Devotional 26: Of Providence: Peter stood before the crowd at Pentecost and the words he spoke were a blade th

The Confession Read

Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 5, Section 2

Introduction

Peter stood before the crowd at Pentecost and the words he spoke were a blade that cut in two directions at once. The Holy Spirit had just fallen with the sound of a rushing wind, and the men who had been hiding behind locked doors fifty days earlier were now proclaiming the mighty works of God in languages they had never learned. The crowd was bewildered. Some wondered. Others mocked: they are full of new wine. And Peter rose to explain what was happening by pointing to what had happened seven weeks earlier on a hill outside the city wall. What he said in that moment is one of the most theologically concentrated sentences in Scripture. Speaking of Jesus of Nazareth, Peter declared, "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain" (Acts 2:23). In one breath, Peter affirms two things that the human mind is perpetually tempted to set at war with one another. The crucifixion was no accident that caught heaven by surprise, no tragedy that God permitted with a sigh and then made the best of. It was an event delivered, handed over into history, by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. Before the foundation of the world, it was decreed. Every detail was appointed: the hour, the place, the Roman governor, the soldiers who cast lots, the precise moment when the sky would darken. And yet Peter does not hesitate to say, "ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." The men who drove the nails acted freely, and their act was murder. Their hands were wicked. The guilt was theirs, not God's. Here, in a single sentence, is the doctrine of Section 2 laid bare: God, as first Cause, ordains all things immutably and infallibly, and yet by that same providence, He orders them to come to pass through second causes — in this case, through the free and wicked choices of men who bear full moral responsibility for what they did. This is the deepest riddle that the doctrine of providence presents: the relationship between the sovereign decree of God and the genuine agency of His creatures. Section 1 taught us that God upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all things. Section 2 now tells us how that government relates to the creatures who live under it. Does God's sovereignty swallow up creaturely freedom, turning men into puppets jerked by invisible strings? Does it make the laws of nature a fiction, as though fire does not really burn because only God is the true cause? Or does the reality of creaturely agency, the fact that I make real choices, that fire really burns, that what we call chance really happens, mean that God's decree has gaps, that some things fall outside His governance? To both errors, the Confession answers with a carefully balanced assertion. All things come to pass immutably and infallibly according to God's decree. And all things fall out according to the nature of second causes, whether necessarily, freely, or contingently. These two truths are not enemies. They are the twin pillars on which a biblical understanding of providence must rest.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of second causes is woven into the fabric of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, and it appears with particular sharpness where God's sovereign purpose and human moral responsibility stand side by side without apology or explanation. The chief of these passages appears in Peter's sermon at Pentecost, and we can examine it more closely now, together with three other texts that illuminate the same mystery from different angles. The Greek of Peter's declaration merits close attention. The phrase "determinate counsel" translates horismenē boulē, a term that carries the sense of a boundary drawn, a line fixed, a decision that admits of no revision. The counsel of God is not a deliberation among possible options. It is the settled determination of a will that knows no contingency, a purpose established before the ages began and executed in time with unerring precision. And the word "foreknowledge," prognōsis, is not mere foresight, as though God peered down the corridor of history, saw that the cross would happen, and incorporated it into His plan. In the biblical idiom, to foreknow is to fore-love, to set one's affection upon a person or event in advance. God did not merely see the cross coming. He purposed it. He delivered His Son into the hands of wicked men because the cross was the appointed means by which He would reconcile the world to Himself. Yet the same sentence that traces the cross to the eternal counsel of God traces it also to the temporal decisions of men. "Ye have taken," Peter says. "By wicked hands have crucified and slain." The pronouns are emphatic. You — the men standing before Peter in Jerusalem, the same men who had shouted "Crucify him" before Pilate — you did this. The responsibility is yours, and it is real, and it is damning. Peter does not say, "God used you as passive instruments, and therefore you are not to blame." He accuses them of murder. And when his hearers are "pricked in their heart" and cry out, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Peter does not answer, "Nothing, for God ordained it." He answers, "Repent." The