Works of Providence - Chapter 1

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank You for the comfort of Jesus Christ.

He is comfort to Jerusalem. We pray that He would comfort us today as we learn more of His plans for us, as we learn more of Your work through Him, and as we trust in Him coming to the throne of grace through the mediation

He provides, in Jesus' name, amen. All right, first of all, does everybody have, one, a book, and then two, a handout?

This is the book we're working through as a church, called The Mystery of the House. Okay, well you can, you can, okay, yeah, just put it back on the table afterwards.

And then, anybody need a handout? Everybody have a handout? All right, so I know that the pace that I usually go through these handouts is two sides and, well, usually that takes me almost an hour, but I think a lot of these are just lists of things that are gonna be pretty quickly, so maybe we get through the whole thing.

Maybe not. We'll see. Something that I mentioned last time but neglected to really mention,

The Mystery of Providence is the secondary title in the original book. The original book is called

Divine Conduct or The Mystery of Providence. So last time I talked about how it is a mystery in that God has not revealed completely what

He is doing, yet at the same time, and it is referring to the secret things of the Lord, the things that He has not revealed, but He has revealed some of how

He acts. The primary title, though, I think is one worth considering,

Divine Conduct. How God acts, that's a pretty substantial thing.

You know, if you were to interact with someone else, you want to know how they act. If you want to know more about kids, you would read a book about kids to see how did kids act?

What do they do? But this is true of one who is above us as well, God. How does

God act? It is a surprising thing in some senses that we would have a handle at all on how

He acts. Why is anything in this universe predictable at all? It is because we have an orderly

God. Not only do we have an orderly God, but we have a God who has revealed Himself. Necessarily, if He is orderly and He has created us,

He has revealed something about Himself to us. But through His Word, He has revealed a lot to us about Himself.

So Divine Conduct, I think that is a very good title to think about, that we can learn about how

God Himself, quote -unquote, behaves. Next, I want to tell you about where we are.

So we went through this introduction. We are looking at benefits of regarding providence.

So why is it that you would want to regard providence and consider it in your life? He breaks these down into five sections.

I haven't actually looked at the modernization that we're going through to know if this corresponds to the first five chapters, but I assume it does given that the first subsection corresponds to the first chapter.

Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't. Well, I'll have to look at that more. But anyway, what we're looking at today is the first subsection, the first of five subsections on the benefits of regarding providence, and this is the concerns of the saints are conducted by special providence.

So within this headline of the concerns of the saints are conducted by special providence, first of all, there's two kinds of providence.

There is general providence and there's special providence. You've never heard of these before.

They are mentioned in our confession, although I forget if general providence is mentioned by name, but it does talk about, it does distinguish these even if it doesn't spell it out with this terminology exactly.

There's a general providence over all creatures. God is taking care of everything. There's not a single thing that is not upheld by the word of His power, as it says in Hebrews 1.

Everything is upheld by the word of His power, but He is specially working toward the end of His church, and He is ordering all things for a particular good.

Sometimes when people talk about special providence, they are talking about ways that God moves, as it says in our confession, beyond, contrary to, or by different means than His usual providence, or we could just be talking about His particular ends in His providence.

Remember this passage we looked at not too long ago in an evening sermon, 1 Timothy 4 .10. He's the

Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Okay, so He's guarding all things. He's the upholder of all things, as the psalm says.

He is the Savior of both man and beast. Now this is not talking about eternal salvation.

This is not talking about access to heaven, like I mentioned in the sermon. It's not saying all dogs go to heaven when it calls

Him the Savior of man and beast. What it is saying is that everything is upheld, everything that has any kind of protection at all, it is coming from God.

But then He is especially the Savior, through Jesus Christ, of those who believe. So He has a special providence,

He has a special care for His church. Next point He makes here is that heathens deny providence.

Heathens deny providence. So it is, that's a notable thing. If the bad guys are saying one thing, then maybe you should say something different.

Yeah, they deny that providence is a real thing. They would look at things and just call it coincidence. This is a common thing, right?

You've probably experienced it before, where you point to fulfilled prophecy in the Bible and people say, oh, that was just coincidence or something like that.

