The purpose of God is pursued in His providence. What He designs to do He sees done. This we know by faith. It is by faith that, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, we hold fast our belief that the world is not abandoned by Him, but remains the sphere wherein He still- acts. Not indeed always with the effortless word, for in the things of the spirit He is limited by the attitude of His creatures whom He has endowed with a measure of independence and free will. And therefore, while in the realm of matter His will moves triumphantly and directly to its end, in the realm of spirit it is often only through thwarting and disappointment, by unchosen and unwelcome ways, that He attains His goal. And the Christian watches the vexatious disappointment and agonizing delay, and is tempted to despair. But it is the victory of faith that he believes in God, not simply as the Creator of the universe, but as its ever-active Lord who will, in spite of all suspense and postponement, at last bring all opposition to an end and reign as the unchallenged King of kings.
1. Creation by a good God carries with it the ideas of purpose in creating and providence in bringing this purpose to fulfilment. A God who is Father must have at heart the highest welfare of His children; and one who is Almighty will pursue that welfare till it is secured. This faith in God’s providence, to which our hearts thus give in their assent, we as a matter of fact owe—like the rest of our belief in God—to the revelation in the Scriptures, of which the main topic is the gradual working out of God’s good purpose in Israel, and through Israel for the world. The Jewish prophets laid their chief stress on Jehovah’s mercy and truth, or, as we should say, His love and faithfulness. Having promised to bless the world by their means, He brought “them out of Egypt, guarded them in the wilderness, subdued before them the land of Canaan, and by judges and kings and prophets trained them in His ways; ever holding out before them some new hope if they would be willing and obedient. From the first, emphasis is laid on the fatherly care and zeal of Jehovah. His very name is said by some scholars to imply the limitlessness of His goodwill to His people: the sense being not “I am that I am,” but “I will be what I will be.” He was Jehovah, “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in goodness and truth.”
How exquisitely is God’s fatherly lovingkindness to Israel expressed in that ancient song in Deu_32:10 : “He found him in a desert land, and in a waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him; he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: so the Lord alone did lead him.” And the prophets are full of assurances of God’s continual love and pity, despite desperate ingratitude on the part of Israel The evangelical prophet describes God as bearing all the troubles of His people.
“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.” Without any counting of the cost, the fatherly love of God pursued its purpose. [Note: H. C. Beeching, The Apostles’, Creed, 31.]
2. This prophetic revelation of God’s Fatherhood has been almost superseded by the revelation in Jesus Christ, who showed on the one hand the utmost that God’s love would do and bear to bring man to his goal, while on the other He showed that man found his true life and happiness in responding to that Divine love. But even so, even for us who believe in the Father not so much through the prophets as through the Son, faith still retains its character as a confidence which is less than proof, owing to the experiences that still remain unreconciled. Christ gave us no final solution of the problem how evil can exist in a world which is governed by the fatherly love of almighty power.
The Apostles’ Creed was very probably framed to meet the teaching of the heretic Marcion, who in the second century found this very problem of evil his stone of stumbling. Believing that evil was a property of matter, he denied that the supreme God could be the God who created matter, and so he was forced to distinguish the creating God of the Old Testament from the redeeming God of the New Testament. The former he regarded as an inferior deity, just indeed, but not loving, who did His best, but was obliged to punish His creatures for disobedience; the latter was the supreme God who took pity on men and sent His Son to save them. Of course such a theory, which separated righteousness from love, justice from mercy, was no solution of the difficulty, and only made havoc of the Bible, by ignoring the tenderness of the God of the Old Testament and the holiness of the God of the New. Moreover, it destroyed all belief in the providence of God. A God who did not make mankind, and had no purpose in them, but simply took pity on them in a crisis, was entitled to such gratitude as would befit the Good Samaritan in our Lord’s parable, but had no claim to obedience, or co-operation, or filial love. And so the Church would have none of Marcion’s explanations of the difficulty; but expressed in clear words the truth of which it was sure, despite its difficulties—“I believe in God the all-ruling Father.” [Note: Ibid. 33]
3. Regarding God’s providence two views are held with more or less distinctness: the belief in what is technically defined as special providence, and the belief in that which may be called general providence. The terms are inadequate, but we may use them for convenience. According to the first view every element of life and every event in life is specially adapted to the special needs of each individual, so that if special suffering comes to a man, or special joy, there is the question why this joy or suffering should have come to this particular individual. According to the other view the laws of nature are invariable, and every spirit alike is subject to them. Therefore when this or that experience comes to an individual, he does not ask why the special event should have happened to him, but sees in it one manifestation of the forces by which all men are surrounded. According to the first view, a man’s relation to the world is like a bath that has been specially prepared in accordance with the directions of the physician, with just such qualities to the water, and just such temperature, and so on. According to the other view, the relation is like bathing in the ocean, where there is no preparation for the individual, but the same surf beats upon all alike.