reality of divine decree does not diminish human responsibility by a single degree. The cross is the supreme theatre in which God's horismenē boulē and man's wicked hands are not competitors but coordinates. The Old Testament provides a parallel that is, if anything, even more searching. In the final chapter of Genesis, Joseph stands before the brothers who had hated him, thrown him into a pit, and sold him into slavery. They had spent more than two decades living with the guilt of what they had done, and now the brother they wronged holds their lives in his hand. They are terrified. But Joseph speaks words that have echoed down the centuries as one of the most luminous statements of the doctrine of second causes in Scripture: "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (Genesis 50:20). The Hebrew verb chashab, used twice in this verse, means to plan, to purpose, to devise with deliberate intention. The brothers chashab evil. God chashab good. The same word, the same intensity of purposeful willing, applied both to the sinful intention of the creature and to the holy intention of the Creator. The brothers' plan was truly theirs. They were not puppets; the hatred that moved them rose from the corruption of their own hearts. Yet beneath their plan and above their plan and in and through their plan, God was working His own plan, a plan of such wisdom and goodness that when Joseph finally saw it whole, he could look at the very evil done to him and call it good. Not because the evil was not evil — it was — but because the God who governs all things had so ordered it that the evil became the instrument of a greater good than anyone could have imagined. This is concurrence in narrative form: God's plan working through human plans, neither annihilating the other, both genuinely real. The prophet Isaiah gives us a third angle on the same mystery, cutting against the pride that would make the human agent the ultimate cause of his own actions. God addresses Assyria, the great empire He is about to use as an instrument of judgment against Israel. "O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in their hand is mine indignation" (Isaiah 10:5). Assyria is a tool in the hand of God, an instrument He wields to accomplish His holy purpose. But then comes the twist: "Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few" (Isaiah 10:7). Assyria does not know she is God's instrument. She imagines she is acting for her own imperial ambitions, driven by nothing but lust for conquest. And she is guilty for those ambitions. The following verses pronounce judgment: "Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith? or shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it? as if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up" (Isaiah 10:15). The axe is a real instrument; it really chops. But the axe does not swing itself. The hand that holds it is the hand of God. And the axe is held accountable for imagining otherwise. When the Assyrian soldier raised his sword against an Israelite child, that sword was the rod of God's anger, and yet the hand that held it was a hand of wickedness, and God would judge it. The soldier was not a puppet. He was a willing, eager agent of evil who happened also, without knowing it, to be the agent of a holy God. One more passage deserves attention, bringing the doctrine of second causes from the realm of great historical events into the intimate realm of the believing heart. Writing to the church at Philippi, Paul issues a command that at first seems to place the entire burden of the Christian life on the believer's own shoulders: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). The verb is active, imperative, urgent. You work. You exert effort. There is no hint of passivity, no suggestion that because God is sovereign you may sit back and wait for holiness to arrive like a package in the post. And yet Paul does not leave the matter there. The next verse supplies the ground: "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). The Greek verb energeō, the same root from which we derive "energy", describes an active, effective, unceasing divine operation. God is working in you. His working is the cause of your willing and your doing. And precisely because God is working, you must work. Divine causality does not replace human effort; it enables it, sustains it, and makes it fruitful. Paul does not say, "God works, therefore you need not work." He does not say, "You work, therefore God's working is unnecessary." He holds the two together in the same breath, the same logic, the same reality. The Christian life is a concursus, a running-together of divine energy and human diligence, and neither makes sense without the other.