Sometimes when it seems like things don’t go our way, we can wonder what the Lord is up to. We get it. It’s a long, narrow road, and all will end well ultimately. But sometimes it sure does seem like everything is going to pot… How can God make ‘all things work together for good’ out of the carnage we see all around us or even inside us (Romans 8:28)? Humanly speaking, it seems that the church is in decline. Society is more godless than ever. As individual Christians we may feel less like Jesus than we should be. Our lives are full of challenges. Christianity can seem so pitiful in the eyes of the world.

But we can be sure that this is all within the sovereign outworking of God’s providence, paradoxical as it may be. ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ writes the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper (1731-1800). This is no cliché when you think of it: God’s ways are not our ways. His providence and wisdom is infinite. It always works out well for Him and His people in the end. It never happens quite as you might expect, but it always happens for the glory of the Triune God.

Real wisdom

The Lord makes Gideon reduce his army of 32,000 to a few hundred and then they rout an entire army by blowing a few trumpets and smashing a few pots (Judges 7). He chooses the weak things to shame the strong; the foolishness of the world over the wisdom of the world to demonstrate real wisdom to the wise (1 Corinthians 1:18-31). ‘He who sits in the heavens laughs’ (Psalm 2:4). He picks little David over big Goliath. He selects a few, mostly illiterate, Galilean fishermen to lead the Christian revolution. This is His way. ‘The less probability in the instrument, the more is God’s wisdom seen,’ declares the Puritan Thomas Watson (1620-1686) in his excellent work A Body of Divinity (p. 74).

The church grows during persecution: ‘The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied’ (Exodus 1:12). He allows trouble and trials to come for a reason. ‘Like ground, the more it is harrowed, the better crop it bears,’ says Watson. Or take the biblical metaphor of gold being refined by fire again and again (e.g. Malachi 3:3) to bring the impurities to the surface to scrape them off, and so result in 24-karat gold. The Israelites wandered around in the desert for forty years before they got anywhere near the Promised Land. The psalmist writes, ‘Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen’ (Psalm 77:19).

The apostle Paul had to go to Rome as a prisoner, which was not quite as he had planned. But before he even got on a ship sailing to Rome, he – the main man – was left to rot in prison for a few years (Acts 24:27). How frustrating must that have been! Yet because he was in that prison he not only got to witness to Governor Felix, but also Governor Festus, King Agrippa and Bernice. So much so that he later marvelled at God’s providence in giving him these opportunities throughout his captivity (Philippians 1:12). 

Fine margins

It’s not just in Scripture either. These seeming paradoxes in God’s providential hand are evident throughout human history and even in our own individual lives. Think about it. A series of ‘chance’ encounters or split-second decisions in your life may have had massive impacts. Some things are determined by only very fine margins. You pause before you cross a busy road and the act saves your life; or maybe you don’t pause and the lorry hits you. As David writes, ‘there is but a step between me and death’ (1 Samuel 20:3). Those fine margins are really the Lord’s providence.

The inspirational Joni Eareckson Tada who broke her neck in a diving accident, leaving her arms and legs paralysed, was told by the doctors that if she had injured her spinal cord just a bit lower she would have been fine. Conversely, had the break occurred a bit higher up, she would have died. Eventually, through her trials, she found faith in Christ and now it’s her testimony that ‘I’d rather be in this wheelchair knowing God than on my feet without him.’

Thomas Watson again writes: ‘He makes his people gainers by losses, and turns their crosses into blessings’ (p. 75).

Even in sin, God’s will is done. ‘You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive,’ Joseph tells his brothers who sold him into slavery (Genesis 50:20). Joseph was a kid who had big dreams, yet even when he thought he had made it as Potiphar’s right-hand man, he was thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit, only for him to be elevated in the most unexpected way. God was preparing him the whole time. There is no wastage in God’s economy. When the night sky is darkest, the stars are most visible. Or, as Watson puts it: ‘If it were always sunshine we should see no stars’ (p. 121). And, we should ‘trust God [even] when providences seem to run quite contrary to promises’ (p. 123).

God raises kings and rulers and He brings them down again. ‘The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will’ (Proverbs 21:1). Xerxes, king of the Medo-Persian Empire, couldn’t sleep one night and asked to be read a book, and so Mordecai came up trumps, got led around Susa on a horse (Esther 6) and ended up second in the kingdom (Esther 10:3). Isn’t God’s providence a beautiful thing!

The greatest paradox of them all

God loves a paradox because they point to the greatest ‘paradox’ of all, His Son! The greatest paradoxical providence is the incarnation of the Son of God. It was to a lowly virgin woman through whom the Creator and Sustainer of the entire universe came into our world. Not as a king nor a warrior, but as a ‘man of sorrows’ (Isaiah 53:3) and a servant who ‘came not to be served but to serve’ (Matthew 20:28).

God Himself had to die so that we can live. The perfect Man become the worst sinner ever to have lived. He, the Light of the world snuffed out, dying the pathetic death of a lowly criminal. The infinite, eternal, immutable, only-wise God died on a cross so that you and me can be forgiven of our sins and receive His righteousness as our own.

It defies all human logic. I fear sometimes these things can seem so familiar to us that we lose our sense of wonder at the providences of God.

So, Christian, whatever your circumstances, take heart, God always fulfils His promises. We can trust Him even ‘where we cannot trace’ Him (p. 76); He knows what He’s doing. William Cowper writes: ‘Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.’