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"The Providence of God" Text Comment v.14 The Bible does not recommend such a procedure to us. Whether the Lord simply accommodated himself to this man's well-meant though presumptuous wish or the man had some instruction to proceed in this way is not said. But we are not given reason in the Bible to conclude that God will guide us in this way. And v. 21 suggests that even he may have understood that the Lord might not have agreed to this plan. In any case, what lies behind the plan is simply a shrewd test of character. The kind of girl he wants for Isaac is a woman with a generous and hospitable spirit, and the test is stiff enough to show up someone lacking in this regard, for not only did the servant need water, but he had 10 camels with him that needed watering as well. v.15 An "arrow prayer." And, as quickly asked, quickly answered. "Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear" (Isaiah 65:24). v.16 Her virginity may have been indicated by her dress; or the reader may be here given information that was learned only later by the servant. v.20 This in other words was enthusiastic hospitality. v.21 It takes a long time to water ten camels. v.22 We learn from v. 47 that he put these pieces of jewelry on her at this time. One of a number of texts in the Bible that celebrate the cultivation of beauty with jewelry, cosmetics, etc. even as the proudful use of such things or pride in one's appearance is condemned. v.24 In other words, he had come looking for a woman from Abraham's clan, and the Lord had taken him straight to Isaac's cousin. v.27 He began with prayer seeking help from the Lord; he finishes with prayer giving thanks for that help. Success, which inflates the ego of the natural man, humbles the spiritual man. His first thought is of the Lord who granted him this kindness, his second for his master for whom this will be the most happy development, and only last for himself: And as for me -- for me -- he led me straight to the house of my master's relatives. JOY: Jesus first, others second, yourself last! In verse 12 we read that Abraham's servant asked the Lord to give him success. That is the way the English versions (KJV, NIV, NASB, RSV) translate the text and that is what the servant means to be sure. But the verb literally reads, "make it happen in front of me" or "cause it to occur for me." It expresses the fact of the Lord's providential overruling and ordering of all events. "Providence" in Christian doctrine is, as our Shorter Catechism has it, "God's most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions." You might wonder why that doctrine is not called "God's Rule" or "God's control" instead of God's providence. But this is an old use of the word "providence" which comes from the Latin verb meaning "to see beforehand" or "to provide for beforehand." And that is the thought, God has prepared ahead of time for everything that happens in the world and all falls out according to that plan. In Christian theology, the doctrine of divine providence usually is said to have three parts or dimensions: 1) conservation, by which is meant, that after God made the world and all things he preserves it and keeps it going; 2) concurrence or concursus, by which is meant God's cooperation with second causes, so that any result or event or creaturely action can be ascribed both to God and to the second cause (We can say, that is, and say correctly that God sends the rain or that rain results from a process of evaporation and condensation effected by such forces as humidity, temperature, etc.). As Calvin writes in the Institutes, "God's providence does not always meet us in its naked form, but God in a sense clothes it with the means employed" [I, xvii, 4]; 3) government, by which is meant God's ordering of all things and all events to an end and eventually to the final end. In other words, the providence of God means that there is a purpose, God's purpose, in everything that happens. So, we can define God's providence as "the continuing act of divine power, subsequent to the act of creation, by means of which God preserves all things in being, supports their actions, governs them according to his established order, and directs them toward their ordained ends" [Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, p. 251.]