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines understood that the relationship between the first Cause and second causes was not an academic puzzle but a pastoral necessity. Get this wrong in one direction, and you produce Christians who are passive, fatalistic, and irresponsible, waiting for God to do what He has commanded them to do. Get it wrong in the other direction, and you produce Christians who are anxious, self-reliant, and prayerless, acting as though the outcome of their labours depended entirely on themselves. The opening clause establishes the foundation: "Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly." The word "although" signals that what follows is not a qualification but an addition. The immutability and infallibility of God's decree are the given. The decree is the first Cause — not first in a temporal sequence, as though God started the chain and then stepped back, but first in the order of being, the ground on which every other cause rests. Without the first Cause, there would be no second causes at all. And then the Confession turns to the "yet": "Yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently." The phrase "by the same providence" is the theological keystone. God does not ordain things immutably despite second causes, as though they were an obstacle He must overcome. Nor does He ordain them by overriding second causes, as though they were merely apparent. He ordains them by the same providence, the identical governance, by which He rules all things. Divine sovereignty does not violate creaturely causality; it establishes it. The three categories that follow merit close attention. Necessary causes are those that operate by fixed laws and cannot do otherwise: fire burns, the sun rises, water flows downhill. These causes are genuinely real — fire really burns — but they operate of necessity according to the nature God has given them. Free causes are those that operate by rational choice: the decisions of angels and men. When a man chooses to marry, or to take a particular job, or to commit a sin, he chooses freely, from his own will, without external compulsion. His choice is genuinely his own, and he is genuinely responsible for it. Yet his choice is also ordained by God, not by coercing the will but by working through the will. Contingent causes are those that we experience as chance or accident: the fall of a die, the meeting of two friends on a road. These events appear to us to have no determinate created cause, and in one sense they do not — no created cause determines them. But they are not random to God. What we call chance is simply the name we give to events whose created causes we cannot trace. The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord. The Divines were answering specific errors. On one side stood Stoic fatalism, the belief that all things happen by an impersonal destiny that reduces human beings to cogs in a machine. Against this, the Confession insists that second causes are real. Men choose freely. Fire burns necessarily. These are not illusions. They matter. The farmer who does not plant will not harvest, not because God's decree fails but because God's decree includes the means as well as the end. On the other side stood the Arminian limitation of providence to a general oversight that leaves human choices genuinely undetermined, free in a sense that excludes divine ordination. Against this, the Confession insists that all things, not some things, come to pass immutably and infallibly according to God's decree. The freedom of the human will does not place it outside the scope of providence. It means that God governs free causes as free causes, not turning them into necessary ones. The mystery of how this is possible the Confession does not pretend to solve. It simply asserts what Scripture asserts, leaving the "how" in the hands of the God whose ways are past finding out.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of concurrence — the divine working with and through secondary causes — has been developed with care by Reformed theologians, and four voices are worth hearing on this section. Stephen Charnock, whose Discourse on Divine Providence stands among the weightiest treatments of the subject in English, expounds concurrence with clarity. Charnock insists that God's concurrence with second causes is not a general, remote influence but an immediate, particular, and intimate operation. God does not merely set causes in motion and then leave them to their own devices. He works in every act of every creature. When the sun warms the earth, God warms the earth through the sun. When the farmer ploughs the field, God ploughs through the farmer. When the sinner chooses evil, God sustains the choosing — the faculty of will, the act of volition — without infusing the evil of the choice, which arises solely from the creature's corruption. Charnock deploys a now-familiar analogy. The same sun, by the same heat, melts wax and hardens clay. The difference in effect does not proceed from a difference in the sun but from a difference in the materials upon which it acts. So it is with God's concurrence. The same divine operation that softens the heart of the elect hardens the heart of the reprobate. The same providence that draws good out of the obedience of the righteous draws judgment out of the sin of the wicked. God is not the author of the hardness, any more than the sun is the author of the clay's nature. But He is the sovereign Lord who ordains that the same operation shall produce different effects according to the different natures of the creatures. John Owen, in his Display of Arminianism, addresses the question from the angle of human freedom. The Arminian definition of free will, the power of contrary choice with absolute indifference, is not the freedom that Scripture attributes to human beings. True freedom, Owen insists, is not the absence of divine determination but the absence of external compulsion. When a man acts according to his own desires, from the inclination