Providence

So I will read the beginning of Jonah to you. It's nice to have everyone here as I realize that I don't have the streaming on, which is part of why I forgot something else that I needed to bring. It made me think that everybody's here, though, that normally would be here or would want streaming. And so I'm glad to see that, although as I said that, I realized Elijah's family wasn't completely here.

But in Jonah, see if we can get a little further along than we have before. Verse 1, Now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. Yet Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, and paid its fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.

But Yahweh hurled a great wind on the sea, and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship gave thought to breaking apart. Then the sailors became fearful and every man cried to his God and they hurled the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down below into the innermost part of the vessel, laying down and falling asleep.

So the captain came near to him and said to him, How is it that you are deeply sleeping? Arise, call on your God. Perhaps your God will be concerned about us so that we will not perish. Then each man said to the other, Come, let us have the lots fall, so we may know on whose account this calamitous evil has struck us. So they had the lots fall, and the lot fell on Jonah.

Then they said to him, tell us now on whose account has this calamitous evil struck us? What is your occupation and where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew and I fear Yahweh, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. Then the men became greatly fearful.

And they said to him, what is this you have done? for the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of Yahweh because he had told them. It's a reading of God's holy word. You may be seated. Last week, I took one week to talk about prophecy because Jonah is a prophet. And we talked very, very briefly about God's word and prophecy and how it comes to us through prophets.

And that could have been, I mean, so like multiple conferences have been put on with multiple sermons on that topic, all of which haven't covered it completely, I'm sure. We have statements about God's Word that churches like ours probably appreciate. We maybe haven't adopted them officially, but there's like the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

And there's been other things people have said in the past that we would certainly say we were in agreement with, if not officially. But I didn't want to spend seven weeks on omnipresence and seven weeks on omniscience. We could go on forever with some of these things. But when you talk about God's Word and how God's Word comes to us, the natural question for the cessationist, which is what I totally hope everyone in here is or becomes, the natural question is, well, then, how do I know what to do sometimes?

So I told you, well, Jonah knew what to do because God told him exactly what to do. It was very simple. you go to Nineveh and you're going to say this call out against it right that's what he tells them so Jonah knew exactly what to do and he did it not and that's easy to see well what about other things in life okay I told you last week scripture was sufficient so I told you you don't need to go to a you don't need to go to a a quote Christian counselor and take a personality test they give you to find out how to you know handle your your disobedient child or uh Christian uh marriage counseling where you where you know you do a profile thing and figure out you know you're an eight and I'm a seven so you know that means this or that about it we have God's word to help us with all these things but sometimes you have to do things that there isn't a clear command from God and one of the things that we do as Christians when there's not a clear command from God I think is we decide that we're going to read providence there's a teaching that is out there I don't even know if I could give it a name But there a spirit of the age out there that would have you believe that God has a revealed will That scripture And we we stand on scripture And the same types of people that might teach that some of them will say, and there's also a secret will of God. And we'll agree that God has a secret will.

The things that are mysterious are the Lord's. He knows all the things we don't know. He knows the purpose behind everything that has happened and is happening and ever will happen. And we know this and we know it to be true. and there's something in us, even as Christians, that wants to know it also. This is why we cry out, why, why, oh Lord? And even the psalmist did that.

An inspired person is writing, oh why, oh why? He's expressing the human feelings that we have. now I think it can be very dangerous to try to do what is called reading providence I don't think that we should completely ignore providence I think sometimes God does things in our lives that is meant to get our attention a little bit I also think that we don't want to make the mistake of thinking that we now understand the secret will of God because something happened and we decided, well, that was God's response to this other thing. And there's plenty of scriptures about that.

But what I want to get to today is the idea that Jonah. I'll put it on your mind and we'll go back through the narrative a little. Jonah may or may not have been trying to employ this technique of reading Providence. But had Jonah been trying to, Jonah could have been deceived into thinking that he was actually somehow in God's will, even though he knew he wasn't in God's will because of the revealed will of God. because sometimes, sometimes in your life, even when you're being disobedient to God, things work out okay.