Or you point to situations in your life where it looks like God's really looking out for you and they say, well, that was just coincidence.

Yeah, if you come from an unbelieving perspective, you can just call all those things coincidence. But there is enough, there are enough coincidences that if you were to stack them up and consider them by, according to statistical significance, you would find they are statistically significant.

But then from a believing perspective, we just know this to be the case. We know that God is taking care of us because He has said

He is. So he lists here several demands, three demands in particular.

And this is the nature of the rest of this section.

And these are typically how these outlines work. If you'll notice that the first part of the outline is very thin and then it like expands and grows larger and then expands and grows larger and deeper, etc.

It is kind of hard to follow, but that is, but hopefully it's a little easier to when you're looking at it in this outline form.

Yes. Right.

Yeah, he, deism, yeah, essentially says that God wound everything up and just let it go and isn't really watching over everything.

And then pretty much all heathen religions have a God who is not so powerful as to be watching over it all.

Yeah, most religions, God is less than that. I'm trying to think about how that plays out in Islam exactly, because Sunni Islam does have a notion of predestination, etc.

But I imagine it even breaks down. If I knew more about Islam, I'd be able to say more about that, but I don't.

Okay. All right. Now, having mentioned that heathens deny providence, he goes on to talk about several demands.

And these are basically just proofs like, okay, you heathen, you deny providence.

Here are several things you have to answer. You have to be able to answer. Why is it that the saints have been delivered so greatly and frequently?

Now, of course, he's going to appeal to a bunch of evidence that our modern heathens would just deny.

He's dealing with people who would still be working with biblical revelation as a real thing.

But it is worth for us to consider just as we grow in our own confidence of God's providence.

The Red Sea, that one's obvious, right? They're able to cross the Red Sea. The whole Exodus is a wonderful work of providence on a number of fronts, including even just the raising up of Pharaoh to be this one who would be so hardened in his heart that God would make such an example of, according to Romans 9.

He has a mention of James Banahan. Some of these people that he mentions are well -known people.

Others he speaks of as just though we should know them. And really the only place you can find them is in Fox's Axon Monuments, which is also known as Fox's Book of Martyrs.

Axon Monuments refers to all the abridged versions are called Fox's Book of Martyrs. If you want to look at the real one that's like a gazillion volumes long, it's called the

Axon Monuments. So anyway, some of these people are not necessarily well -known even though he talks about them like they are.

Bainham, I think, was one who was more well -known. Yes. Yeah, I would like to read the whole thing.

That is something I want to do, especially reading this book is really driving me to. I feel like there's a duty to consider the history of God's providence in a way where I've been kind of dismissive, like, well,

I don't know what I can think about those kinds of things. I feel like maybe I should be reading that. And that is, I have a bookmark saved on my browser so that I can read a little more of it every so often.

I haven't gotten very far. But then, yes, as I'm reading this and looking it up, I am using Google Books to do a search.

Yeah. Google Books is pretty fantastic if you're looking for a particular phrase. Yeah. I can find,

I've managed to find a lot of the things he's talking about just through doing that. Things that are only mentioned in like one other book, you know, and he's just getting it from that one other book.

All right. So James Bainham, as he's being burned at the stake, says that flames are like a bed of roses.

I have forgotten. I should have written down for myself a note about who he was.

But 1532, that gives you a little bit of information about when he's living, you know, shortly.

Luther nails the 95 Theses in 1517, so 1532 is not too long after that.

James Bainham. English lawyer and Protestant reformer who was burned as a heretic in 1532.

Yeah, a lot more written on Wikipedia, but okay. Daniel and the

Lions. Hopefully you're familiar with that story. Ever since a little kid, you've probably heard about Daniel and the

Lions. Polycarp. If you don't know who Polycarp is, he is written about in early church history.

He's one of the earliest martyrs we have after Stephen. He is a disciple of John the

Apostle. That's how early we're talking about. And a lot is written about his death, and it describes him as being unharmed by the flames at first, so they had to kill him with a dagger.

