Devotional 27: Of Providence: Naaman the Syrian stood at the prophet's door, and his soul was full of resentme

The Confession Read

"God, in his ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure."

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 5, Section 3

Introduction

Naaman the Syrian stood at the prophet's door, and his soul was full of resentment. A great captain, a valiant warrior, and the man of God would not even come out to meet him. Instead, a messenger brought the humiliating instruction: "Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean." Naaman's rage boiled over. "Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper" (2 Kings 5:11). He had a theology of means — but it was his own. He wanted the dramatic, the immediate, the miraculous. A wave of the hand, a flash of divine power, and the leprosy gone. God, however, chose to work through the ordinary — a muddy river in a conquered land. We should not rush past Naaman's error, for it is our own. We imagine that if God is truly at work, He must bypass the ordinary channels — the quiet reading of Scripture, the steady discipline of prayer, the patient use of lawful means. We expect lightning from heaven and receive bread from the earth. We want the extraordinary and stumble over the ordinary. Yet the God who could have healed Naaman with a word instead sent him to wash seven times in the Jordan. Why? Because the God of means is the God who will be trusted, not the God who will be dictated to. Naaman had to humble himself, to stoop to the simple and the unspectacular, before he could rise cleansed and whole. This is the truth at the heart of our confession this morning: God ordinarily works through means, yet He is free to work without them, above them, and against them whenever it pleases Him. The section before us is among the briefest in the entire Confession, a single sentence of barely thirty words. Yet within that sentence is compressed a theology of daily life, a map for the soul navigating the tension between trusting God's appointed instruments and trusting God Himself when the instruments are stripped away.