See, a lot of us like to believe that the moment we do something that's outside of God's will, there's going to be the lightning strike. there's going to be something that happens that opens our eyes and lets us know I'm going the wrong way. But a lot of times what will happen is you're going the wrong way. You're violating God's revealed will in some way that you don't even maybe understand because we haven't studied it enough and you don't have enough wisdom to even understand how to make some decisions. which that's okay there's maturity that we need to grow in in Christ but sometimes as we're going along a path and we're not realizing that had I studied proverbs more and had I listened to more sermons and had I been more diligent in prayer to ask God for wisdom I'd actually know a better way to proceed than I'm proceeding right now we don't know this so we're functioning with a level of blindness where we're not totally sure what we're supposed to do.

It's not clear cut. That could either be in the case of you being immoral in a way you don't know, or maybe it's just not an important decision. Do you add more salt or not to a recipe? That's not a moral decision. And we will deceive ourselves into thinking that we somehow, whether it's through our feelings, through our intuitions, or somewhere through our senses, we're going to figure out what God would have us do outside of a clear command of Scripture.

If you are a charismatic, as we call them, or a continuationist, as I told you to call them last week, a continuationist Christian, well then the answer becomes very easy. You just pray and you do your meditation techniques that they get taught, which are really just Eastern mysticism techniques imported into Christianity usually. And you just wait until the thought comes in your mind that says, you know, I'll just use the silly example, add more salt to the soup.

And then you just say, well, that was the Lord. OK, so it's real easy if you're a continuationist, you can always confirm your own senses by just saying, well, you know, the Lord told me. If you're Reformed, which you can't be a continuationist and Reformed. So just so you know, when you go on the Internet and you meet one of these Reformed charismatics, you can try to politely let them know that that's impossible.

It's a contradiction. But if you're Reformed and you believe that God has spoken through his word, you know not to come to church and say something like, God told me to make chicken tonight. You know not to say that. But you may have had some sensual, sensory experiences, things you experienced with your senses, things you saw, touched, tasted, heard, or smelled that led you in that direction.

And you want to believe it was God leading you. And now it gets a little bit hairy Because of the doctrine of divine providence we also know that God does direct all things God's works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions. so if you're sitting there i'm going to use the silly example again trying to debate whether you add more salt to the soup or not and you're not sure and you you just want to do it the way god would want that soup if you have the inclination to add the salt you're going to want to feel like well god told me to but you know not to say he told you audibly so we say things like yeah i just had this strong feeling. And so people say all sorts of things.

Very humid in here today. Excuse me. Or else it's just humid for me. I don't know what it is. People say all sorts of things to try to get away with the idea that they think God's directing their steps in a particular way. And because God is good and he does preserve and govern all his creatures and all their actions, there is a truth to it.

But the truth that God has directed your actions and governs everything you do is independent of whether or not it was morally right. And what we want to think sometimes is, well, God directed my steps in this way. I can look back in God's providence because providence you read backwards and I can look back on the events that got me to the point I'm in now and I can see how God's providence brought me here and I just want to warn you that knowing God's providence brought you somewhere doesn't justify any of your behaviors on the way there because I'll tell you what everybody in this room that has ever stood in the waters of baptism one of the reasons you did that is, I mean, unless you did it when you were still in the womb, which I don't think anyone has, one of the reasons you did that is you had an understanding of your sinfulness.

And your understanding of your sinfulness did not most likely come from you were walking along being a good person one day and a nice evangelist told you about Adam in the garden and you realized that you had original sin that needed washed away. Chances are you knew you were a sinner because you sinned. And you knew you hurt people, You knew you hurt others and you knew that you had violated God's holy law.

And somebody gave you the gospel and you believed it. And then you decided, I'm going to go get baptized. And at no point was God not completely in charge of every single one of your actions. But at every point, every single one of your actions was sinful. so this is a very hard concept for us because we like to think that somehow god couldn't have been in total control of it all because then we want to make him responsible for it in our minds this is a very real problem for people christian and non-christian how do you resolve the fact that god is good and god is omnipotent and sin still happens because if God's so good, why doesn't he just stop it is what people like to ask.

How can we say that Jesus Christ was delivered up according to the foreknowledge of God, the predetermined plan of God? Men sinned egregiously and murdered the Son of God. But at the same time, we know that they were doing something horribly wicked. We can say at the same time it was all through divine providence that they even had the strength to do it.

Jesus Christ is the one that made the tree grow that they cut the wood out of that they hung him on. So back to Jonah for a moment. And I want you to have a mind on providence today. And then hopefully next week we'll actually get into talking more about Jonah. Back to Jonah. So God tells him, arise and go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

I always thought it was interesting that God calls it a great city. I think he just means it's large. I don't think God's like impressed, right? Like, oh, look what they did over in Assyria. That's not how God sees us. He sees us as grasshoppers ready to be crushed.