of his own heart, without being forced against his will, he acts freely, whether or not his desires have been determined by God. The sinner who sins does so because he wants to sin. His will is fully engaged, fully consenting, fully responsible. And God's decree, far from violating this freedom, establishes the context in which it operates. God ordains that the sinner shall sin freely, just as He ordained that the redeemed in glory shall worship freely. Freedom is not autonomy from God. It is spontaneity within the sphere of God's decree. Herman Bavinck, in the second volume of his Reformed Dogmatics, traces the threefold distinction between conservation, concurrence, and government, and shows how concurrence means that the same event is at once fully caused by God and fully caused by the creature, each according to its own mode of causality. God causes the act as first Cause, upholding the creature in being, supplying the power to act, directing the act to its appointed end. The creature causes the act as second cause, acting from its own nature, its own powers, its own motives. The two causalities are not in competition because they operate on different planes. God's causality is not one factor among others within the created order, competing with created causes for causal space. It is the transcendent ground without which no created cause could exist or act at all. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession, walks through the three categories with clarity, noting that they correspond to the different kinds of creatures God has made. Inanimate creation operates by necessary laws because God has given it a nature that acts necessarily. Rational creatures operate freely because God has given them wills that choose according to their apprehension of the good. And contingent events occur because God has so ordered His creation that some events shall have no determinate created cause, though they are fully determined by the divine decree. To call an event contingent is not to say it is uncaused. It is to say that its created cause is not necessary — it might have been otherwise, as far as the created order is concerned. But its divine cause is necessary and immutable. What is contingent to us is certain to God. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We cannot calculate the contingencies. But we know the God who holds all contingencies in His hand.

Puritan Application

First, the doctrine of second causes puts to death all fatalism and passivity. There is a false piety that says, "If God has ordained the outcome, my efforts make no difference," and then folds its hands. But this is not the piety of Scripture. God ordains the end, but He also ordains the means to the end, and you are a means. When Paul's ship was caught in the storm and the sailors were preparing to abandon ship, Paul did not say, "If God has ordained our escape, we will escape regardless." He said, "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved" (Acts 27:31). The decree of God did not make the sailors' efforts unnecessary. It made them indispensable. The farmer who believes in predestination does not therefore burn his seed. He plants it. The mother who trusts God's providence does not neglect to feed her children. She feeds them. Your labours, your choices, your diligence — these are not alternatives to God's decree. They are the very channels through which God's decree is executed. Work faithfully at whatever God has given you to do, and do it with all your might, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord, precisely because it is the Lord who works in and through your labour. Second, the doctrine of second causes slays the pride that would make any human being the ultimate author of his own achievements. The axe is a real instrument, and it really cuts the wood. But when the axe begins to boast against the woodsman who swings it, we laugh, because an axe has no power of its own. It is dead iron until a living hand takes it up. And yet how easily we fall into the same absurdity. You built the business, and it prospered. You raised the children, and they turned out well. You studied the Scriptures, and you grew in knowledge. All of that required your real effort, your real choices, your real diligence. But behind every one of those efforts, upholding your strength, directing your path, disposing the circumstances — was the hand of the living God. "What hast thou that thou didst not receive?" Paul demands. "Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). Every gift, every opportunity, every flash of insight — all of it came from the first Cause, who works through second causes without ever becoming subordinate to them. You are an instrument. A blessed instrument, a willing instrument, a responsible instrument — but an instrument nonetheless. And the glory belongs not to the instrument but to the hand that wields it. Third, the doctrine of second causes is balm for the wounded heart that cannot understand why suffering has come. When Joseph's brothers sold him into Egypt, they meant it for evil. Every motive was corrupt, every decision was cruel, and the guilt was entirely theirs. And yet Joseph could say, "God meant it unto good." The same event — the very same sequence of betrayals and imprisonments — had two meanings, two purposes: one human and evil, the other divine and good. And the divine