The Mystery of Providence - Introduction

All right, this book you see titled here The Mystery of Providence, the original title is

Divine Conduct or The Mystery of Providence. The being and efficacy of providence are asserted and vindicated, the methods of providence as it passes through the several stages of our lives opened and the proper course of improving all providence is pointed out.

So all of that appears on the cover of the original book, as is the case with Puritan books, they have big long titles and everything.

All right, now I was not able to verify whether or not this was originally a set of sermons, however it is called a treatise and typically that means several sermons expositing a passage.

All of this whole thing is on Psalm 57 -2, I cry out to God most high that God fulfills his purpose for me.

If you remember when we went through the rare jewel of Christian contentment, that was on a particular half verse, the whole book, this book is all on a single verse, on the mystery of providence.

So just taking apart that title for you a bit, the being and efficacy of providence are asserted and vindicated, okay, so that providence exists and does things, proven.

And then the methods of providence as it passes through the several stages of our lives opened, so in other words, what providence looks like and then the proper course of improving all providence is pointed out.

So if you want better providences for your life, that is something that you can achieve. This is a pretty important topic,

I think it's a comfort to most of us who discovered Calvinism to learn about God's providence and to realize that when

Romans 8 -28 says that all things work together for good, that God really means it and that that can be a great comfort to you.

Well, not only can that be a great comfort to you just knowing that he's in control, but also if you can understand how he's in control in as much as he has related these things to us, then you can actually improve those things.

Now it is a mystery, mystery is something hidden, so not everything is revealed about God's providence. However, he has revealed a lot about his providence and in as much as he has revealed that, we can know about it and improve it as the case may be.

Deuteronomy 29 -29 says the secret things belong to the Lord. Not everything is revealed, some things are mysteries, yet God has told us a little about how he works.

We know that his providence is particularly geared towards his church. We know that he uses certain means to accomplish his purposes.

For example, the notion of hyper -Calvinism, it's typically the idea that God has established ends without the means.

Now most people who are hyper -Calvinists don't really say it that way, they don't think of it that way, but that's essentially what they're doing, right?

The hyper -Calvinists would say, well, you don't have to evangelize because God's already determined who's going to be saved, or I don't need to worry about my own life because God's already determined whether or not

I'm going to heaven or hell. Well that's denying that God uses particular means. The normal Calvinist, not the hyper -Calvinist, knows that God uses the means of the word, etc.,

and the gospel, evangelism, and so those are proper to use in order to seek those providences because God uses those means to achieve those providences.

So that's what we're talking about here when we're talking about improving providence. God uses certain means. He has said the ways that he desires to glorify himself, for example, through prayer.

Don't expect any kind of miraculous deliverance if you're not willing to seek it, but yeah,

God works in powerful ways with prayer, etc. Okay, so what

I'm going to be doing in this as I go through it is trying to break things down into an outline form for you all.

Now I found it interesting that one of the things this copy does, which is slightly abridged and modernized, is it removes almost all of the number markings.

So one thing you'll find in old Puritan books is typically that they have a lot of, there's an outline, but it's not actually written in an indented form, so it's really hard to read.

So they'll say, you know, first of all, and then within that, they'll have subpoint one, but they won't call it subpoint. They'll just say first again, and you're supposed to keep track of everything.

So that's hard to read. This just got rid of it all, and it just flows like a normal book, but then you miss the outline too if you actually wanted to see it.

So what I'm going to do is, what I plan on doing, if I change my mind, I reserve the right to do that, but what

I'm doing here, what I'm going to do next time, because I've already written the outline, is present to you the actual original outline so you can see his thought a little bit better.

Okay. Remarkable things in Psalm 57.

So first of all, he talks about David's extreme danger that he is in. So according to do not destroy, you know, there's some tune or something that's supposed to be used as a

Psalm is being sung that, you know, implies that about destruction.

And yeah, he had fled from Saul, and he was in the cave. So if you all remember this circumstance,

David fled from Saul, and he's in the cave, and then Saul actually goes in the cave, right, and David is able to, yeah, chop off his garment when he's not looking, while he's relieving himself, et cetera.

I was up in Lava Beds National Monument last week, and there's a bunch of caves that are up there, and all the signs say, do not use the cave as a restroom.

I told my kids, if you use it as a restroom, you know what's going to happen, an old man's going to come out of the corny, he's going to cut off your clothes, just like David did.