. It is this doctrine, taught repeatedly and emphatically in Holy Scripture, in such statements as "not a sparrow falls from the tree apart from the will of your heavenly Father" and God is he "who works out everything according to the purpose of his own will" -- I say it is this doctrine that lies behind the Christian's confidence that "even the hairs of his head are numbered," "that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose," and "every day was ordered for us before their was a one of them." This is the same basis upon which Abraham's servant offered his prayer. He was speaking to a God he knew to be in absolute control of everything, who held the march of events, even down to the smallest detail, in the palm of his hand. Some years ago (1984) lightning struck the roof of the great Minster in York, England -- one of the world's greatest church buildings -- and burned and gutted one large section. The church had just been refurbished at the cost of great sums. Now what made this interesting was that this happened just a few days after a liberal Anglican priest had been installed as bishop in an impressive ceremony full of pomp and glory in that same cathedral. This new bishop was a man who had made no bones about his beliefs or lack of same. He denied the deity of Jesus Christ, the miracles of the Lord, and his resurrection from the dead, among other things. Well, you can imagine the furor in the British tabloids. Some said that God had struck the cathedral in his wrath to express his displeasure that a man who denied the resurrection of Christ should be made a bishop in his church. Others as confidently assured the public that God would never do such a thing, loving and generous as he is. But, the debate generally missed the main point. Of course God was behind the lightning strike -- whether or not we can discern all of his purpose -- because he is behind everything, absolutely everything. Not the slightest thing happens in this world -- from the growth of hairs on your head -- a process of terrific biochemical complexity -- to the movement of armies and the rise and fall of nations, that is not ultimately from him. We do not deny that there may have been many causes leading to the death of Princess Diana -- the high speed at which the car was driving, the intoxication of the driver of the car, the pursuing papparazzi, and perhaps other things as well. But, if we ask finally what was the cause of that fatal accident, no Christian can say anything else but that it was the will of God. As it was his will that Mother Theresa should die so soon after the Princess. As it was his will that there should be such a paroxysm of emotion following upon these deaths. As it was his will that Elton John should sing at the Princess' funeral, as it was his will that the weather that day should be as it was on that day, and on and on concerning the tiniest details and the largest dimensions of these events. We do not presume to be able to tell all that God intended by these events, what purposes he had in bringing them to pass, but that they were his will we do not doubt if we are Christians. As C.S. Lewis put it, "No doubt all history in the last resort must be held by Christians to be a story with a divine plot." Now, the Bible assumes the divine providence most of the time. Only from time to time is it explicitly stated, but often enough and plainly enough so that we have no excuse if we forget. Joseph told his brothers that, though it was pure wickedness in them that led them to sell him into slavery in Egypt, God was behind all of that accomplishing his own ends: you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Or, in another case, after Abigail had stopped David from murdering Nabal, her idiot of a husband, David, upon reflection, recognized the Lord's hand in all of it. "Praise be to the Lord [i.e. it was not Abigail in the final analysis, but the Lord] who has kept me from doing wrong..." (1 Sam. 25:39). Or, in another classic instance of concursus or concurrence, we read that the Devil tempted David to number the people in 1 Chronicles 21:1 but, in the parallel passage in 2 Samuel 24:1 we read that God, angry with Israel, incited David to number the people. Both God and the Devil can be thought of as the cause of a single event. Even the Devil can do God's work for him, one of many instances in Holy Scripture in which, as my old pastor William Still used to put it, "God uses sin sinlessly." Even the wicked acts of men are under the control of the Holy God, however difficult it may be for us to understand how that is so. The point is, of course, that there is no true accident ever in the world, that, as the church father Basil of Caesarea wrote in his commentary on Psalm 32: "fortune," and "chance" are pagan terms. Even in the day of state-sponsored lotto and quinto it remains the case that "the lot is cast into the lap, but every decision is from the Lord." Of course, we do not know what God intends and has planned, and we are neither able nor supposed to live our lives in the expectation of knowing God's secrets in advance. We are to keep his commandments and live by prayer and we will find out what God has planned as the events unfold. After all, the servant didn't know what would happen at the well. What if he had arrived a half-hour later and Rebekah had already left. The whole history of the world might have been different. Or, as Pascal says, with some humor, in the Pensees, "if only Cleopatra had had a shorter nose, the entire history of the world would have been changed!" Mark Antony wouldn't have fallen in love with