The most recent article in this series [February 2008] covered one of the two ways we directly experience God, in prayer. This article offers some observations about providence, the other way we connect with God. It also reinforces the position of the previous one: God is more interested in our spiritual growth than our temporal welfare. We have a number of nooks and crannies to explore. However, the main thrust is pretty simple and straightforward: We should consider the mishaps, difficulties, and pains of life as spiritual growing pains. Furthermore, we should consider them as much acts of Divine intervention as those instances of rescue or redirection that we readily attribute to providence. It’s easy to escape from a near disaster and comment, “God interceded on my behalf,” but these words might not come so readily in difficult times, when the disaster overtakes us. When we recognize that God always works for good — but does not always work good things, as we measure them — we are on the right track to discerning providence.
As with the previous article, I am not attempting a full account of providence, but only of those aspects that relate to the Hard Question, “How Can I Sense God’s Presence?” If we set our providence-detector only to “deliverance by unusual and inexplicable circumstances”, we will miss most of what God is doing in our lives, and we will incur an increased risk of disillusionment if a hoped for deliverance fails to materialize.
I will add here another reminder: when we are discussing providence, we are discussing experiential knowledge, not book knowledge, of God. Almost any believer will agree that God does indeed work in his or her life, but how many of us feel entirely confident that we do meet God daily in our lives? How many believers who can navigate the high seas with their book knowledge feel marooned when it comes to having any sense of really engaging the Divine, even occasionally? Unmet expectations can result in disappointment, and perhaps even disillusionment. If we have unrealistic expectations of how God works in our lives, then we can find ourselves in big trouble, regardless of our intellectual grasp of Bible precepts.
How do we decide what is providential?
An event will typically earn the “Divine intervention” label when some unusual or unusually timed event rescues or redirects us from an imminent or potentially untoward occurrence, or the event provides some benefit or temporal blessing. The essential criteria for deeming an occurrence as “providential” are:
- the occurrence provides some positive temporal benefit for us, and
- the means of intervention involves some specific timing, or unusual or unlikely turns of events.
Consider this fictional, but entirely plausible, event that would likely elicit major beeps and flashes from anyone’s providence-detector: A young family is on their way home from a wonderful week at Bible school. Shortly after exiting a narrow, twisting mountain road, their vehicle suffers a steering failure and they run gently off the side of a straight road into a cornfield, where they emerge from the car shaken, but unharmed. Had this malfunction occurred just a mile up the road, they would likely have rolled down a steep ravine. The parents comfort the frightened but safe children, and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the divine intervention afforded them. Seems like a clear case of providential intervention, but let’s ask a few questions that might generate some further reflection:
- Do atheists ever experience “close calls?” How do we know when God specifically intervenes or when an event is just “happenstance”?
- If the family had an uneventful ride all the way home, would God not have been involved? In other words, if a near-miss signals God’s presence, does the lack of any near-miss signal God’s absence? In short, does uneventful equal non-providential?
- What if a truck had gone out of control and slammed into another car that passed by on the mountain road just moments after the family’s car was in that spot? Was it “providential” that another family was wiped out?
- What if the above situation happened, but the family never learned about their close call and had an otherwise uneventful ride home? Would they give thanks to God for sparing their lives?
- Suppose there was an accident on that road not ten seconds after the family’s car went by, but 20 seconds, or a minute. Is this still “providential?” What about 10 minutes, or an hour, or however long? Where do we draw the “close call” line that seems to delineate providence? We all routinely drive on roads that have had fatal accidents. Every one of us has been exactly at the spot of a fatality many times, but have we felt our life was spared?
- What if the power steering failed during the winding mountainous descent and the car plunged into the ravine with grave results? Would this not be providential? Did an angel miss his assignment?
- What if the power steering went out during the descent, but as the family’s car was going off the road, it collided with another vehicle traveling in the opposite direction? This collision prevented the family from plunging into the ravine and certain death; the occupants of both cars had serious but not devastating injuries. How would we rate that outcome on the providence-meter?
Can we determine what is/is not providential?
I pose these questions and alternate scenarios to expose a mistaken notion about discerning God’s providential activity: thinking that there is actually some way to tell what is providential. Each of us will have our providence-detector tuned differently, and we can become like Pharisees trying to define exactly what constitutes “work” on the Sabbath. The paradigm won’t accommodate how God really works.
We can never establish any criteria that will conclusively distinguish between the normal and the paranormal. Red Seas opening up might be obvious cases, but not much else in our lives is. Some people tend to think God winds up the clock and lets it run on its own, while others see God involved with us at every step and every moment, directly controlling every event of our lives. There is no one answer. How providence works is a plastic and systemic process. The real situation is far more complex than locating a level at which God works; it is an interactive process between God and believer wherein God works with us in accordance to our faith. In short, for those who believe God is in everything, He is. But for those who see the world as essentially a series of naturally succeeding steps, and occurrences that run on their own with perhaps only the exceptional interposition of God, for them the world works that way. It’s interactive and complex, but that’s the gist; we do, in a sense, “create” a God of our own projection (Luke 19:22) and then live with that image of God.