And we're smaller than that because you think he calls the nations grasshoppers. So God's not impressed with the Ninevites. I think he's just saying it's big. And from Jonah's perspective, it is big. And it's true, though. We live in a big city.

If you're near Columbus, right? That's our big city. Cincinnati, I guess, isn't terribly far either. We have big cities, cities where there's going to be lots of people. But he says their evil has come up before me. and yet Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh so he went to Joppa found a ship which was going to Tarshish and paid its fare some people will say that Tarshish could just mean the sea and if you do a quick search on Tarshish in the Old Testament there's a number of times that really you can see how it really just means oh somebody went to sea But Tarshish also was a place very far away across the Mediterranean.

Some people think it's where Saul was from, that actually Saul of Tarsus in Cilicia is the Tarshish here. I'm not going to say that, but what I'm going to say is if I read this as a person that thinks, well, what's divine providence doing? It says Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish. and then the next sentence says so he went to Joppa and found a ship which was going to Tarshish Well, I'll tell you what, you read that to almost any pagan today and they're going to think, well, that's your sign, right?

I want to go to Tarshish. I know it's probably wrong because I got to travel 40 or 50 miles in the opposite direction of what I've been commanded to do by God. and lo and behold, when I get there, there's a ship going to the exact place that I just randomly decided to go to. That's going to feel like divine providence is on your side. That's easy for us looking back to say, well, we know he was supposed to obey God.

But I want you to think about yourself a little bit. You know, when we read scripture, you know, some people say, well, you're not supposed to read it as yourself in the scripture. I think it's okay when you're reading about sinners making mistakes to put yourself in there and to think, okay, how am I no different from Jonah? And then you also look at Jesus and say, well, how did Jesus obey God perfectly and never went the opposite direction?

But I think it's okay to sit here for a moment and kind of chuckle at Jonah, but then at the same time to wonder, okay, well, how do I do the same kind of thing? How have I violated clear commands from God and in the middle of violating them, I'm looking for earthly signs to make me feel a little better about it. I've got a few examples here, but I'm not even sure that it won't cover enough. if I could find my examples.

It was not a good week for note-taking here. Oh, here they are. You know God wants you to evangelize, but you don't go. There's always something else that's more important to do. or the one that's the hardest for me is the I know God wants me to evangelize and so I do a lot of evangelism as a matter of fact I think compared to most other Christians that we know our church does a pretty good job so the other day when I was just moving my car for two seconds and I just wanted to get back into my Airbnb so I could get my next load of stuff to put in the car.

And a guy was walking on the other side of the street with his dog. And I thought to myself, I should just go walk over and give the guy a tract, which I won't say was a word from God, but it certainly comports with God's revealed will, right? Cross the street, hand a guy a tract. I guess the worst thing that's happened is maybe the guy who's walking his dog innocently decides he's just going to murder me right then and there.

Okay, that's probably the worst case scenario. We'll call that unlikely. Best case, the guy gets saved, ends up in heaven with me, maybe becomes a friend of ours. And somewhere in the middle is the guy just says, and just walks away. And it's awkward for three seconds, right? But no, because in my mind, it was, nope, I got something else I'm doing right now.

And even as I walked back to get my next load of stuff, it was nagging at me. This is wrong. This is wrong. I know what God wants me to do and I'm going the other direction. And it's not just I'm just running away from it, though. I've made up a thing that I have to do that's also an OK thing.

I had to load the car. It wasn't not true. But we do these things. We make up excuses for not doing what we know God has told us to do. And then we look for earthly signs to confirm it for us. This isn't a big problem in here, but I wrote this.

You know that you're supposed to do the one another's in scripture, but you skip church. Now, people in here don't skip church, but maybe one day you'll be tempted to. maybe you know other people who seem like good Christians and they don't go to church or they're not covenanted as a member of a church which is kind of a different level of going so they're not able to do the things that God has commanded sometimes we just fail to confess sin we can fail to stand for Christ when we ought to and I realize there are situations where it's hard. Sometimes we don't show hospitality to people because when you show hospitality, there's secondary effects, one of which is those people who are now in your home are observing things that you usually can keep a little bit hidden.