And then Dionysius the Areopagite, unharmed by flames also, and beheaded.

Now, you might be asking yourself, to what degree do we need to believe these things? After having read more of this book,

I feel like maybe we should believe more than I used to believe of this stuff, because I used to just dismiss it all.

God is working in a lot of providence, and even though it's not scripture and it seems fanciful,

God certainly can do these things. Even as a cessationist, you don't have to, you know, cessationism denies that there's ongoing verbal prophecy, it denies that God works by sign gifts, but that does not, it does not deny that God works by miracles, even profound ones.

So there's no, you have, let me just clear that up for you. If you feel like you are obligated to deny any of these things, you're not.

You know, unless they come with particular verbal revelation and such that would, yeah, that would give you reason to pause.

Okay, Jeroboam's hand drying up in 1

Kings 8 .4, Jesus' disciples saved from wolves in Matthew 10 .16,

right, I'm sending you out as sheep among wolves. Joseph, from his brothers, right, his brothers sell him off into slavery, but the

Lord saves him. The Jews from Haman through Mordecai and Esther, that one is, man,

I just read that again to my family. That and the story of Joseph always makes me just really well up.

All the mistaken identity portions, those always just like get me going emotionally for some reason, where he doesn't realize that, he thinks he's friends with Esther and does not realize that he's mortal enemies of Esther and everything.

It's pretty incredible. All right. How do natural causes unite the saints for the saint's, sorry, how do natural causes unite for the saint's relief?

So this is the next demand. All right, if you deny that providence exists, how come natural things even tend to work out for the saint's relief?

Simeon and Anna, being present for the Messiah, right, you read

Luke 2 and you see that, oh, they were both right there in the temple for when Christ comes in and they're dedicating

Him in that way. Bildensturm. So I look this up.

There was a movement among the

Reformed in Holland to destroy images in the churches.

So an iconoclast movement, that's a good thing, by the way. And you might be wondering, well, are they destroying other people's property?

These are their own churches in a sense, so it's, you know, this is within, I don't think you have to condemn them for destroying these images.

But they all moved at night, on the same night, without coordination. That is the story behind this.

So there's just this general sense that these images need to be destroyed and they go destroy a bunch of images and a bunch of churches all in the same night without coordination.

So why is it that they all just happen to do this on the same night? Joseph had 12 steps of providence.

He spoke about this like it was just the standard well -known thing. Also, I'm going off the original one,

I'm not going off the modernization, so I don't know if he mentioned that there. But he spoke of this as just a well -known thing. I looked around,

I couldn't find it, so I made an AI -generated list. Maybe this is the kind of stuff he's talking about. You can look at this.

That's helpful for you. These are different things that happened in Joseph's life, so maybe that's what he's thinking about with the 12 steps.

I mean, these all are significant steps of providence, so you could probably add more to these even.

Haman had seven acts of providence. Haman hung on the gallows. Once again, another

AI -generated list for you because I am not aware of a standard set of seven acts of providence, but apparently this is something where he's getting it from somewhere that people would know what he's talking about.

Non -miraculous. People going out on the same night is not the same as someone's hand drying up all at once.

That's a miraculous thing. That is contrary to, or if I can grab a copy of the

Confession, I can read that. Oh, wait. It's in the back of the hymnal. Let me just do that. So on page 673, if you're looking at the hymnal, not hymn number 673, but page number 673, it says in paragraph number ...

Where is ... Okay, if I could Control -F, I would look for against. All right, let me just do this real quick.

I should have looked up baptisconfession .org

against three, it's three.

Okay, yes. Oh, that was obvious. Yeah, God in his ordinary providence makes use of means.

So ordinary providence, that's general providence, right? He's using different means, but he's free to work without, above, or against them at his pleasure.

So usually the sun's going, you know, the sun's going around its normal course, or the earth is going around its normal course, and so you see it, but then

God can work against that to make the sun stand still. So yes, here he's talking about that ordinary use of providence, but then he's also free to work without, above, or against those means.

All right. Why do powerful efforts against the saints fail, and weak efforts for them succeed?