All right. So yeah, and then the next point is David's earnest address to God. So he says here, be merciful to me,

O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge, in the shadow of your wings

I will take refuge. But then he goes into David's arguments. So excuse me, excuse me.

So this is what we should be doing when we're praying, is appealing to God, making arguments for Him answering us.

There's some parts of Scripture that speak of prayer with God as being a wrestling with Him. Okay, that is right to do, it is right to wrestle with Him, in that He has given you prayer as a means to take hold of the promises and to understand

His will. If you are, it could feel like a more holy thing to not do that, because wrestling sounds hostile or adversarial, and I'll just let

God do what He's going to do, you know, I don't need to ask for anything. No, God has made us to be creatures that are relying on Him, that are dependent on Him, and in that process of dependence, understanding

His will better and appealing to it and learning to trust in Him by appealing to His promises.

So this is something He wants you to do. So he says in verse 1, for in you my soul takes refuge.

So he does not argue for the dignity of God's act towards him.

Like in other words, he doesn't say because I deserve it, right? That's not the point here. Instead, because I have taken refuge in you.

You should notice that with a lot of the Psalms. Occasionally, there will be something like remember me, but what that's not saying is

I deserve it. What that's saying, it's appealing to promises about God being faithful to those who are faithful, etc.

It's not a statement of having merited anything. The example that comes to mind in Isaiah is when

Hezekiah is praying to God and he lays before God in the temple. He unfolds

Sennacherib's letter and he says, look at how Sennacherib has blasphemed you. Answer me because of that, right?

We haven't done anything good, but look how bad he is. He's really bad. And then that's his appeal.

It's not, oh, I deserve it. It's this guy needs to be punished. And here it's not,

I deserve it, but I have taken refuge in you. So he says the argument is for the nature of the object, which is a compassionate

God. So yeah, why should God do this? Because God is compassionate.

And then he has an argument for the promise of sanctuary. Isaiah 26, 3 says, you keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.

So yeah, because God has promised sanctuary, He ought to give it. In the shadow of your wings,

I will take refuge till the storms of destruction pass. And that's, yeah, that's what he has promised.

All right, then David goes to his former experiences of help. This is a common thing that you see in the

Psalms. This is how you should be praying. And he's not even getting to necessarily instructing you in prayer yet.

I think he's going to be doing that later, but these are obvious applications here for us. We should be praying like David is praying.

And so it, and you can think about your own prayers, whether or not you see these things featured in your prayers, you know, or you, do you do this where you recount,

God, you've answered me in these ways and these ways and these ways. This is part of how God would have you answer him is by recalling things he has done and giving him thanks for them.

Part of why he withholds things is so that you will be more thankful of the things in the past. And if you don't do that, and God is trying to teach you that, don't, don't expect answers while you're refusing to learn.

All right. He says, yeah, he has a holy passion and Flaval describes this as often speeding, often speeding.

So like the idea being that if someone is really actually passionate about their prayer, you know, it's not going to be some sterile, clinical statement of words in a dispassionate way.

Obviously, if something's passionate, it's not going to be dispassionate, right? It's going to be a bunch of rush throts,

God, please, blah, blah, blah, blah, because of these reasons, et cetera, et cetera. Now you should not try to make your prayers a performance for the

Lord. But if you are in an extreme situation, your prayers warrant a, a corresponding zeal to match that.

Don't think that, yeah, you've, you're putting dire straits in order to have a real dependence on the

Lord. What the Lord doesn't want at that point is just you to say, well, God, I guess I've got to pray a prayer here because that's what

I'm supposed to do, et cetera, et cetera, right? You know, you're supposed to really go to him earnestly with what that looks like in your life.

What would it look like in your life if you were dependent on another person and, you really had to wrestle with them and ask them for something and plead with them, plead with them.

Encouragement to take this resolution. So objective and subjective. So objective, taken from the sovereignty of God.

So God is sovereign. You know, Saul is high, but God is most high, right?

Saul is the king, but God is higher than the king. Psalm 59 .9 says, oh my strength,

I will watch for you, for you, oh God, are my fortress. I think that's the point of these passages that talk about God as a rock, et cetera, is that he is more reliable than anything else.

So God is sovereign. He is king, right? That's something you used to describe a nation or a king, you know, sovereign nation, sovereign king.

God is higher than that. He is more sovereign. His rule matters more. And then subjectively from the experience.