It may be asked, where, if we take this latter view, is the possibility of recognizing any providence at all? Where is there any opportunity for faith? The difference, however, between the two views is largely one of detail. There is opportunity for precisely the same sort of faith in the one case as in the other, the faith in an absolute ordering of events. Only according to the second view we assume that the Divine providence has ordained this subjection of man to a system of invariable law as the best method of education for the spiritual life, recognizing that in a world where laws might be suspended, where the action of forces might vary according to every varying need, the soul would lose its, strength and vigour.
There are unseen elements which often frustrate our wisest calculations—which raise up the sufferer from the edge of the grave, contradicting the prophecies of the clear-sighted physician, and fulfilling the blind clinging hopes of affection; such unseen elements Mr. Tryan called the Divine Will, and filled up the margin of ignorance which surrounds all our knowledge with the feelings of trust and recognition. Perhaps the profoundest philosophy could hardly fill it up better. [Note: George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance.]
4. However we regard the question of a general and a particular providence, one thing is certain, that without some view of providence the soul cannot rest and religion cannot exist. All that religion demands is the recognition of an. infinite spirit of love into relation with which the finite spirit is brought. And every man must by faith make this recognition for himself. When our Lord addresses His disciples, “Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” we can have no doubt of the sense in which He employs the word “faith.” No one can question that He means by it, that confidence in God’s protection which their observation of His care for the lowest parts of His creation ought to imprint upon the hearts of every one of His children—who should feel that they are objects of far warmer love and of far tenderer care. A glance at the whole passage will show that it is designed to condemn, in God’s children, all that unreasonable solicitude about life and its wants in which they are so prone to indulge—to banish a doubtful mind concerning the supply of our necessities, by the recollection that our heavenly Father knoweth that we (each one of us) have need of these things.
Here in the country’s heart,
Where the grass is green,
Life is the same sweet life
As it e’er hath been.
Trust in a God still lives,
And the bell at morn
Floats with a thought of God
O’er the rising corn.
God comes down in the rain,
And the crop grows tall—
This is the country faith
And the best of all! [Note: Norman Gale, Collected Poems, 5.]
5. But it is one thing to be in God’s hands—as we all most surely are; it is another thing to know that this is so. The sense of dependence is easily lost. God does not stamp all His gifts with the broad seal of heaven. The one Divine touch that testifies to the other-world origin of life’s commonest bounty is sometimes like the hall-mark on precious metal-work—put where you won’t see it unless you look for it.
Do we look out for God’s providence? Have we the eye of faith? We have our dull and ignominious times, when nothing seems to prosper with us, when we feel as if everything Divine were remote or unreal, when our prayers have been so long unanswered that we begin seriously to doubt whether prayer avails. To have an eye for things spiritual makes all the difference at these times. The veil that hides the forces which really rule this world is lifted, and we see things in their true relations. We see the swift couriers of Jehovah incessantly streaming in from all parts of the earth, we see that there is nothing unobserved, and that He to whom this detailed information is present does not wait to be urged or prompted to action, but that with gravity, earnestness, and impassioned tenderness, He interposes at the fitting juncture. While we are thinking that our efforts to set matters right are not observed or regarded by any higher power, there is a grave and comprehensive consideration of our affairs, a sense of responsibility which accepts and discharges the management of all human interests, an efficient activity to which ours is as negligence.
