Accepting God’s Providence

I appreciate this, but let’s go ahead and close the loop on the Trump incident.

I’ve often gotten the impression over the last couple weeks that a lot of folks thought “God’s providence was on display in the preservation of Trump (but wouldn’t have been if the bullet had killed him).”

Have I imagined this? Would the same people be saying this with the same conviction if the target had been Biden or if Trump had died?

But the truth is that God is good all the time and is providential all the time. His plans are not ultimately about us or our cultural and political battles. They are about His glory, and He always wisely and perfectly orchestrates events for that ultimate purpose.

This would be equally true regardless of the outcomes on July 13.

So “walking by faith and not by sight” means seeing God’s providential, wise, and good hand in all that happens—though the wisdom and goodness may not be apparent.

Aaron,

Deep down, we know that God is good no matter what, and that his providence is on display even if we disagree with the results of it. But we certainly don’t always express it that way.

You don’t need to look only at the recent attempt on Trump’s life. (As you note, God’s providence would have been just as much on display if Trump had been killed, but looking at our current political situation, it’s not unreasonable for some to be thankful that didn’t happen.) Just look at how Christians have to deal every day with serious health issues that sometimes go away and sometimes result in death. We know God’s plan is right no matter which occurs, and yet we still often speak of having received God’s blessing when our loved ones (or ourselves) are healed.

If we or our loved ones truly know God, I’ve wondered how much of a blessing that really is at times. Did Lazarus wake up after 4 days and think “Bummer, I was just in paradise, and now I’m stuck back here!”? Or maybe God graciously temporarily wiped out his 4 days of memory until he eventually died again. We won’t know until glory since scripture doesn’t say, but I figure if he had extensive memories of his experience, he would have told everyone he knew! And the same with all the others in scripture who experienced miraculous raising from the dead.

That aside, we probably do need to consider carefully what we are doing when we declare God’s blessing after events, particularly since we don’t do it for all outcomes.

Great article Don!!

Just look at how Christians have to deal every day with serious health issues that sometimes go away and sometimes result in death. We know God’s plan is right no matter which occurs, and yet we still often speak of having received God’s blessing when our loved ones (or ourselves) are healed.

…

That aside, we probably do need to consider carefully what we are doing when we declare God’s blessing after events, particularly since we don’t do it for all outcomes.

There is a somewhat tricky balance here in how we frame “blessings” in teaching and preaching and Christian conversation. On the one hand, we are supposed to notice and be specifically thankful when events occur that clearly bring us joy, comfort, success, etc. The Psalms certainly include a lot of that.

On the other hand, we’re also supposed to give thanks for ‘everything’ (Eph 5.20) and find a more sophisticated joy in the fact that God works ‘all things’ according to the counsel of His will for the praise of His glory (Eph 1:11-14).

It wouldn’t be right to turn the call for thankfulness for ‘all things’ into a kind of flat, abstract belief that has no moments of celebration for the special gifts that bring us immediate joy.

But we’re also off track if we look at specific world events we like and say ‘that’s God’s providence’ while events we don’t like (say, Paris Olympic opening ceremonies) are seen as something else.

In the case of the Trump assassination attempt, I think where many went astray was just in the presumption that Trump is “God’s man” and so anything that helps him is ‘providence’ and anything that hinders him is, I don’t know, the devil. But everybody keeps forgetting that we are supposed to be a nation of laws and when a shooter tries to circumvent our legal framework and remove an elected official, this is a defeat, no matter who the target is. And it is not just providence, but a short-term blessing also, when that kind of behavior fails. It has nothing to do with anybody being “God’s man” or not.

But to me this thinking is symptomatic of what we see quite a lot of in evangelicalism/conservatism these days: the near-total forgetfulness that elected officials are a means to greater ends. The greater end is a society where laws rule as well as we can achieve that, and law-makers make the best laws we’re capable of making. Executives like governors and presidents are suppose to serve law. The judiciary is supposed to serve law. This is inherent in trying to be a democratic republic vs. a simple democracy or an autocracy or some other kind of ‘ocracy.’

This is Civics 101, but most people (evangelicals not less than everyone else, as far I can tell) seem to have forgotten it or were never taught.