The Consolation of Providence

Christians believe in providence, which holds that God is the wise and sovereign governor of all creation. But what is providence for?

Unlike some doctrines, this one refuses to stay in the study or pulpit. Providence makes public claims—about the public, the shared space and time in which we all live together. It gets called in to do work whenever something momentous happens. 

Not just Christians, but most people look at an event and point and wonder, Is this the work of God? And if so—or at least, if it unfolded in accordance with God’s purposes—does that give the event a stamp of divine approval? 

That’s what many of us are after, if we would admit it: confidence that God is with us, with our tribe, or with our country. Though often bent into a too-narrow shape, this longing is the right one; it’s an instinctive search for Immanuel. It’s a question, therefore, that we should keep asking, but we should do so while on guard against easy answers or convenient solutions.

Claims and counterclaims of providential affirmation invariably intensify during election seasons and the interregnum period that follows. And this political year has been especially rocky. A presidential candidate was nearly assassinated—more than once. The sitting president announced he would not run for reelection. November was heralded, as it is every cycle, as the most important vote of our lifetime, its stakes existential.

I’m writing these words before that vote is counted, and you’ll likely read them after the winner—and whatever else awaits us between Election Day and the Inauguration (not to say Judgment Day)—is revealed. But the very point of the doctrine of providence is that I don’t need to know that outcome to trust that God will be with us in the weeks to come.

In fact, the doctrine of providence has a number of roles to perform, and one of them is to turn down the volume on the frantic speculation to which we are prone in such moments. Providence isn’t a decoder ring for history, and it certainly isn’t for the present. To switch metaphors, it’s got bigger fish to fry. 

But that’s not to downplay its power. Providence is a lifeline for Christians in a fallen world where chaos threatens to overwhelm us. But we need to understand what it is and what it teaches before we can receive the consolation it is meant to offer.

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Providence begins and ends with God, his identity and activity. God alone is maker, sustainer, and savior. “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens” (Ps. 96:5). Loving what he has made, God rules wisely over his creation. As part of his rule, he orders all things to their final end in himself.

Providence is the word Christians use for this hidden, ordered provision guiding history to its appointed terminus. Every book of the Bible testifies to this divine prudence, though one could construct a theology of providence out of nothing but the Psalms, perhaps even Psalm 104 alone. There we learn of God’s universal creative power, his unrivaled sovereignty, and his immediate, active care:

These all look to thee,
to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them, they gather it up;
when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things.
When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed;
when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created;
and thou renewest the face of the ground. (vv. 27–30, RSV)

Absent the Lord’s hand, the history of not only humanity but the whole universe would be meaningless. Lacking all order, it would have no
rationale or goal. 

Thankfully, the universe is not meaningless. God’s providential care is boundless. “All things are subject to divine providence,” writes medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, “not only in general, but even in their own individual selves.” Or take Augustine in the fifth century, in a more elaborate passage from his treatise On the Trinity:

The whole of creation is governed by its creator, from whom and by whom and in whom (Rom 11:36) it was founded and established. And thus God’s will is the first and highest cause of all [creatures and events]. For nothing happens visibly and in a manner perceptible to the senses which does not issue either as a command or as a permission from the inmost invisible and intelligible court of the supreme emperor, according to his unfathomable justice of rewards and punishments, favors and retributions, in what we may call this vast and all-embracing republic of the whole creation.

Let me unpack these claims, because although they are dense, they are universal across Christian tradition. Three are paramount, and simply stated.

First, God’s providence is comprehensive; nothing is excluded from it. Second, God wills some things actively, and these are “incontrovertibly good,” as the seventh-century monk John of Damascus puts it in Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Third, God permits other things, and these are defects, errors, sufferings, or evils, including those of the political variety.

At this point, differences arise between theologians and denominations—the position of sin in relation to God’s plan, the reason he allows evil, and the role and character of fallen human will—but agreement is firm on this point: Nothing falls outside the sovereign power of God. Nothing is outside his providential grasp. If anything were, then some things would exceed his reach. And if that were true, God would be unable to save us. Either providence is all-encompassing or our redemption is in jeopardy.