You know what, I didn't bring my wallet, but maybe I'll put a $100 bill in my wallet. How's that? And if anybody can honestly come up and tell me that they behave better at home with their family behind closed doors than they do when they show up at church at Sunday, you can have my $100 bills. That sound good? And all I have to do is be able to ask the rest of your family members and they all confirm it.

Oh, yeah. He's actually more of a jerk at church than at home. I'll make it $1,000. All right. I don't want to turn this into a gambling thing. So don't don't twist it.

But the point is, is I'm going to save my money because there isn't a person in the world. Almost probably. There's always an exception. But there isn't a person that we know who, when they're at home alone, under stress on a constant basis, dealing with the familiarity of the people that they're dealing with there, and the situations that arise nonstop in a home that is more outwardly holy than they can appear for a few hours on Sunday.

You understand? so show hospitality is a command of God and we should do it. So Jonah knew that the Lord was unlike pagan deities, whose power was believed not to extend beyond the boundaries of a given area, but he thought running away to a distant place would make it physically impossible for him to discharge his commission. So remember I said it was foolish of Jonah to flee from the presence of Yahweh.

Well, maybe Jonah wasn't as stupid as we make it out to be. Maybe Jonah just figured, at least if I go away, I just can't do it, right? So he acted as people often do who dislike God's commands. He set about removing himself as far as possible from being under the influence of God and from the place where he could fulfill them. God commanded him to go to Nineveh, which lay northeast from his home, and he instantly set himself to flee to the then furthermost west.

Real quickly, we'll see this more in a later chapter, but why would Jonah do this? And there's a few answers why. One is he was embarrassed that he'd be a false prophet because when he spoke against Nineveh, he knew the truth of Jeremiah 18, which is a passage that you should familiarize yourself with just so you can at least get back to it. Jonah knew this truth that had not yet been written.

Jeremiah 18, the word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh saying, Arise and go down to the potter's house and there I will make you hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house and behold, he was making something on the wheel. So here's the story. Jeremiah goes, there's a potter and he's making something out of clay, right? But the vessel that he was making was ruined in the hand of the potter.

So he turned around and made it into another vessel, according to what was right in the eyes of the potter to make. So the potter does what he wants with this clay. Then the word of Yahweh came to me. So Jeremiah actually gets a word from God directly. Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does, declares Yahweh. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

Now listen, this is the truth that Jonah knew about his God. At one moment, I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to tear down, or to make it perish. But if that nation, against which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I plan to do against it. This is exactly what happened with Nineveh.

That's exactly what Jonah feared would happen with Nineveh. You keep reading, he says the opposite. He may promise to bless a nation, and then when that nation fails, he may judge it. So Jonah, one, may not have wanted to be seen as a false prophet. I said something's going to happen, and now it didn't happen. I think he would have been exonerated from false prophecy. because people would have understood the change in the nation.

Secondly, he may have feared the physical cruelty of the Assyrians. These people were as barbaric as we can imagine. And the things that they did to people are things we really can't talk about. If you want to go look up what the Assyrians did to their enemies, grab a bucket and go ahead and read about it. And then finally, another reason that's been given is, Jonah had a zeal for Israel and Israel alone.

Some people have called him racist. I don't think of him as racist when we talk about this. But he wanted the nation of Israel to be where he prophesied. He wanted to be with his people, the covenant people of God in his mind. And he was more interested in Israel's glory than God's glory. Because as we'll see in chapter 4, Jonah's knowledge that this merciful and compassionate God was potentially going to be merciful and compassionate on the Ninevites bothered him.

Jonah didn't understand that he was supposed to be a priest to the nations along with the rest of Israel. But so as Jonah flies away, he goes to Joppa, found a ship, verse 3, paid its fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish. And Yahweh hurls a great wind on the sea, There's a great storm on the sea. We'll look at the storm more later. But in verse four or verse five, the sailors are fearful and they began crying out to their gods.

I don't generally have the impression that the sailors in this day and age were overly religious people. OK, these were people who were so utterly afraid of the storm that suddenly came that they had no choice but to cry out to whatever they thought God was. These weren't guys who went to prayer on a regular basis. OK, these were people who, oh, calamity has struck.

We need some higher power here. Right. It's like the first AA group, right? The higher power of their understanding is who they were praying to. It's easy to judge the sailors. But are we that different sometimes?