It’s not the point of this article, as I said, to discuss how or to what extent God works in our lives, although our position on that issue absolutely shifts our perspective on the question that this article does want to address: “How do we sense God’s presence?” That is a different question. If God is indeed working with us directly, and we don’t sense it, we’ve missed much. If God is working indirectly, through some seemingly ordinary means that don’t fit the standard criteria of “clearly providential”, we can miss that also. We can have “false negatives”, that is, instances where God worked directly in our life and we didn’t recognize it; we thought it was just life happening as it ordinarily does. We can also have “false positives”, that is, attributing some event to the direct hand of God (something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise) when in fact the event was a normal occurrence that would have happened anyway. The issue is not whether or not God directly or indirectly caused an event; the issue is whether a specific occurrence is some deviation from the ordinary that qualifies as “providential.”
Asking the right question
So our question is not, “How do we know if God is working this specifically?” The better question is, “How do I sense God’s presence, however and whatever and whenever that presence may be sensed?” The answer to the last question, the “whenever” question, is the key, and it has an easy answer: always. God is always with us. The “however” question is easy to answer but much harder to appreciate in real life: God works in every possible way.
The main issue in how we sense providence is not so much how and when God works; rather, it’s how we perceive God working, and the most commonly used filter or criterion here is an extraordinarily poor one: our own comfort level. When we receive (figuratively) water from the rock in the desert, we say, “God is working in my life”; but it is the same God who is taking us through the parched land. When we walk through the land of abundant water, we drink very well indeed, but we may not perceive the same God and the same providence that brought the water from the rock in the desert.
I would like to take you back a couple of years to an earlier article on theodicy, the “problem of evil” article with which I started this series. I started with theodicy because it is the leading route to disbelief. People, in general, have lost more faith over that one issue than probably all other reasons combined. It’s a huge problem, not from a theological perspective (where it’s quite resolvable) but from the human perspective. On this level we gauge that an all-powerful God could easily have prevented ethnic cleansing and Huntington’s Disease and tsunamis. These evils do exist, ergo an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God (of the “Judeo-Christian tradition”) does not exist. However, this argument is based entirely on a human perception of evil, and thus fails entirely to address the issue of evil from God’s perspective, and that’s the issue at hand.
People lose their faith, sometimes, when they encounter what they perceive as evil. They do not see that God is providentially acting in their lives to bring about faith. If we set our “providence detector” to only register unusual beneficial events, then we will miss providence when it occurs in an uncomfortable fashion.
Properly perceived providence
Our late and highly beloved brother, Gary Burns, did not suffer from this disillusion. Struck down with acute myelocytic leukemia while yet a very active man in his early 50s, Gary knew that the disease was God’s providential way of teaching him faith, dependence on God, humility, and love. He never felt closer to God in his entire life of good health and prosperity than in his last year and a half of misery (from both the disease and the draconian treatment regimen). When I visited with Gary in his hospital room shortly before he died, he told me God had used this disease to purify his heart. God was not present in a miracle cure or even in any “ordinary” cure. The chemo failed and the bone marrow transplant failed. Massive prayer on his behalf failed. It was not God’s will that Gary would survive his leukemia, but Gary felt the closeness of God in a sense that those who live without tragedy and suffering might never experience. Gary’s providence-detector wasn’t set to his physical comfort, but to spiritual development through trial.
God clearly tells us that He is very close to us when we suffer, and these chastenings are clearly acts of providence. If our providence-detector fails to register them, then we ask, “Where is God?” when He’s sitting right next to us. Scripture teaches us that through physical and emotional pain and privation we develop dependence on God, faith, perspective on life, priorities, and more (e.g., James 1:12, Heb 12:5-11).
Eagles’ wings only?
“They that wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
They will mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint” (Isa 40:31).
Some time ago I heard a powerful meditation on this beloved passage. The speaker was a minister who had lost a young daughter to leukemia. He recounted his prayers and hopes for God’s miracle deliverance. That didn’t happen. He recounted his prayers that the doctors could find a cure or somehow bring remediation of her disease. That didn’t happen, either. When his daughter died, in his hour of utter despair, he prayed only that somehow God could give him strength to go on just one day at a time.
The speaker related his experience in terms of the three metaphors in Isaiah 40:31. Sometimes we mount up on eagles’ wings; that’s when God works an obvious miracle and rescues us from dreadful circumstance. Sometimes there’s no miracle, but God does provide (often subtly and indirectly) the means by which we can resolve the problems that beset us, and thus we run and do not grow weary. Lastly, there are those times when we neither fly nor run, but we do manage to walk without fainting. There is neither deliverance nor resolution, but we manage to walk anyway, while God’s presence keeps our burdens from crushing us.
Miracles still happen, and I don’t discount anyone’s tale of deliverance or rescue that is attributed to Divine intervention. I’m also quite sure that God works in many ways that we fail to recognize because we have our providence-detectors set on “rescue”. However, God is most present when we walk and do not faint. It is when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune overwhelm us, when the whips and scorns of time assail us, when we don’t fly anywhere but sink in a sea of troubles… it is then we are most likely to encounter the God of providence. It may be our false expectation that God works only in “eagles’ wings” experiences that quashes our sensitivity to His loving presence at all other times.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One