Q11. What are God’s works of providence?

A. God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.

Providence is about God causing all things to come to pass, his governing of all events, his care for his creatures, and especially for his own people. Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28 are two famous texts that are examples of providence. This is a different work of God than creation. Watson resolves the words of Jesus in John 5:17 that, “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” in exactly this way. He says, “God has rested from the works of creation, he does not create any new species of things. ‘He rested from all his works;’ Gen ii 2; and therefore it must needs be meant of his works of providence.”1 We will divide this doctrine into four heads: (i) Defining; (ii) Disecting; (iii) Distinguishing; (iv) Defending.

Defining Providence

The word PROVIDENCE comes from the two Latin words, the first being videre which means “to see,” and the second being pro which is of course “before.” Now at first this may not seem strong enough for the concept. Surely providence is a larger concept than foresight. That it is. However, it may be helpful to think of the expression “see to it,” as in, “See to it that the garbage gets taken out, the dogs fed, and your homework done by dinner time.” Here the actor is not merely to see a series of events with the mind, but to carry them out in an orderly manner. The “sight” becomes an eye to effecting. Of course we might also think of the English word “provide,” which does indeed come from the same. And we may rightly have in mind God’s regular care of, say, the animals and plant life:

“These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things” (Ps. 104:27-28).

This is a picture of a personal provision of a caring God who sees to it that his creatures have what they need. Now there is a special providence for his own children. How does God reveal himself to Abraham on Mount Moriah? “Abraham said, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son’” (Gen. 22:8). So closely associated with God himself was this act of provision that Abraham names that place what has been taken as a name of God: “So Abraham called the name of that place, ‘The LORD will provide’” (v. 14). The Hebrew that our English rendered Jehovah Jireh (יהוה ׀ יראה) comes from the root verb “to see” (רָאָה), and so it can mean either “The LORD will provide” or “the LORD will see.” 

Note the two action words here: PRESERVING and GOVERNING. These are the twin pillars of God’s ordering of the cosmos: both nature and history, both the impersonal and the personal, such that even the impersonal is personally directed toward perfect ends. Now as far as preserving, its scope is the whole universe: “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), and “and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

It also adds the government of God over all of history: “The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Ps. 103:19).

The Confession puts it in this way:

“God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledgee and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy” (V.1).

There is a totality to providence just as there was with creation. It covers ALL HIS CREATURES and even ALL THEIR ACTIONS. All means all—down to the most minute and seemingly random, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Prov. 16:33).

We mentioned Genesis 50:20 in passing when we spoke of the divine decree and evil. Not only was God the one behind the immediate actions of Joseph’s brothers. God was not only the main Sender of Joseph, but he was also the one who caused the famine that drove them there: “When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave” (Ps. 105:16-17). Genesis 50:20 only makes sense if God caused even the brothers’ evil plot. When he says, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good,” we must ask again: How could God mean it for good, if God didn’t mean it at all?

The minute level that providence covers is meant to communicate comfort: 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Mat. 10:29-31).

Dissecting Providence

First, notice the attributes of providence listed here: HOLY, WISE, and POWERFUL. That all of God’s preserving and governing actions are holy rules out any suspicions we could cast upon them: “The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works” (Ps. 145:17). So when it is reasoned that if God ordains “all their actions,” then it follows that he commits their sin, or even creates it, but at least condones it. But these are all false. To speak of his causality is to speak of permissive (rather than efficient) causality: “he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14:16). Do we honestly believe that a Being of all-power and all-knowledge, who needs nothing in the creature, would have created any such states of affairs unless he knew perfectly well that he could and would bring about only that which is good and holy? And it is that orchestration, or conducting that good end from the whole symphony, that we mean by its wisdom. “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Ps. 104:24).

When considering both the wisdom of God’s providence and its intrinsic goodness—its holiness—it is important to note that simply because his ways are holy and wise does not mean that you and I are sure to understand. Knowing that it is by his providence is certain; interpreting that providence is often a fool’s errand. 

When it comes to the power of providence, we have to return to the subject of dual agency. And here we must return to the concept of primary and secondary causation. In the grand scheme of things, God alone has primary causation. All else is an effect. However foundational a causes is to other effects, if it is external to God’s essence—that is, if it ever came to be—then in the final analysis it belongs to the realm of secondary causation. 

