How Does God Do That? - Proverbs 14:26

Proverbs 14:26 (Part 3)
Those who fear the LORD are secure; He will be a place of refuge for their children.

We are working our way through answering the question, “If God controls all things, why does He allow bad things to happen?” This is not a question that can be taken lightly, nor can it be answered in one short devotion. In some aspects, the answer can be very complicated, while in other aspects, it is really quite simple. What I am trying to do is to hopefully make the complicated simpler. But to do this we need to spend some time laying a base - which I began last time by briefly looking at God’s perfect mercy and His perfect justice. Let’s spend our time today looking at the providence of God.

The Random House dictionary defines providence as: (1) the foreseeing care and guidance of God or nature; (2) God; or, (3) care exercised in providing for the future. The providence of God then deals with His infinite ability to foresee all future events and somehow weave all of those events to each person’s care or benefit. If you spend too much time contemplating that in your mind, you better keep the aspirin handy.

Let me try to illustrate this in another way to help us truly appreciate how awesome and miraculous this is. I enjoy putting jigsaw puzzles together. My grandmother started my brother and me on puzzles at an early age, so we were working the big 1,000 piece puzzles before most are even dealing with the 50 piece puzzles. I’ve seen puzzles where all the inside pieces are the same shape so you can’t always tell if you have the right piece in the right place or not. In recent years I have seen 1,000 piece puzzles that are two-sided. You don’t know if you even have the right side when you are trying to piece things together (the person who dreamed these up needs intensive psychiatric help). But if you have the picture on the outside of the box, even these more challenging puzzles can be handled fairly easily if you have a knack for jigsaw puzzles. But imagine a puzzle with a billion pieces, and each piece of the puzzle has a million different sides to it, and the picture on the box changes every second - even this illustration is not enough in describing the extent of what is involved in God’s providence.

God takes the endless combinations of the events that happen in the lives of the billions of people on this planet and He throws in the natural events of nature (which He also controls) and works each situation to His plans and His purposes. At the same time, God allows each of us the freedom of choice - try and figure that one out.

Joseph was sold into slavery as a young teenager by his brothers, spent 14 years in a prison for a crime he didn’t commit, had no hope of ever seeing his family again, all for the express purpose of preserving the lives of his family some thirty to forty years later, and thus preserving the nation of Israel. God’s providence saw the events of the future (a severe famine that would wipe out many people in the land) and by allowing Joseph to be sold into slavery, by allowing him to develop the needed contacts with key people through his time in prison, he eventually was elevated to second in command in the kingdom of Egypt. Through these events, he would save the lives of his father and brothers, even though Joseph had no clue of this purpose until the thirty or forty years had passed. Joseph finally understood God’s providence when he said to his brothers, “God turned into good what you meant for evil.”

And that is the point of God’s providence. We may not see the reason or the point of the events happening in our lives or the events happening in the world at the time, but God is still in control and He is still at work. For those of us who know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, the Apostle Paul has this to say concerning God’s providence, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them” (Romans 8:28). All things work together for our good, not just what is good in our eyes.

Well, we’re out of space again. What a great and awesome God we serve! We will make some more progress in our quest next time.