Some of us are, we are quick to pray when things get tough. But are you quick to pray and ask for help when things are going good? Because if you're not as quick in those moments, what it sometimes shows is you're actually just relying on your strength in those moments. You don't think you need God in those moments. You forget that it only divine providence that holding you up at that moment So in your strongest moment it God who sustaining you And in your weakest moment, it's God who's sustaining you.

And thank God he sends us the weak moments that we might actually repent of those other moments that we think we're strong. But look at good old Jonah. I love Jonah. Love him. But Jonah had gone down below into the innermost part of the vessel, laying down and falling deep asleep. When you talk to people who, trying to be polite, read Divine Providence, I was going to say they read the tea leaves.

I said it anyway. When you talk to people who believe that they can figure out God's secret will, and they never say it that way right nobody ever comes out and says by the way i think scripture is not sufficient so i'm going to do this other thing here to try to figure out nobody ever says that you kind of have to discern it you have to think through what they're doing with them when somebody tells you that they've come to a point when they're making their decision sometimes it's a decision that is so clearly contrary to scripture from our perspective but when they come to their decision, usually in what we'll call a semi-gray area, right? Like, I've decided to divorce my husband.

Well, there's enough Christians out there that see in Scripture some justification for divorce at times that we'll call it a gray area, meaning that just because somebody wants a divorce doesn't mean that they're absolutely totally in violation of scripture in that moment there's going to be some churches that would say they are it's never acceptable but we'll say that that's a area where there's people who could be legitimately confused and one of the ways that they'll say that they are sure that this is what god wants is they'll say i'm at peace about it god's given me a peace and the onlookers sometimes will be thinking you seem to be violating scripture and that might not be the best example but there's a lot of examples of things where we may come to a conclusion that in some contexts what we're doing would actually not be sin but in that context we haven't actually sought out the the requisite wisdom to know. And so we say, I have a piece about it. And suddenly, the determining factor of whether or not you're in God's will is that at that moment, like Jonah, you're just able to lay down and sleep in the middle of a storm.

I mean, these guys are going to throw away their cargo. All right? They're going to throw away their livelihood. They're going to throw away their wealth. They're going to throw away their business to save their lives. And Jonah's just down there zonked away.

Satan always provides transportation for the soul that's running away from the Lord. Spurgeon said evil also has a mysterious providence. And it is not always right to do what seems convenient. Turn to Ezekiel 14. I want to give you a warning and an explanation. So the question is, how can I flee God's command?

How can I do the opposite of what I'm supposed to do, whether it's obvious in God's revealed will, or maybe it's even a little bit of one of those gray ones where I don't know for sure if this is wrong or right, and I'm getting direction from different people that are good people, and they're saying different things, so I'm honestly confused right now. How can I have a peace about it and yet be wrong? So I'm not telling you that you're always wrong.

What I want to tell you is that having a peace about something is not your indicator that you're right. In Ezekiel 14, we have a very interesting passage starting in verse 1. Then some elders of Israel came to me and sat down before me. And the word of Yahweh came to me saying. So this is again the word of Yahweh. Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their hearts.

And have put right before their faces the stumping block of their iniquity. He said, should I be inquired by them at all? Therefore, speak to them and tell them this. Thus says Lord Yahweh. I love the LSB. Because that would have said, what does it say in the ESV?

Thus says the Lord God. They do it all different because the word Lord is already there. Anyway, any man of the house of Israel who sets up his idols in his heart puts right before his face the stumbling block of his iniquity. He says, listen, and then comes to the prophet. So you've got an idol in your heart. You come even to God's word, the prophet, and you want confirmation of your idol.

You say you want what God has to say. But what you really want is you want your idol. And he says I Yahweh will be brought to give him an answer in light of it in light of the multitude of his idols What he's saying is, if you come to God with an idol in your heart, an idol before your face. he may just answer you according to the idol you've already built you can you can open the scripture even and you can read what the scripture says and unless the Holy Spirit crushes your idol and lets you see what his word really says, you'll actually read God's holy word in light of the idol that you've set up somewhere inside.

And the divine providence of God will ensure that it happens that way, in fact. So God's providence. God's providence is good, but it's not always an indicator that you're on the right side. Spurgeon said, evil also has its mysterious providences. I'm not always sure I like the way that was phrased, but I know what he means. Sometimes when we're going against God, we will actually think we're on the right path because we're more focused on confirming what we're doing by the signs and the senses we have, making us just feel okay at the time than not.