So if you're the prayer, you know, if you're the one praying, you think objectively what you're praying for is God who is sovereign.

And then subjectively, you're praying according to the experiences you've had of his providence, his being sovereign.

Yes. Okay. So four more experiences help.

So first it talks about that, okay, the duties resolved upon, I cry out to God, and then he is explaining why he is so reliant on God's sovereignty, right?

So he's serious about being reliant on God's sovereignty, and now he's explaining why he's reliant on God's sovereignty. Does that make sense?

In part. And so we're breaking down the reasons why he's, so the first - The reasons why he's reliant.

Right. Yeah. Okay. So the reasons for his argument. Right. Yes. So objectively,

God is sovereign, and he knows that God is his fortress.

But then subjectively, he has experienced that, and I guess four more experiences of his help may not sound like, that may sound exclusively subjective, but Flavel's breaking this down into the objective part and the subjective part of it.

He knows it to be true, but he's also historically experienced it firsthand to be true.

Yes. Okay. So, and then

Psalm 138 says, the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. He has this quote in here, payment is the performance of promises.

Grace makes the promise, and providence is the payment. All right.

So God makes promises graciously to us, and then providence is where he fulfills his promises.

So he says all things, kinds of things about how he will protect his people, he will supply all their needs, et cetera, et cetera.

He makes all these promises. He doesn't exactly say how he's going to do it, but providence is him making good on those promises.

All right. Now, the prospect of providence describes it as being universal.

So it affects great things and ordinary things, both near things and far things.

When I've talked about this to people in the past, a lot of times people ask, well, isn't God just sovereign over the big things that happen?

You know, he's controlling like which nations win wars, things like that, but he doesn't care about who wins a football game, or maybe he cares about that, but he doesn't care about, you know, where, you know, what happens to a small worm out in the middle of, you know, some field no one's ever discovered before, or something like that, or how a leaf falls in a forest.

No, he cares about everything. Proverbs 16 .33 says, the lot is cast in the lap, but it's every decision is from the

Lord. Every little thing is coming from God. And we will see on the last day how that all mattered, just because we don't understand how it all matters doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

You know, you can even look at human theories about the butterfly effect and everything and realize maybe these things do matter a little more than we're giving them credit for, and God is accomplishing great things, even with very small things that seem small to us.

And we have all of eternity to find that out too. If you think about the fact that God is, he does these things in order to glorify himself, what that suggests to me, speculatively, but still, given that we have an infinite amount of time to learn more of him and see his glory, does it not suggest that we will ultimately hear of everything?

Just because something is infinite does not mean it is uncountably infinite, if you're a mathematician.

Like, for example, to enumerate all the natural numbers, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, if you walk through 1, 2, 3, 4, you will eventually get to every number with an infinite period of time, right?

You won't go through all the numbers, but for any given number, you will get to it, right?

You pick a number, you will get to that eventually with an infinite period of time. Same thing for rational numbers, you have to figure out how to walk that triangle.

Some of you know what I'm talking about, but you'll get to them all. So will we not discover all the things that God is doing now?

I believe, I suspect we will. It is effectual, so it accomplishes what it starts.

God does not just start some work of providence and then it can be foiled or frustrated later on.

It will be finished, just like it says in Philippians 1, 6, that I'm confident that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus.

And then it is irresistible and uncontrollable. No one can, like I said, no one can frustrate his works of providence.

It is beneficial, it is for the good of the saints. It's not just that he's doing whatever he wants for his jollies, he's got a particular plan that he has shared with us that is for our good.

And so he is, so we know that it's always for the good of his people. And then it is also encouraging.

So it is not just for us to know that it's good in some way, but then it's not of practical help for us.

To know that truth is of practical help because it is supposed to encourage us in the day of difficulty.

And if you're going through some extreme difficulty, knowing that God is accomplishing good things or knowing that God is capable of pulling you out of that, knowing that God is doing what is best should be a lot of encouragement for you.

Now people will tell you that this is actually discouragement to the saints.

If you listen to fools like William Paul Young, I don't know if you know who he is, he's the guy who wrote the book

The Shack, he will say stuff like, well, that's discouraging to think that God is in control because if he's in control, then this difficulty that came into my life came from him.

And then he's an angry, mean God, et cetera, right? And this is why he pictures the father in his book as a black woman because that's more warm and comfortable than the notion of a father to him.