This is the next demand. Why is it the case if God is not at work? So some examples,

Pharaoh failed to stop the Israelites, political Rome failed to destroy the church, religious

Rome failed to destroy the church, like Roman Catholicism. Persia was swallowed by Greece, Greece was swallowed by Rome.

You know, these different things that are going against the church are all being thwarted. Diocletian, who was a persecutor of the church, he suddenly got sick at the height of his persecution of the church and just worked in his vegetable garden.

And then Maximian had to step down with him because the successor was, yeah, encouraged him to commit suicide.

Yeah, so Maximian, I think, was like a general or something like that, and he could have risen up the power, but there was enough pressure that he ended up just committing suicide.

Christianity was planted by poor mechanics and fishermen. Mechanics is an interesting word because we think about that as referring to cars, but he has something else in mind here.

Ram's horns succeeded against Jericho. Okay, yeah, these are examples of weak things against strong things, right?

So the ram's horn is a weak thing. The strong thing is Jericho's walls. Three hundred men defeated

Midian under Gideon. These are illustration, the intentional illustrations of God's providence to intentionally use the weakest thing to defeat a very strong thing.

I don't even know how to pronounce French words like this, but Bézier. So this,

I looked up, once again, this was one of those things that only shows up in one book, but there was a

Roman Catholic siege against a Protestant city that was going to destroy it, and it just so happened that there was a drunken guy walking around and found a bell and started ringing it at the exact time that that siege was happening, and so everyone was alarmed, alerted to the attack when they otherwise wouldn't be.

Bartholomew Day Massacre, yeah, a couple of examples. This guy who hid inside of an oven and his persecutors skipped over it because of a cobweb.

Same thing, this is one where it's only, I could only find that recorded in one book. And then, similarly,

I only found it recorded in one book. There was a Protestant who hid in a secluded spot where a hen kept laying eggs, you know, giving him enough food to survive.

Okay. All right, and then the next demand. How are men speeding toward calamity turned away?

How is it that those who are so certainly headed to their end, how are they saved from that?

Festus refused Paul to be brought to Jerusalem. Augustine mistook a usual road and escaped the

Donatists. I looked that up, that's in, yeah, this story about the life of Augustine, that he accidentally went along the wrong road, so the

Donatists that were going to kill him, he just never showed up because he accidentally went the wrong way.

Anybody know what the Donatists believe? Okay, this is something that would be good to keep in memory.

The Donatists believed that the sacraments were not valid unless they came from someone who did not, who would not ever deny the faith.

So, for example, if your pastor denied the faith, that meant that, or under threat of persecution or something, that meant that every time you had taken communion, it was invalid, and your baptism is invalid, and all the people that he had laid hands on were not legitimate ministers because he was never a legitimate one himself.

And then you have the problem of, well, how do I know that everyone going back all the way to the beginning who laid hands on my pastor, who laid hands on his pastor, who laid hands on his pastor, et cetera, you know, never ended up defecting?

So, this was a pretty significant issue in the early church and comes up later as people are working through certain issues.

And it comes up even now with, especially if you would look at Baptist thinking, right?

There's a question of, for Baptists, well, how do you deal with the fact that you have so many

Pato -Baptist churches beforehand, what, yeah, you have all these people who didn't have a legitimate baptism, how can you even start a

Baptist church out of that? Well, if you have a Donatist view of things, you can't, but if you realize that, oh,

Donatism was rejected as a heresy, then, oh, okay, we have a path forward here.

Yes. Right.

So, there's X, okay, so there's

X opera operato, which is from the working of the worker, and then there's

X opera operantis, which is from the working of the work, let's see, from the work performed or from the work of the doer.

The Reformed view, I forget what Latin term is usually referred to as that, but anyway, there's this correction in Roman Catholicism, man,

I can't talk about this off the top of my head, unfortunately, but there are several Latin terms that categorize this, and yes, the

Roman Catholic view is, like, better because of Augustine, but then there's a Reformed additional correction of that to make it really not about the, to make it about the faith of the believer, because, okay, if you make it about the work, that still isn't enough, because that means that it's a substantial thing, even if you don't believe.