her because she wouldn't have been so strikingly beautiful; there wouldn't have been the falling out between Antony and Caesar; there would not have been a battle of Actium; Augustus wouldn't have become Caesar; there wouldn't have been a pax Romana allowing the Apostle Paul so easily to evangelize Europe; and on and on...if only Cleopatra had had a shorter nose! But, of course, her nose and her beauty -- like Rebekah's --, Pascal is reminding us, was all part of God's plan and that plan could no more fail than God could cease to be God. Or as one older Reformed theologian wrote: "to deny providence is to deny God." But only from time to time does God's providence break to the surface as it did here in Genesis 24 or does in the case of Joseph and his brothers or, over and again, in the life of God's people in the world, when events unfold in such a way as to cause the very hand of God to appear to those with eyes to see. As when Cecile Huntsman's death and that of her brother, fifteen years younger, occurred within a day of each other. Or, when the Southern Presbyterian evangelist, Daniel Baker, one of the great preachers of American church history, had his wagon break down near Charlotte Court House, Virginia as he was moving his family to Ohio in 1831. While awaiting the repairs he was invited to preach and there was such a response to his preaching that he did not leave for over a year, with more than a thousand being brought to faith in Christ during those months. What would have happened to those thousand souls if Daniel Baker's wagon wheel hadn't hit that rock? Or, when John Gifford, the royalist major, irreligious and profane, to everyone's dismay, escaped from the Puritan army prison during the English Civil war, and made his way to Bedford to become the town doctor, later falling under the spell of divine grace, eventually becoming the pastor of the town, and the Holy Mr. Gifford who was so influential in the spiritual awakening of John Bunyan and who is immortalized as "Evangelist" in Pilgrim's Progress. What if he had not escaped; what if he had been kept in prison. No John Bunyan, no Pilgrim's Progress, no Alexander Whyte writing his four wonderful volumes on the Bunyan Characters, and on and on. But it was all in God's hands, from the tiniest details to the fulfillment of the greatest purposes. In this these "demonstrations" of divine providence are like sudden and dramatic conversions, what the old Puritans used to call "election conversions." Conversions like Paul's, or Augustine's, or that of Charles Wesley or Spurgeon or Chuck Colson, involve no power, no grace, no new birth, no profound spiritual change, no working of the Holy Spirit any different in kind or principle than that which happens in the case of infant who is saved in the womb or someone whose pilgrimage to faith in Christ is so long and complicated that he or she is unable to identify later even exactly when it was that he or she crossed over from death to life. We see it more clearly in the one case than in the other, but it is the same in both. And so with the providence of God. We see it more clearly in dramatic events that God orchestrates in such a way as to prove his rule over human history, but that rule is there just as certainly in the ordinary run of daily life, when we rarely think of God's absolute rule over all. The pervasive experience of emptiness and meaninglessness in the modern world, the acceptance of the exaggerated claims of science to have explained the world in naturalistic terms, and the diminishment of the authority of the Bible upon the mind and consciousness of the church have led, in our day, to a situation in which even for evangelical Christians the doctrine of God's providence -- his control over the world -- has ceased to be an influential part of their worldview. Christians don't deny that God is in control, in some degree, it is just that the idea lacks weight and conviction and authority. It is, of course, as it has always been, a doctrine of pure faith. One cannot actually see a hand from heaven orchestrating events or hear a divine voice ordering developments. We know that God is in control because he has told us he is and because he has demonstrated that control to us who are his children in so many different ways through our lives. But, still for the believer, it is an act of faith to understand all events, of every kind, both great and very small, as being under the direction of our Heavenly Father who is working out everything according to the counsel of his will. It is, of course, easier to believe in the providence of God, when that providence seems to smile on you as it did on this faithful servant of Abraham. It is easier to believe that God is orchestrating the events of your life when those events are so pleasing to you. But, the Bible seems even more determined to remind us that when our lives are heavy and full of trouble, that too is from the Lord and this is as much his will as the other.