purpose swallowed up the human one without excusing it. This is the comfort that the doctrine of second causes offers every suffering believer. The person who wronged you meant it for evil. The pain was real, and you need not pretend otherwise. And yet — and this is the mystery that sustains the saints — the same event your enemy intended for evil, God intended for good. He did not merely permit the evil and scramble to salvage something from the wreckage. He ordained it for a purpose that embraces your sanctification, your conformity to Christ, and the praise of His grace. When you cannot see the purpose, you can trust the Purposer. Nothing reaches you that has not passed through the nail-scarred hands of the Redeemer, and nothing that passes through those hands will ultimately harm you. Fourth, the doctrine of second causes makes prayer rational rather than superfluous. If God has ordained all things, why pray? The answer is that prayer is a second cause. God has ordained the end, but He has also ordained the means, and prayer is among the chief means He has appointed. When you pray for your child's salvation, you are not attempting to persuade a reluctant God. You are participating in the very means by which God has determined to accomplish His plan. James tells us, "Ye have not, because ye ask not" (James 4:2). The absence of prayer is one of the reasons certain blessings are withheld — not because God's decree has failed but because His decree has linked the blessing to the prayer. This transforms prayer from a desperate attempt to change God's mind into a confident participation in His purposes. You do not pray to inform God of needs He does not know. You pray because God has ordained that your prayers shall be the appointed channel through which His blessings flow. Prayerlessness is not merely a failure of piety. It is a failure to take hold of the means God has ordained. Fifth, the doctrine of second causes teaches us to live with mystery without surrendering to contradiction. The history of theology is littered with the wreckage of minds that could not rest until every paradox was resolved: the fatalist who sacrifices human responsibility on the altar of divine sovereignty, the Arminian who sacrifices divine sovereignty on the altar of human freedom, the open theist who concludes that even God does not know the future. All of these reduce the biblical mystery to something the human mind can master. The Confession refuses to take any of these paths. It asserts both truths — God ordains all things immutably, and creatures act according to their nature — and leaves the how in the hands of God. This is not intellectual laziness. It is intellectual humility, the humility of a finite mind before an infinite God. We are not called to comprehend the incomprehensible. We are called to believe what God has revealed and to trust Him where He has not. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children. The doctrine of second causes is among the revealed things, and it is enough. It tells us that our choices matter, that our prayers matter, that our labours matter — and that behind all of them, directing all of them to His own glory and our own good, is the God who is the first Cause of everything that is. We can rest in that. We can work in that. We can suffer in that. And when the tapestry is turned over and we see the pattern whole, we will discover that every thread, however dark, was necessary to the design.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, the first Cause and the last End of all things, we bow before Thee as creatures who owe our very existence to Thy sustaining hand. Thou hast ordained whatsoever comes to pass, and nothing lies outside Thy wise and holy decree. Yet Thou hast also made us genuine agents, with wills that choose and hands that act and hearts that bear responsibility. We confess that we cannot comprehend how Thy sovereignty and our freedom coexist, but we believe it because Thy Word declares it, and we trust Thee where we cannot trace Thee. Forgive us for the pride that would make ourselves the first cause of our achievements, as though our strength had accomplished anything apart from Thee. Forgive us for the fatalism that would excuse our laziness by appealing to Thy decree, as though Thy ordaining of the end made the means unnecessary. Forgive us for the anxiety with which we face the future, as though the contingencies we cannot predict were outside Thy control. Forgive us for the bitterness with which we have received afflictions, as though the hand that sent them were not the hand that was pierced for our redemption. Teach us to labour with all diligence, knowing our labour is not in vain in Thee. Teach us to pray with all fervency, knowing that prayer is the means Thou hast appointed to accomplish Thy purposes. Teach us to suffer with patience, knowing that the evil men mean against us Thou dost mean for good. And teach us to live with the humility of those who know they are instruments in the hand of a Master whose wisdom is unsearchable and whose love is unfailing. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, who was delivered by Thy determinate counsel and foreknowledge, and who by wicked hands was crucified and slain for our salvation. To Him, with Thee, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, be all glory and dominion, now and forever. Amen.