It's not the Lord's Supper itself that feeds people spiritually, it is the

Lord's Supper joined with the faith of the one who is participating in it, that's the Reformed view, is that there has to be some faith in the matter for it to have an effect, which is also why,

I don't know, the Paedobaptist view of baptism is a little wonky, because from a

Reformed perspective, you need faith for these things to matter, and you don't have faith in a child.

They would argue that, well, when they have faith later, then it, like, brings all those effects to bear or something like that,

I'm not sure, but anyway. All right, continuing on, where were we,

Augustine, yes, Jacob escapes Laban and Esau, Balaam is hindered by a donkey, right, because he's about to run into a, he's about to run into the angel, but he's saved at the last minute,

Saul is converted by Christ, yeah, even though he's killing the church.

Okay, and then the next demand, how is it that others are repaid their deeds to the saints?

So how is it that when people do good things to the saints, they seem to be repaid to it, and those who do evil to the saints seem to be repaid evil for that?

So on good counts, the Egyptian midwives received blessed families because of their help towards the people of Israel.

The Shunammite is given a son after she helps, this is Elisha, I always get these mixed up,

I think it's Elisha. And then Rahab was exempted from destruction because she helped the spies,

Publius' father is healed when he had helped Paul in Malta.

Now, evil deeds, Pharaoh and the Egyptians lost firstborn sons after having, yeah, worked against Moses et al.

I am wondering if I should quit here because we already are at 733, but man, this is just a list of things.

Let me just go through this list because I don't want us to take forever here. All right, yeah,

Haman's hung on the gallows, Ahithophel's destroyed by his own council. Hopefully, some of these things are familiar to you from the

Bible. Charles IX made the canals of Paris bloody with Protestant blood, but then dies by tuberculosis.

Part of his point here is that they are repaid in kind as well. This is something that I've pointed out a lot of times as we've gone through Isaiah.

There's just a lot of notions of poetic justice where the same way that someone afflicts

God's people, that happens to them, right? Their mischief falls on their own head and on their own skull.

Their violence descends, as it says in Psalm 716. Okay, Stephen Gardner, bishop during Mary I, burnt saints, but then dies of inflammation.

Obviously there's an English idiom thing going on there, but still, it's fitting that if he's burning people, he dies of his own kind of burning.

Maximinus engraved his persecution of Christians in brass, but had swarms of lice on his entrails, and his physicians would not attend to him.

He's executed. Yeah, I forget what the details were here.

Right, right. Yes, yeah, they were executed, right. Okay, God struck the same arm that Jeroboam stretched out.

A woman died of palsy in the tongue soon after mocking another for a holy living.

I don't know what palsy of the tongue exactly is, but maybe that just means she choked on her own tongue or something like that, but this is after she had used her tongue wrongly.

Henry II died from a jousting injury to the eye soon after saying that he'd see with his own eyes a

Protestant counselor burnt. Dogs licked the blood of Ahab where they had licked

Naboth's blood. Tophet is made the grave of the Jews after they offered their sons to Moloch there.

One nightingale fell out of the pulpit and, oh, I should say and broke his neck while abusing first John 110.

That came from John Fox. One nightingale, meaning one person named Nightingale. Okay.

Some verses. Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein, and he that rolleth the stone, it shall return upon him,

Proverbs 26, 7. With what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you,

Matthew 7, 2. Yea, so exact have been the retributions of providence to the enemies of the church, that not only the same persons, but the same members that have been the instruments of mischief have been made the subjects of wrath.

And Augustine answers doubters, if no sin were punished here, no providence would be believed. And if every sin should be punished here, no judgment would be expected.

That's an interesting one because you're saying, all right, well, you're saying that everything is, you're saying, you know,

Newton's laws here, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Well, that's not happening every time.

Well, Augustine is saying, well, if it happened every time, you wouldn't be expecting judgment in the next life. So, yes, it happens here some to let you know it's going to happen, but then it happens there completely.