Again the Confession speaks to this: 

“Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently” (V.2).

Considering distinct kinds of causality together with God’s wisdom and power is the way to understand how providence is reconciled to “irregularities,” or as we would say it today, “random chance.” It is not merely the random nature of things that disturbs our doctrine, but the sense of waste in it. Watson says of these: 

“the things that seem to us irregular, God makes use of to his own glory. Suppose you were in a smith’s shop, and should see there several sorts of tools, some crooked, some bowed, others hooked, would you condemn all these things, because they do not look handsome? The smith makes use of them all for doing his work. Thus it is with the providences of God; they seem to us to be very crooked and strange, yet they all carry on God’s work.”2

God even uses the lashing out of the cruel and powerful on earth to do his working. So it was with Assyria as his rod. But in the very moments when God was acting his wonders through their worst, what does it say? “But he [the Assyrian king] does not so intend, and his heart does not so think; but it is in his heart to destroy” (Isa. 10:7).

Distinguishing Providence

We can distinguish providence from miracles, for example. Miracles are not simply “acts of God,” or even supernatural acts, as opposed to natural. That won’t do for reasons that we have already seen. Given the necessity of primary causation over all instances of secondary causation—if all that was necessary to call something a “miracle” is that primary causation, well then everything would be a miracle! And as the saying goes: If everything is a miracle, nothing is a miracle. There must be more to it. What if we add the condition that the divine action be direct, that is, without the aid of any secondary or natural causes? But this creates two problems: first, what if no one ever witnesses such an act? second, what exactly is meant by “no” secondary or natural causes? Does this exclude all material and formal causes? In other words, the first problem is that it defeats the purpose usually ascribed to miracles in the Bible, and the second problem is that the concept becomes unintelligible on a more sophisticated account of causation.

If one is not inclined to hear from Aristotelians about how material causes are (a) true causes, (b) secondary causes, and (c) make a real difference to the exact effect—for instance, even Michelangelo could not have made David out of a slab of Jello in the same way that he did out of a slab of marble—then such a person should at least consider a few biblical examples. God used wind to part the Red Sea and Jesus used saliva and dirt to open the blind man’s eyes. Certainly they did not have to. But they did, and the two are considered miracles all the same.

More is still required in our definition of a miracle. Sproul constructs a definition of a miracle that includes “its function as a sign or as attestation of spokesmen for God (agents of revelation), but we must also observe that biblical miracles were actions and events that were observable in the external world.”3

It may help to know that the Hebrew and Greek words, אוֹת and σημεῖον, used for our English word “miracle” essentially mean “sign.” At first it may not seem to advance our understanding. When signs were performed before Pharaoh this was to show the power of God per se. However, the more one studies the place and significance of miracles in the Bible, the more a pattern emerges. That pattern is that the signs all point to Christ and the coming of his kingdom. In other words, miracles are not simply extraordinary because nature cannot explain them in some generic sense. They are extraordinary as divine speech to lead the way of his people into that kingdom. To put it one more way: miracles are related to providence in a similar way to the relationship between special revelation (Scripture) and general revelation (Nature). They are acts of God, like all of God’s acts of providence, but they are special windows or doorways into deeper or wider horizons of the everlasting world. 

Sproul links this matter to the debate between Continuationists and Cessationists, which is really only a more modern version of the debate between Rome and the Reformers—i.e. Has special revelation continued? In arguing that there were two ultimate sources of specially revealed truth, Rome answered in the affirmative. They understood the link between miracles (which they claimed for their “saints”) and being God’s true messenger; whereas Pentecostals and Charismatics often attempt to disentangle the miraculous and the revelatory so as to persuade themselves that their claimed signs and wonders are not setting themselves on par with Scripture.4

The next section in the Confession says,

“God, in his ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure” (V.3).

Watson makes a helpful general distinction: “I call providence God’s ordering things, to distinguish it from his decrees. God’s decree ordains things that shall fall out, God’s providence orders them.”5 How does this help us? We have seen that God’s decree is ultimately one. When we speak of the manifold nature of this decree—that is, in the plural—to account for all of God’s works, then many questions emerge about how (or even, on what basis) God has ordered things. Which things have priority over others? When it comes to providence, we must remember what we have seen in Question 7 about the end or design of the decrees: namely, his own glory. Questions about the good of this or that decree really reduce to the sense in which God has sought to glorify himself in that ordering of things. Whatever the glory shall be its good; and whatever its good in itself is also the good of the creature. For example, the crucifixion of Christ was called a glory to the Son (Jn. 12:23), and that to the glory of God the Father (Phi. 2:11), and it was precisely that glory drawn to the Son by which he drew all men to himself (Jn. 12:32). So that the maximization of glory to God must always be the maximization of happiness to the soul made to flourish by that glory. 