But it actually is an encouraging thing to know that God is in control of all things because when you're in those difficulties, it is purposeful.

It's not some meaningless thing that happened outside of God's control, but it's meaningful. Your suffering means something.

It's not just pointless, right?

Now he says, it is the duty of the saints, especially in times of straits, a strait is a narrow part of life that's hard to get through, right?

If you imagine yourself floating down a river and you're squeezing through something tight.

The last vacation I went on was not at caves, but it was at Joshua Tree. They have this one place called the

Hall of Horrors. One of the coolest things I've seen on vacation, it's just rocks that are really close to each other and so you have to squeeze through all these really narrow parts, right?

That's like a strait. And man, there was one part that was really, you know, you just have to tamp down on all the instincts to become very claustrophobic all of a sudden because you're deep in there and there's no easy way out.

And then you got to like squeeze, squeeze out of there. It's, oh man, scary stuff. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that it's describing metaphorically.

In times of straits, to reflect upon the performances of providence for them in all the states and through all the stages of their lives.

This is part of your duty. This is part of your task. A lot of people consider it too speculative or foolish or arrogant or who knows?

There's all kinds of things people can say about trying to think about God's providence. And there are foolish ways that people can do it, right?

You can be someone who's essentially engaging in divination because you are so curious about the providence of God that you are just guessing at it really heavily or looking to means that he hasn't given you to discern it, right?

How many people do you know who've done Bible roulette where they ask God what's going on in their life and they're like, all right, tell me on this page.

And then they read this page and God's got to tell them and they'll take some word out of that and they make it mean something to them.

And then they say, oh, well, God is clearly, whatever the case may be, blessing me with financial wealth because this passage happened to be about financial wealth and that's how you discern it.

So there are foolish ways of discerning God's providence, but that doesn't mean it can't be sensibly discerned or that we aren't commanded to.

It's not an option for a Christian. It is what we're commanded to be doing. All right, twofold reflection of our, twofold nature of our reflection on providence.

We will perfectly understand its harmony in the final state. This is part of what I was getting at earlier. We now imperfectly understand its harmony.

First Corinthians 13 says, now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. Yeah, that's true.

It's something that a lot of people have reflected on. We see in mirror dimly. If you're familiar with the older language about that, it's a scanner darkly, right?

Just like the Philip K. Dick story. Some of you are familiar with it. It got turned into a movie eventually, but it's just the idea of like not knowing things very clear, everything being muddy.

That's what it's like right now. Everything is muddy. Back then mirrors were not the very nice things that we have right now.

If you imagine just like looking at your hubcap and trying to see your face, right? That's more like what they were working with.

You just can't see things clearly in an old school mirror. But then we will see as though you're just looking right at someone's face.

In the harmony of it, you will see. There's a poem that I very much like from John Davies, who is an old

Anglican. He wrote a poem called Nosey Te Yip Sum, which it's a book -length poem about the soul.

I would like to teach on it one day. I hope to at some point. I haven't had the time to put together material completely on it, but would like to.

There's one part of the poem that I wrote down that I very much appreciated.

The language in it is hard to understand, but I've updated the language here to make it a little easier to understand.

Oh, could we see how cause from cause doth spring, how mutually they linked and folded are, and hear how oft one disagreeing string the harmony doth rather make than mar?

And view at once how death by sin is brought, and how from death a better life doth rise, how this

God's justice and his mercy taught, we this decree would praise as right and wise. So what he's saying is, in this life, everything seems to be a big mess, it's a big discord and mess.

It doesn't sound harmonious at all, and it all seems full of death, et cetera. But once you will see how from death a better life rises, how

God is using even evil things together harmoniously to do good, you will praise his decree.

Before that, you'll be like Job, who says, God's not hearing me out, he's getting something wrong here.

And then eventually you'll be like Job at the end of the book where he says, all right, you know better. You are doing something, I just don't see it.

Right, but then you will actually see it. A couple of quotes.

So this quote I like from Luther. One day while he was sick with a bunch of different diseases, dysentery, a bunch of other things, yeah, too.

He said, our Lord God is like a printer who sets the letters backwards so that, sorry, my computer's getting old and it just, the screen shuts down quickly.

Our Lord is like a printer who sets the letters backwards so that here we must so read them. When that we are printed off yonder in the life to come, we shall read all clear and straightforward.

Meantime, we must have patience. If you've ever seen what like a old printing press looks like, you take the little metal types and you put them in, but if you were to look at them, they'd all look backwards and unclear.