All right, next demand. How do matters agree so exactly with scriptures in all particulars? So yeah,

Cyrus freed the captives to fulfill Scripture. So it's just describing prophecy being fulfilled,

Cyrus being one of the most notable prophecies given how early Isaiah prophesied about it and even named

Cyrus by name. That's the really amazing thing about that. Very few prophecies have that level of detail to them.

But Cyrus is named by name, what, 200 years before he comes around and actually saves the people from Babylon like Isaiah prophesied he does.

How do these deliverances happen in the nick of time? Saul being ready just as the

Philistines invaded in 1 Samuel. The angel saved Isaac just at the last moment. Hagar discovered the well just as the last moment.

The Rabshakeh was foiled just at the last moment. That's talking about when the angel of the

Lord shows up and kills, what is it, 800 ,000 Assyrians as they're sieging

Jerusalem. Haman's plot is hindered at the last moment.

He's already built the gallows and he ends up on his own gallows. Carpenters saved

Judah at the last moment. That's a vision, so it's kind of hard to understand what he's entailing about that.

But yeah, anyway, the carpenters are, it's a vision of carpenters that are around the horns of the altar.

Okay, Siege of La Rochelle, Huguenots, those are

Protestants, saved from starvation by fish in the harbor at the last moment. So there's like a storm that brings a ton of fish in the harbor, otherwise they were being sieged by Roman Catholic enemies around them.

So they were able to eat even though they were being starved to death. One man was saved from hanging himself when

Puritan John Dodd could not sleep and decided to visit his neighbor. Yeah, so John Dodd just goes next door because he can't sleep and it turns out this guy was about to kill himself.

I don't know if you've heard the story about William Cooper, who's in our hymnal. The song about the mystery of Providence, or God works in mysterious ways, that we've been singing some.

Something happened to Cooper and I think it was the motivation for that song, if I understand correctly, is that he wanted to go kill himself.

He went out to the bridge, had the cab driver, you know, we're talking about like horse and buggy kind of thing, had the cab driver take him there.

It was too foggy, couldn't find it, and he ends up just having him let him go wherever. And so he steps out and he happens to be like right at his own house again.

Yeah, and then he writes that hymn about how God's providence is saving him.

All right, faithful Tieti, I don't know how to pronounce this, fled the

Irish rebellion. His child was about to die and at that last moment his wife discovered a bottle of milk left on the rock, left on a rock.

A broke woman discovered gold in a chest at the last moment. This is a personal story that Flavel tells us, not something from a book.

And then last demand, how is it that the saints immediately, or how is it the providence immediately and constantly answers the saints' prayers?

So not only does this stuff happen, but it happens when people pray. The sea is divided in Exodus when

Moses prays. Victory is given to Asa upon prayer. Ahithophel hung himself upon David's prayer.

Haman is foiled after Esther's fast. Richard I was killed by an archer on his prayer for the shot he shot.

So yeah, an archer kind of like, oh, I forgot, it was

Ahab, right? Ahab is struck by the random arrow. It's kind of like that where the archer just prayed and managed to hit

Richard I, you know, hit up in his tower. Abraham's servant found

Rebekah upon prayer. Peter was delivered from prison upon prayer.

More examples should be, could be given, but your own should suffice. I thought that was an interesting line, like you should be keeping record of these things.

I have noted some notable things of providence, but then I haven't perhaps recorded them as I ought, and then

I noticed that as I stopped telling the story, I forget it myself. These are things worth keeping in mind.

It's worth keeping a record of these histories. This is why Fox wrote the Acts of Monuments, so that people would be encouraged by this.

I am very convinced by this book that this is a really important thing for us to do, is to regard these works of providence and thank

God for them, be praying for them, etc. Any questions? Just like that.

Yeah, that we should be recording these things. We should be thanking God for these things. We should be praying for providence.

What did Jesus say to Satan? You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. So yeah, that doesn't seem quite fitting.

I don't think we should be throwing out fleeces. It depends on what you mean. Like you could certainly recount the things from your life and give them as evidence.

God wants us to do that like we're doing here, but yeah, testing

Him for that in the future in a way like that where we're kind of making

Him subject to us would not be as appropriate. So I don't know. I don't know what such a test would look like,

I guess, or what such a... I don't know if there's a way you could go about it that wouldn't be that kind of test, right?

