son is "upholding all things by His powerful word" (Hebrews 1:3), and "in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). As Paul told the Athenians, "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). The church's word for God's ongoing care and rule of his world is providence. It comes from the Latin for foreseeing and providing, and it fits the name Abraham gave the mountain where God supplied a ram in Isaac's place: "The LORD Will Provide" (Genesis 22:14).

Jesus taught this care through the smallest things.

Look at the birds of the air: They do not sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

Matthew 6:26

Not one sparrow falls "apart from the will of your Father" (Matthew 10:29), and "even the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matthew 10:30). Jerome says the saying shows "the boundless providence of God towards man, and a care unspeakable that nothing of ours is hid from God" Jerome.

The Heidelberg Catechism (Q27) describes providence as God's almighty and everywhere-present power, by which, as with his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, health and sickness, riches and poverty, all things, come to us "not by chance, but by his fatherly hand" Heidelberg Catechism, Q27.

Our steps, the nations, and even evil

God's rule reaches our plans and our paths.

A man's heart plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.

Proverbs 16:9

Even what looks like pure chance is in his hand: "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD" (Proverbs 16:33). So is the rise and fall of empires. Nebuchadnezzar, humbled and restored, confessed that God "does as He pleases with the army of heaven and the peoples of the earth" (Daniel 4:35).

The deepest mystery of providence is that God works even through evil for good. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, said to them years later:

As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good, in order to accomplish a day like this— to preserve the lives of many people.

Genesis 50:20

The same Hebrew verb, chashav (חָשַׁב), to plan or devise, stands behind both uses of ‘intended’. There were two purposes in one event: the brothers' purpose was evil, and God's was good. That is why Paul can say, "God works all things together for the good of those who love Him" (Romans 8:28). Matthew Henry draws out what that good is: "Every providence tends to the spiritual good of those that love God; in breaking them off from sin, bringing them nearer to God, weaning them from the world, and fitting them for heaven" Matthew Henry. Augustine wrote that God would never allow evil among his works if he were not "so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil" Augustine, Enchiridion 11.

Yet God is not the author of evil. "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone" (James 1:13). The cross shows both truths at once. Jesus "was delivered up by God's set plan and foreknowledge", Peter preached, and yet the people who put him to death were answerable for it (Acts 2:23). God "works out everything by the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11), and still Paul can command, "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling", adding at once, "For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose" (Philippians 2:12-13). Scripture sets God's purpose and our responsibility side by side and lets go of neither.

Sovereignty and freedom

How the two fit together is explained differently in different traditions. The question of election has its own lesson; here we look only at providence.

The Augustinian tradition, carried on by the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, holds that God ordains all that happens. The Westminster Confession says that God did "freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures" Westminster Confession, ch. 3. People do what they truly want to do, and so they are truly responsible.

The Thomist tradition in the Catholic Church sees God as the first cause of all things, who moves each creature according to its nature: necessary things necessarily, and free creatures freely. On this view God's action and human freedom are not rivals competing on the same level, as if more of one meant less of the other Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Another Catholic school, begun by the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, speaks of God's ‘middle knowledge’: God knows what every free creature would freely choose in any situation, and governs the world through that knowledge Luis de Molina, Concordia. Molinism grew up within Catholic theology, and some Protestant philosophers hold it today.

The Arminian and Wesleyan traditions teach that God upholds all things, guides history to his purpose and by grace enables people to respond, but that he foresees and permits free choices rather than determining them John Wesley, On Divine Providence. God "wants everyone to be saved" (1 Timothy 2:4), and Jesus lamented over Jerusalem, "how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling!" (Matthew 23:37).

For all their differences, these traditions reject the same two errors. None believes in fate, an impersonal necessity governing all things, and none believes the world is left to chance. All confess that God is good and not the author of sin, that people are responsible for what they do, and that prayer is not wasted breath. For more, see Is God in control?.

Living by providence

The Heidelberg Catechism (Q28) asks what good it does us to know this, and answers that we may be "patient in adversity; thankful in prosperity", and for the future may place our firm trust in our faithful God and Father, sure that no creature can separate us from his love Heidelberg Catechism, Q28.

Believing in providence does not make suffering disappear. Joseph spent years in a pit and a prison before he could see what God had been doing. So providence is not an explanation to hand quickly to someone in pain; it is a promise to hold in the dark. Because of it we pray: "Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7). For the hard questions, see Why does a good God allow evil?, Does God answer prayer? and How can I know God's will?.

Practice