That’s not to say the world is as it should be. If it were, Jesus wouldn’t command us to pray that God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Such a prayer would be redundant if the status quo left nothing to be desired. In that case, earth would already be heaven.

But providence holds together two truths in a single mystery: Regarding God, “everything that he wills comes to pass,” John of Damascus says. If that weren’t true, God wouldn’t be God. God is good and does good; he abhors sin; he cannot be an author of evil. 

Regarding us, we do what is wrong: We sin, transgress, and turn away from God’s love. And because of our first sin, this world is sunk in evil and death—the two very enemies opposed to life that God sent his Son to defeat.

Taken together, it appears that the horizon of God’s will overlooks or permits—with patience but never resignation—rebellion and defection from his manifest purposes for our good. But he never causes, desires, or blesses those evils.

Hence, providence does not mean that evil does not happen. Providence means that evil is not ultimate, that it does not and will not have the last word. It means, further, that in spite of the evils we witness and suffer, God has not abandoned us; the story is not without a plot; the author has not lost control of his narrative. 

As theologian John Webster puts it in an essay on the doctrine, “Providence is not asserted on the basis of the insignificance of evil but on the basis of the belief that God outbids any and all evil.”

Indeed, in his famous treatise on The Bondage of the Will, Reformer Martin Luther once observed that if all we had to go on was the evidence of the world, we would conclude that God is evil or must not exist. 

Providence, therefore, is not an empirical doctrine; it’s not a reasonable guess based on the way our lives go. Rather, it’s a confession of faith in God incarnate, the God of Calvary, whose death on a cross seemed to almost every onlooker to refute his message.

Providence, in short, makes a promise. It says that human history may sometimes seem like one long crucifixion, but at the end of it lies an empty tomb. Confidence in providence thus begets perseverance. It takes God at his word no matter how dark life becomes.

According to each of the theologians I’ve cited, the truth of providence has great theological stakes because it is rooted in the nature of God, both his goodness and his power. His goodness, because the evils of the world seem to belie it; his power, because none but God can bring good out of evil. The watchword for providence in all ages is Joseph’s response to his brothers: You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good (Gen. 50:20).

John of Damascus saw two sides to providence: a practical charge and a theoretical danger. On one hand, with a view to the life of faith, he writes that “when they are accepted with thanksgiving, all the vexatious things that happen to us are laid upon us for our salvation and most certainly become occasions of benefit for us.” On the other hand, he warns that “the ways of God’s providence are many and can neither be explained in words nor grasped by the mind.”

Put these together, and you come to see that providence is a call not for speculation but for action. It is a gospel truth built on the rock of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, meant for our consolation and hope in the face of trials, sufferings, and calamities. Providence names a mystery deep in the heart of the church’s life, one that explains her courage, her boldness, her stubborn refusal to shrink back from faith. Providence is a secret whispered from one martyr to another until the end of time.

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We’re now far afield from contemporary political turmoil, and rightly so. The church’s teaching about providence preexists American and modern politics. It stands wholly independent of the day’s news. 

In the summer of 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazis’ intrusion into church affairs, Swiss theologian Karl Barth composed a plea for Christians to stay faithful to the gospel. He asserted that, for his part, he would carry on with theology as if nothing had happened. 

This bald claim has scandalized many of his readers over the past century, even as it did at the time. But Barth didn’t mean that Christ-ians should remain aloof from the events of their era. This is the same man, after all, who the following year helped draft the Barmen Declaration against Nazi influence in the German churches. By saying he would carry on as if nothing had happened, then, Barth meant that the gospel stands or falls on its own terms, not the world’s. 

The axis of history turns on the resurrection of Jesus. If Hitler or Stalin could bend the arc of history to their will—if theology had to “change” in light of later events—then God would not be sovereign. A rival would sit on the throne, and our trust in his promise would be called into question.