God is so good and he does so many good things, even for those who are his enemies. We should remember that his word is where we go for the anchor of the truth, not in our experiences. A couple of definitions. So the answer from the Heidelberg Catechism of what is the providence of God is this. The almighty and everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were, by his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth with all creatures and so governs them. that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, all things, everything, right, come not by chance but by his fatherly hand.

And one of the reasons why good reformed people, we try not to say good luck, is we don't believe in luck. and sailors on the ship did. Right? The lot is cast into the lap, but every decision is from Yahweh, right? So we know that when somebody rolls dice, it's not random how they land. God actually picked how it lands. And if it happens to confirm something for them, you know, so be it, right?

These sailors were superstitious enough that when Yahweh allowed the lot to fall upon Jonah, when Yahweh made the lot fall upon Jonah, it's like they drew straws, you know, just rolled dice. It's just like the kind of things we do to pick a winner of things and flip heads or tails. The sailors knew that Jonah was the one with the problem. God providentially made it so that it was clear Jonah was the one that the reason the storm came.

He doesn't have to do that. You could cast lots or roll dice or do any number of different little games that, you know, random number generators. You could do it a million times for the rest of your life and never actually get the right answer. This wasn't a rule for us to follow that the pagan sailors did this. why should we study God's providence what good will it do so I just told you you shouldn't try to read it live at least even looking at it historically can be difficult right just take the United States we're the most blessed nation in the history of the world most likely and you could say well then apparently everything that the founding fathers did was right.

No, that's just not how it works. So why study it at all? Why worry about it? If it doesn't tell you which way to turn at the light when you're lost, if it doesn't tell you who to marry, If it doesn't tell you the answers to all the secret things that the Bible doesn't give you the direct answers to, why study it? Again, from the Heidelberg Catechism, that we may be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity.

And for what is future, have good confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature shall separate us from his love. since all creatures are so in his hand that without his will they cannot so much as move. So you learn about and you study God's providence because God's worth studying and it's his. But there's some practical effects. You'll be patient in adversity.

The next time difficulty happens, the next time you don have peace your first reaction won be I need to do whatever it is to get out of this It might be oh I can patiently persist in this difficult situation because I know that my Heavenly Father is providential and perfect and even this calamitous evil that has come upon me is all part of His perfect plan. non-christians who cannot believe that there's a good god ordering all things and even christians that refuse to believe that what a terrible life to live every single time uh your kid gets a sniffle oh satan's doing something again and god's handcuffed there's people that believe this. You understand me, okay? I'm not making this up.

There's people, they're Christians, who believe that when bad things happen, it's almost like God's like, he's like the God on Mount Carmel, the other gods, Baal, right? Like God's in the bathroom. He's just a little too busy to make sure you didn't get in that car crash. Satan got a little too active. What a horrible, horrible way to live. First of all, it's blasphemous.

It's just, you know, but what a horrible way to live. The thought that at any moment the accuser of the brethren has enough power to do anything that God didn't direct him to do in the first place by his providential hand is scary because of what it says here. You can have good confidence in your faithful God and father that no creature shall separate you from his love.

I don't care if I get in a stupid car accident, OK? hey, I care, but I don't. When I compare it to the thought that someone other than God would be able to sever the bond that He's made with me, there's no one with that power. You should be thankful in prosperity. When you get rich, when you get a new job, when you make more money, when things are going well at work or at home, or when your kid gets saved, or all the things that happen to us that are wonderful on a regular, nonstop basis.

And if we stopped to actually count them once in a while, we'd probably be overwhelmed with His goodness. When those things happen, understanding His providence and that it was Him who directed every single moment, every single molecule of the universe from the moment He created them has all been completely and utterly perfectly directed by Him up until the moment that you get the thing that actually brings you great joy. Isn't that wonderful?

People hate the word election. And Christians or non-Christians probably hate it. Most of them probably don't know it. Christians hate the word election. It's like, wait a second. You have a perfectly all-wise, holy God that has made sure from before you were created that you were going to be one of His?

And you're going to hate that because it's important to you to have your own choice? Choose what cereal you want. choose canes over Chick-fil-A I don't care God's the one that providentially governs all things and Abraham knew it Abraham when his son said where are we going to get a sacrifice from dad Abraham said God will provide he said God will see to it faithful people know that God takes care of his people So Matthew 10, the chapter we looked at recently because we talked about an earlier verse with the presence, I think. But in 1029, Jesus says, are not two sparrows sold for a cent?