But, what is perfectly clear in Holy Scripture is how vital an active consciousness of the divine providence is to the practice of believing life, to Christian godliness. It made this servant a man of prayer. His knowledge of God's control, his rule, his superintendence of all things, even the smallest things, made him all the more naturally turn to God as the one who could actually make a difference. One wishes, first and foremost, to speak to the man in charge! It did not, interestingly, put him off praying, as if the knowledge of God's absolute control of human affairs made prayer unnecessary -- God will do what he has willed and nothing we do can effect that! -- which is the way some, even some in the church, have sometimes argued. In his own way, he knew that he was to pray and that God's rule and control in no way robbed prayer of its power or effect. Whether he thought in these terms or not, he knew that the secret things belong to God and that the things revealed -- such as the duty and the power of prayer -- belonged to us and to our children. The Bible says both things -- that God is in control and that prayer changes things -- and does not require us to be able to understand in just what way God relates means to ends in fulfilling his purposes in the world. We are simply told that the means are as important to him as the ends. It was not only that Rebekah be found for Isaac, but that she be found in answer to the servant's prayer. Such is the providence of an all-wise God. And, second, his belief in the providence of God made this servant, further, a student of affairs, a careful observer of life. Verse 21, a perfect example, by the way, of the art of telling a story, of Moses' narrative flair, is intended to be a picture of how you and I ought to live our lives as well, every day, all the time. He had prayed, he had entrusted this matter to God, and now he watched intently to see what God would bring to pass. This is the subjective response of the Christian's objective belief in the divine rule of all things. It makes all of life, everything in life, the act and the doing of God. What it means to say that God rules over all, that not a sparrow falls from a tree apart from his will, is that there is nothing, nothing, that is without meaning, nothing that God did not plan from eternity past, nothing that he has not seen fit to have happen as it happened, just as it happened: my car trouble the other day, that assignment your teacher gave you, that hour you spent looking for something you lost, that misunderstanding that has complicated your relationship with another, that twinge that made you worry that there might be something wrong with your body, that medical report that confirmed that there is, that you are sitting where you are sitting in church this morning and on and on ad infinitum! I say, what it means is that the world is charged with meaning; your life is supercharged with meaning, because God means something, intends something, by everything in your life! Or in Jeremiah's phrase, your daily life comes out of God's mouth! And you should be, therefore, able to see yourself in Abraham's servant, sitting by that well, watching intently the events as they unfold, wondering what God has done and will do. I do not say that you can find out God's meaning and purposes in most things. Surely you cannot. Nor do I deny that many of God's providences confuse us terribly. In this world, as the Scripture many times makes clear, that servant might well have thought Rebekah was the one for Isaac, only to discover later that she would not go back to the Promised Land or that she had been already betrothed to another.
As more than one writer has pointed out through the ages, our life is like a weaver's web. We see only the back side, the wrong side, as it were, with all of its knots and no clear pattern. It is only when it is turned over and we see it as God has always seen, and when the work is finished, that the beautiful design is visible to all. Samuel Rutherford is quainter still. He is pointing out that God's providence has two sides -- one dark, one light, one sad, the other joyful, but it is the same providence. For example: Christ is scourged, crucified, in such a state that he cannot command a cup of water; he is shamed, forsaken. That is the dark side. But, Christ in that same work, in that same state, is redeeming the captives of hell, opening to sinners the Paradise they forfeited, and that is the bright side. He goes on,
We are all inclined to say to one another "Isn't the Lord good!" when he has given us something we have long wanted or has protected us from some harm or has made us happy in some other way. But, the fact is, the Lord is no less good, no less loving, no less tenderly inclined toward us as our Father, no less applying to us the benefits of Christ's redemption when our circumstances are dark and difficult. "All things work together for good to those who love God..." and Paul means by that not the good things, of course, for no one doubts that they work together for good, but the bad things, the heavy things, the hard things, the things he goes on to mention in the following verses: nakedness, famine, and sword. God does not tell us what he is doing or why nor what he will do tomorrow. He intends that we should live by faith. But it is essential for us to know that He is the one doing all these things, that he has our lives and all reality besides, entirely under his control to ensure that it accomplishes the plans he has for the world and every life in the world. This is a doctrine that is intended to make God great and high before our eyes; a doctrine that should make us humble before God and one another, but strong before kings. For this is truth that founds all that is on the eternal rock of one absolute sovereign and levels all other sovereigns in the dust. It renders God and Christ infinitely great and the believing sinner infinitely secure. It extinguishes fear, makes victory certain, nerves the saints, and makes both heart and arm strong. The man to whom there is no God is an atheist. But there are many to whom the influence of God is vague and uncertain, even, alas, among believers. But the Christian is to be the one who altogether lives and moves and has his being in the present, active, ruling God. All things were created by him and for him; he is before all things and in him all things hold together. "And this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide, even to the end." [Psalm 48:14] |
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