“It just happened.” You ever heard those words? You ever said those words? What about, “It was fate that brought us together.” Sometimes we hear or say these things to justify some hurtful thing we did or to explain a decision about relationships or work or some other major life choice. “It just happened.” But what does it mean?
London pastor and preacher Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “Fate is this – Whatever is, must be. But there is a difference between that and Providence. Providence says, Whatever God ordains, must be; but the wisdom of God never ordains anything without a purpose. Everything in this world is working for some great end. Fate does not say that….There is all the difference between fate and Providence that there is between a man with good eyes and a blind man.”
If you are not a follower of Christ, the only explanation for what happens in your life is fate. “Whatever is, must be” is your theme. According to this theme, life cannot have purpose or meaning beyond the here and now. It is a theme that has little hope for the future or comfort amid difficulties. It is a theme that leaves one exposed to the trails of life with no reason or answer for them. It is a theme that is bone-chilling cold to the soul.
As one who believes the gospel, the idea of God providentially working out all things according to His purposes is one of the hardest doctrines for me to believe and yet, it shows up all over the pages of scripture. The Old Testament book of Esther teaches us that God is providentially at work in His world and in our lives. The reason this truth is so difficult for me, and perhaps for you, is because much of the time, I can’t see God at work in my life. I think, if I can’t see God at work, He must be absent, but that is not the case. God’s seeming silence does not mean His is absent.
The Heidelberg Catechism’s, written over 300 years ago, answer to the question of what do we understand by God’s providence reads this way, “Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty – all things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but from his fatherly hand.”
So what? Why does this matter? When we begin to believe this we are freed to rest in God’s Fatherly care of us. We can rest in (in lieu of becoming complacent in) the ordinary things of life. We can rest in the reality that everything comes from the hand of a loving Father, who knows what we need, better than we do.
If God knows all things and is omnipotent then it is possible that he knows something that we do not about what our soul needs most. If we will trust this fact, then the most difficult trials will begin to come into focus.
When I remember that the injustice of Christ’s trial – the guilty verdict made of an innocent Jesus, Christ’s separation from the Father and the brutal death on the cross – all passed through God’s loving fatherly hand, it gives me hope. Jesus death was not a mistake but a direct result of God’s loving hand at work, in order to reconcile sinful men and women to himself. As a result, those who believe and trust in Christ, experience the saving grace of God, restored relationship with the Father and rest in God’s providential work in our lives.
Because of Christ’s work, we are empowered to walk through our circumstances with the great knowledge and joy that God is working “all things together for the good of His people, according to His purposes.”
May we learn to live, and rest, more and more, in the tender hands of our Father. From one older brother to another…
Ed Dunnington is the Senior Pastor at Christ the King Presbyterian in Roanoke. Visit their website at www.ctkroanoke.org.