And when you print it, then it looks all normal. That's what life is like right now. It's all backwards. It's not clear.

And then that song we just read from, sang from William Cooper. Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain.

God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain. All right. Any questions about anything we've covered here in this introduction?

Both. Yes. Yeah, well, we're going to go through the whole book here.

But what it would look like is something like, why, what might

God be teaching me during this trial in my life? That's a very simple one that a lot of people are familiar with.

So that can be an example. The one I point to often is what was

God doing during COVID when so many churches shut down? If his providence is centered on his church, was he not rebuking many for their false worship that never opened again?

Given all the patterns you see in the Old Testament of him shutting his worship down every time he was displeased with it, it seems pretty clear that that's a pattern he set for us and that's a reasonable way of interpreting things.

So there's a lot of situations like that where we would discern and then also better our providence by understanding, you know,

God uses certain means, let's go to those means. So not just discerning, but also employing means to achieve better providences.

That one works. This one's not bad, you know, I will cry to God the most high, the

God who accomplishes all things for me. Why would you cry to God who accomplishes all things if you don't know, yeah, if you don't have any way of telling what he would want to do in this situation, right?

We have ways. Another one that I like is, part of why

I like this one is because it's challenging for people. A lot of people wrestle with this when they, at least when they first hear it, if not later.

So, if anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will give him life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death.

There is a sin that leads to death, I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is a sin that does not lead to death.

So this is commanding us to pray for certain kinds of brothers and to not pray for other brothers who are committing the sin leading to death.

There's, Jesus made it clear there's only one sin that won't be forgiven, right? The unpardonable sin, blasphemy of the

Spirit. Hebrews 6 describes it as someone who has tasted the heavenly things and then turns away.

It is a full apostasy where someone has experienced the goodness of God as a part of God's people in an outward sense, though not necessarily inwardly saved, even though they've experienced that goodness and then turns away, right?

Just like those people who said that Jesus' works, though they had experienced them right there seeing him cast out demons, that that was a work of Satan.

Now Bible says not to pray for that, right? You're supposed to discern, okay, God will not save this person, I should not pray against his will.

I should actually probably rather pray for this person's destruction at this point. You see this in the history of the church,

Julian the apostate emperor, Christians would pray for his destruction while they would pray for other emperors to be saved.

Yeah, occasionally you will see a new apostate, like when

Joshua Harris, is that the guy I'm thinking of? Yeah, when he apostatized, right, a lot of people will apostatize, a lot of people publicly said, you know, pray for him, et cetera, and my response was,

I don't think we should pray for him. I think he's making it abundantly clear what God's will is for his life, and I don't believe

I have permission from God to pray for him, and that my prayers are better spent elsewhere for the kingdom of God, or contrary to that end for the kingdom of God, right, yeah.

With peace, you know, if you're anxiously wrestling for someone's salvation, that you have been otherwise given a guarantee won't happen, like just let that go, right, or I've seen people pray for the

Pope, where if you believe the Reformed idea that he is the

Antichrist according to 2 Thessalonians 2, he is the son of perdition, just like Judas was called, not someone that you should be praying for.

There's a lot of heavy implications for this stuff. Now those are kind of tough ones right now, because it's not clear why that would necessarily give peace, but I think it does free you in a lot of ways to pray for more profitably, you know, in ways that God is going to answer, and if you're stuck there praying against his will, it's not going to help anything.

Yes. So, would the way you would come to understand if you're dealing with a permanent apostate or a temporary apostate, based upon in their experience how much they were immersed in the outward body of Christ?

Yeah, if someone just grows up in the church as a kid, you know, and then the second they hit the teen years, or the second they hit adulthood, they're out, you know,

I'm not going to say that, oh yeah, that's someone that this counts for. It's not necessarily the same thing as, just because they were in the church for a long time doesn't necessarily mean anything there.

Yeah, if somebody, for example, like I said, I've been in the church since I was a kid, became ordained, and then they leave and become an

LGBT kind of person. Yeah, and they deny Christ, right? So this is not, I'm not describing just being engaged in sin, right?

People can fall into sin and be brought out. Yeah, but they say, I don't believe in this stuff no more. Right. Like some sort of Christian, maybe even now, and they're just accepting all sorts of abominations.

Yeah, if they deny the faith, that's different. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. They're crucifying