So we can distinguish the good ordering of God from the evil occurences steming from the creature’s agency—and we can do so without extracting that evil agency from the divinely ordered state of affairs. Sproul explains what is at stake here:

“Christianity is not a religion of dualism by which God and Satan are equal and opposite opposing forces destined to fight an eternal struggle that must result in a tie. God is sovereign over His entire creation, including the subordinate domain of Satan. God is Lord of death as well as life. He rules over pain and disease as sovereignly as he rules over prosperity.”6

Defending Providence

“Isn’t the Reformed doctrine really Fatalism?” No. There are two principle differences between Fatalism and the Augustinian-Calvinist view (which is really just the majority position in church history when it comes to the totality of the divine decree). Where Fatalism is both 1. impersonal and 2. finite with respect to the primary cause of all things, the biblical view has the divine decree coming from a 1. personal, 2. infinite God. These differences explode out into all of the others that differentiate biblical Christianity from classical paganism on questions of providence or predestination (which isn't salvific in pagan thought anyway). Moreover the word “fatalism” is typically understood today to respect only the issue of that primary cause rendering human action meaningless. This fails to reckon with the classical distinction between primary cause (God’s decree) and secondary causes (like human thoughts and decisions).

“Isn’t the Reformed doctrine really Occasionalism?” Again, no. What marks the difference between occasionalism and the biblical view is that concept of dual agency, or in other words, giving proper due to primary and secondary causation. Occasionalism would hold that God is the cause of all things in such a way that there either are no secondary causes, or that they are, for all practical purposes, merely the “occasions” for a divine causality that renders creaturely efficient causes (especially the volitional causes of human beings) moot. All of the classical and Reformation era theologians—and Calvin certainly among them—rejected occasionalism and, if they did not work out an explicit doctrine, at least wrote about these concepts in a way that can be discerned as something very different than occasionalism.

One professor of divinity at the University of Edinburgh, David Fergusson, has authored a book entitled The Providence of God in 2018, which I was assigned to review. What he does, in a nutshell, is to level five main criticisms against the historic Reformed doctrine:

1. It was too philosophical; 2. It is unattractive to modern sensibilities; 3. It subsumes providence to the eternal decree of predestination; 4. It reduces providence to God the Father, ignoring those “two hands” of God’s working, namely, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and 5. It lacks a corrective to prevent it from being wielded by those in power to resist necessary social change.

At the heart of a few of his objections is the notion of God’s totalizing decree gives us a “block universe,” that is, a single predetermined set (or block) where no “entity or event awaits future causal determination.”7 As to the “too-philosophical” objection, there are differences between the classical Christian idea and the pagan brand that even Fergusson recognizes: “the Stoics took the Greek gods and Plato’s one form, and identified these “with a world soul or reason (logos),”8 so that the idea “is generally pantheistic, materialistic and impersonal.”9 Perhaps his most disingenuous reading is this judgment of both Thomist and Calvinists: “Secondary causes here tend to become more ciphers for divine volition, their principal function being to rescue God from direct responsibility for sin and evil.”10

At the end of the day, the classical view of providence is indispensible for rational monotheism to be what it is, let alone for the Christian gospel to be what it is. Watson put it well, “The providence of God is Regina mundi, ‘the queen and governess of the world’ : it is the eye that sees, and the hand that turns all the wheels in the universe. God is not like the artificer that builds a house, and then leaves it, but like a pilot he steers the ship of the whole creation.”11

___________

1. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 119.

2. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 121.

3. R. C. Sproul, The Invisible Hand (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 188.

4. Sproul, The Invisible Hand, 191-95.

5. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 119.

6. Sproul, The Invisible Hand, 8.

7. David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 173.

8. Fergusson, The Providence of God, 15.

9. Fergusson, The Providence of God, 15.

10. Fergusson, The Providence of God, 15.

11. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 120.