Providence, therefore, is not affected by the news. But neither is it rendered inert by current events. True, we’re not meant to speculate; that would mean looking at providence rather than using it, properly, as a lens to view our lives. Looking through providence, we see a fallen creation governed by its loving Lord, not random atoms colliding aimlessly or human happenings devoid of meaning and, often, full of terror.

This is why it is perfectly reasonable for people to wonder about God’s involvement in shocking, significant, unexpected, or improbable events. The conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the battle of Tours, the rout of the Spanish Armada, the evacuation of Dunkirk—many Christians, rightly or wrongly, believed they could discern the Lord’s hand in these events. 

The trick is to avoid cherry-picking. Vulgar providentialism sees the smile of heaven in any happy occurrence and its absence whenever things—whether in reality or from our own perspective—go wrong. Worse, such convenient providentialism can become confirmation bias projected onto history: When my guy wins, when my policy passes, when my promotion goes through, I know that I was right because God is telling me so. Of course, when my guy loses or my policy fails or my promotion stalls, I don’t assume I was wrong all along. I know that life’s not that simple.

Here’s the difficult truth: The sheer fact that something has happened—that God willed or allowed it to happen—tells us nothing whatsoever about the thing itself. It may be a cause for celebration or lament or, more likely, a mixture of both. On their own, events are illegible. We may never know in the moment what God is up to, much less how God might work good out of some bewildering or shocking occurrence. 

Wise discernment and faithful response are a long game, so long that you and I may not live to know the answer. Sifting history for the work of God is thus a task for a community, not an individual, over a span of centuries, not weeks or months or the few moments it takes to post on social media. At any given time, what seems like a very good thing may turn out for ill, just as a very bad thing may turn out for blessing. The people of God must be patient. Spiritual hindsight is the prerogative of the church, and even then it’s touch and go.

For these reasons, providence is an ill-shapen tool for imprinting Christ-ian approval on current events, and this realization should help believers turn popular recourse to providence inside out. Far from a means of explaining why something has happened, it should instead become an occasion for humility: We simply do not know. Our trust in God remains unshaken, but rarely if ever can we predict or unveil his purposes with confidence. We know the final outcome—each of our graves vacant in a flash (1 Cor. 15:52)—not the twists and turns by which it will arrive.

Scripture supplies many examples of this fundamental ambiguity of providence. Foreign empires appear on Israel’s borders. Is this from God? Yes, it is. They threaten to attack God’s people. Is this too from God? Yes—though repentance could change their fate. Soldiers lay waste to the temple and perpetrate injustice against the innocent. Could this also be from God? Well, the answer is complicated. Isaiah 47 reveals that God did employ the Babylonians to punish Israel but they went too far; now he will raise up another empire to punish them for their transgressions.

Or consider ancient Israel’s monarchy. A line of kings is a key component of God’s purposes for Jacob’s children, for it will culminate in Jesus. Yet when the people beg for a king, it is an act of mistrust on their part; they spurn the Lord in order to be like the other nations (1 Sam. 8:4–9). And as it turns out, Saul, David, and many of David’s descendants often prove disastrous for Israel. The lesson for us: Be careful what you wish for. And perhaps also: Be cautious in divining the Lord’s will. In the moment, it may seem clear what he is doing and why. In the long run, though, you may live to regret your rush to judgment.

And yet: Out of the long disaster of the Davidic kingship God brought Jesus, the Son of David and the final king of Israel. It only took a thousand years. Perhaps it will likewise take a millennium for keen-eyed observers to gain true clarity on our own political trials and conflicts.

In any case, the rule stands: For all Christians, whether Calvinist or Methodist, Catholic or Baptist, providence is by nature ambiguous. God permits things; God wills things; God does things. We do not always know which is which, and we very rarely know why—and never without a long backward glance. Even when we are sure God’s hand was at work in an event, his purposes are likely to be obscure, especially to contemporaries. 

We must remember to root the doctrine of providence in the good news of Christ—his cross and resurrection, his love and promises for his people, his pledge to be with us to the end. Recast in that light, providence doesn’t make history easy to interpret. It makes living through it endurable. 

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.