He says, and yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. This is Jesus's way of getting his people to think about how detailed the care of God is. And for us, it sounds like pedantic, like for one of us to be really good at a lot of details, it requires a ton of time and energy and effort. And usually that person gets annoying.

And now we've created things called OCD that we call people that just like to clean things or whatever. But in God's case, having care over every single detail is nothing. it's not like God has like a million omnipotence and the more details he's concerned with there's like some running out he has infinite power and it is nothing to him to control everything all the time in fact it would be impossible for him not to Phil Johnson talking about this verse in one of the best sermons I've ever listened to about Providence. This was from the Strange Fire Conference.

He said, That doesn't merely mean that God watches and observes the sparrows. It means without his express decree and permission, even a sparrow doesn't die. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows. Really. he gives them miraculous power so he's talking about the disciples now so this is taken out of the broader sermon this is where he told the disciples they were going to go preach the gospel and work miracles and then a few verses later he says by the way a lot of people won't believe you and they'll kill you so it kind of goes from like woo miracles to uh oh he says I'm sending you out in the midst of wolves you're going to be attacked and instead of saying use that power to silence your opposition he says just bear in mind God's there and he's involved with you his comfort to the disciples wasn't the miracle working power his comfort to the disciples was God's there and he's with you I cannot stress this enough, Johnson says, when the Lord wants to reassure the apostles that Almighty God is directly and personally and lovingly involved in their experience and not only in their triumphs and successes, but also in their trials and sufferings.

Jesus doesn't point them to miracles. He doesn't talk about dreams and visions or other mystical phenomenon, which is striking because he just told them they were going to do this stuff. All right. Cessationism hadn't started yet. OK. He doesn't tell them to listen for a still small voice inside their heads.

And he certainly doesn't tell them that their words have creative power. So, you know, when you encounter opposition, just go ahead and make a positive confession. Instead, Jesus teaches them a truth we know is the doctrine of providence. He stresses the fact that God is intimately involved in all the details of our lives, even when we can't consciously sense his presence.

Even when we don't understand what he's doing or why he's doing it. You need the confirmation of the word of God to know God will Providence isn easy nor safe to read God word is But the comfort, the comfort that comes from knowing that God is the one who takes care of you, even when things are difficult, is one of the main outputs of this doctrine. so the next time I'm not going to say you can't kind of ask why like if you're praying like why oh Lord you know I get that but the next time you're suffering the next time things are difficult the next time you think you did the right thing and then now things are getting worse and you kind of feel like it's associated like if I had just done the wrong thing I feel like things would be better right now talk about muscle memory I just went to adjust my glasses I'm not wearing my glasses right now the next time you're tempted in your suffering not to question God I hope we try not to question him but the next time you're tempted to question does he really love you does he really love me is this actually me suffering because of my sin that's the temptation, that's the fear we have is we actually suffering not because righteousness but because I actually just a run sinner unsaved unregenerate and God is now leaving me to the consequences of my own sin. The next time you're tempted to think those thoughts as the result of the suffering, remember the Lord Jesus Christ. because the Lord Jesus Christ also suffered and he had done no violence nor was there any deceit found in his mouth, right?

And at his greatest point of what you might call his need, that's when he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So if God didn't spare his own son, will he not graciously give us all things? One of the reasons we went through the book of 1 Peter was to prepare a 21st century church for suffering. One of the reasons we teach the doctrine of God is to prepare a church for suffering.

One of the reasons why we have the doctrine of divine providence, which ultimately amounts to God uses all sorts of ordinary situations to affect his purposes. Divine providence, the whole point is it's not miraculous. All right? You show up at a store another guy shows up the same day and you become friends for some reason It not a miracle It called providence People go to stores God uses these ordinary means, and it's to show us that he's constantly, constantly in care and control of everything.

And so that those whom he loves, he will work all things together for their good infallibly. Father thank you that your word is so rich with truth and that we could probably have turned to nearly any chapter of the Bible and read about your divine providence I pray that as we study the scripture in our private times that this people, myself included would recognize these truths that are embedded everywhere that you work and Lord that as we read about Jonah and we see some of Jonah's errors that we would turn from the errors of our own ways choosing rather than judge Jonah but to even judge ourselves. Please grant us by your grace and through your remarkable perfect providence wisdom from your word that we might live lives that are pleasing to you.

Amen.