Yeah, I mean, you could each do that, right? You could each create a journal today and be like,

I'm going to record God's acts of providence in my life and see if I notice, you know, what

He is doing for me. There are a few things where, yeah, there are some small things for me.

You know, He talks about like the gold coin, et cetera, just from a neighbor. I remember one time in college,

I needed a textbook that was very expensive. You know, it's one of those books that was like a dollar per page almost, you know, 130 pages and it's like, and it costs $130.

And I'm looking at this, I don't want to buy it. So I start looking online for someone who has it and I find it on, you know, this website.

At the time, there was not a lot for this, but there was this website where people were swapping books and this guy has it.

I show up at this place and he hands me the...

He starts to hand me the book and I look and I say, well, this isn't whatever it was that I needed.

You know, Introduction to Electrical Engineering or Introduction to Computer Engineering. This is Introduction to Computing Ethics.

He says, oh, well, I have that one too, if you come with me. And so we go back to his place, which is like down, you know, the way a bit out into the woods.

We come back, yeah, I'm making awkward conversation with his girlfriend in the car and the dog is like, he's got a dog in the car too, is like all over me.

And we come back, he drops me off. I go home and this is before,

I don't have like a cell phone at the time. I was late adopter of cell phones.

And I get a message from this guy on AIM. When I get back, AIM was the old chat platform everyone used. And he says, hey, we have a problem.

I say, oh, what's that? He says, I don't know what you look like. I say, what do you mean? I don't know what you look like. And he says, well,

I was there at the bookstore today. Where were you? And so like that other guy was planning on meeting somebody else at that exact same time, at that exact same place, like in front of the volume two bookstore at five o 'clock with that, you know, amount of money.

Because I hand him like the $80 or whatever it is, right? And he hands me the book. Like I'm sitting there at the curb with my money, you know, and he shows up and it was the wrong guy.

But I got it for cheaper because this other guy showed up first and he sold it to me for cheaper than that other guy did.

So, you know, I look at that and I was like, well, that was a good encouragement to me at the time.

You know, I believed in the Lord. I thanked him for it afterward that I got the book for cheaper. And yeah, it was just because somebody else showed up at the curb to sell the exact, or who had the book who showed up to make a sale at the exact same time.

Anyway, Charles. Sure. So there are some times when we are encouraged to test

God. So for example, Ahaz, Isaiah told him that you could ask for any sign as high as the heavens.

And Ahaz said, no, I won't. Now there's an example where God is inviting him to.

And he says that, he says, I will not test the Lord. Like he's like piously when really what he's saying is

I want to go do my thing anyway. Like I don't want a sign to confirm that you're going to take care of me. I want to just do my sinful thing of making an alliance with Assyria instead.

So yeah, sometimes we are encouraged to test God. Taste and see that the Lord is good in Isaiah 1.

Yes. He did it repeatedly, right?

And given the circumstances and all the character flaws of the judges,

I think you are supposed to understand him as being a very timid, cautious person. And God is condescending to that.

Like he's tolerating it, but yeah. Yes. If we're praying. I think it is tasting and seeing if the

Lord is good. There's different things that are meant by testing him, right? Throwing yourself off a building and saying, will the

Lord catch me like Jesus was being tempted to do? You know, that would not be a right kind of testing him.

Throwing out fleeces or playing Bible roulette would not be a right kind of testing him. But there are good kinds of testing him like praying or, you know, being obedient.

And yeah, those right kinds of testing him are basically just being obedient. Yeah. And then seeing how he is faithful to the faithful.

But yeah, I think the best kind of test you can do is just to start collecting your own examples of providence and not letting them go.

All right. Let's go ahead and pray here. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening.

We ask that you would hear our prayers. We ask that you would move mightily by providence. Pray that we would record these things, that we would give you thanks even as the scriptures tell us to do, that we would not forget your wondrous works.

And that in being encouraged that way, you would move even more mightily, our faith being encouraged and us going to you with great faith.