Scripture Foundation

We open our Bibles to a passage that unveils the hidden architecture of ordinary providence. In Hosea 2:21-22, the prophet pictures God's blessing as a chain of means cascading from heaven to earth: "And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith the LORD, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth; And the earth shall hear the corn, and the wine, and the oil; and they shall hear Jezreel." Here is the divine economy of means laid bare. God does not create the corn by a direct fiat each season. He speaks to the heavens — the heavens give rain — the rain waters the earth — the earth yields its fruit — and the fruit feeds Jezreel, the people whom God has sown. Every link in the chain is actively governed by God, yet each link is a true created cause, a genuine means through which God's blessing flows. The farmer who sows his seed, the clouds that gather on the horizon, the soil that receives the rain — none of these are competitors with God's providence. They are its instruments, and they answer when He calls. The doctrine of means teaches us that when we pray for daily bread, God answers not by bypassing the baker and the wheat and the rain, but by governing them all to His appointed end. But Scripture will not permit us to rest in the means as though God were bound by them. Turn to Daniel 4:35, and hear the confession wrung from the lips of a chastened pagan king: "And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?" Nebuchadnezzar had learned through seven years of madness what every child of God must learn through a lifetime of discipleship: that God's freedom is absolute. He is not a constitutional monarch, bound by the laws of the realm He has made. The means He ordinarily employs are His servants, not His masters. The heavens obey Him, but He is not subject to the heavens. The earth yields its increase, but if He should choose to feed His people with manna from the sky and water from the rock, the earth has no right of complaint. The phrase "doeth according to his will" carries the weight of absolute, unhindered agency — the Creator acting as He pleases, when He pleases, through whatever means or absence of means He pleases. The Aramaic behind these words paints a picture of a hand that nothing and no one can arrest mid-motion. Now turn to the New Testament, where the Apostle Paul gives us one of the most comforting sentences in Scripture about God's use of means: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). The Greek verb here is synergei — a compound of syn (together) and ergeō (to work). All things — not some things, not the clearly religious things, but all things — are made to work together. The verb is in the present tense: God is doing this now, in the midst of the confusion. And it is God who is the subject of the action: "he works all things together for good," as some manuscripts read. The point for our confession is this: God works through the very things that we call "means" — through employment and unemployment, through health and sickness, through friends and foes, through the sunshine and the storm — and He weaves them all together into one coherent tapestry of good. The means are many; the Worker is one. The threads are tangled; the Weaver's hand is steady. What looks to us like a chaos of disconnected events is in truth a synergeia — a divine cooperation of all forces toward a single, glorious end. Yet lest we imagine that means are optional, let us hear a sober word from the Apostle's own experience. In Acts 27:31, Paul is aboard a ship driven by a ferocious Mediterranean storm. An angel has promised him that all aboard will be saved. But when the sailors attempt to flee in the lifeboat, Paul declares: "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." Mark the startling conjunction: a divine promise of preservation, yet a human means that cannot be neglected. The angel did not say, "God will save you regardless, so do as you please." The promise and the means are not enemies but allies. The same God who decrees the end also decrees the means to that end. To separate them is not faith; it is presumption. What a warning this is to those who claim to trust God's providence while neglecting the ordinary channels through which He has promised to work — the reading of His Word, the fellowship of His people, the prayers of the saints, the diligent use of lawful remedies. Consider also the sweeping vision of Nehemiah 9:6, where the Levites lead Israel in confessing: "Thou, even thou, art LORD alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and thou preservest them all; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee." The Hebrew verb for "preservest" here means to keep alive, to sustain in being — and it encompasses every created thing, from the highest angel to the smallest creature of the deep. God does not merely set the world in motion and retreat. He actively, continually, and personally preserves every element of the created order. The means He employs are held in existence by His preserving hand. The sun that warms the earth does so because God preserves its fire. The rain that waters the ground does so because God preserves the cycle of evaporation and condensation. The medicine that heals the body does so because God preserves the properties He has given to created substances. There is no such thing as an autonomous means — only means that God, moment by moment, upholds.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber during the 1640s, they were crafting this single sentence of the Confession with at least three errors in view — errors that plague the church in every age under different names. First, they aimed their words against the error of Enthusiasm — the claim that the Spirit works directly upon the soul, rendering outward means unnecessary. The Enthusiast, whose spiritual descendants would include certain strands of Quakerism and later revivalism, would say: "I have the Spirit; I need not the preaching of the Word. I am taught of God; I need not the sacraments. My prayers are spiritual; I need not the gathered church." Against this, the Divines insisted that God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means. The word "ordinary" is crucial. It was a technical term in Reformed theology, distinguishing the settled course of God's governance from the extraordinary works that mark redemptive history. In ordinary providence — which is to say, in the normal course of our lives and the life of the church — God works through instituted channels. The Spirit ordinarily works through the Word. Grace ordinarily flows through the sacraments. Growth ordinarily comes through the fellowship of saints. To despise the means is to despise the God who appointed them. When God gave His people manna in the wilderness, He did not thereby abolish agriculture. When He healed by a word, He did not thereby abolish medicine. The extraordinary seasons of redemptive history do not overturn the ordinary pattern of daily life. Second, they aimed against the error of Deism, which had begun to trickle into English intellectual life in the seventeenth century under the influence of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and would later find its most influential expression in the writings of John Toland and Matthew Tindal. The deist would say: God created the world with its laws and secondary causes, then withdrew to let it run itself, like a watchmaker who winds the clock and walks away. Against this, the Divines insisted that God is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure. The means are not an autonomous mechanism that runs independently of God. He is present in every link of the causal chain, sustaining, directing, and governing all. And His freedom means that He is never locked inside the system He upholds. The watchmaker is not absent — He is present, and He may at any moment intervene in ways that transcend the ordinary course. Every answered prayer is, in this sense, a testimony against deism — a declaration that the living God is not a remote First Cause but an ever-present Lord. Third, they aimed against a subtle form of rationalism that would make God subject to human reason. The rationalist says: "If God ordinarily uses means, then He must always use means. I can understand a God who works through secondary causes, but a God who works miracles offends my reason." Against this, the Divines proclaimed God's freedom in four dimensions. He is free to work without means — creating, sustaining, converting, and sanctifying by His bare word when He so chooses. He is free to work above means — enabling the means to accomplish what they could never achieve by their own native power, as when the preaching of the gospel becomes the power of God unto salvation. He is free to work against means — suspending, reversing, or overwhelming the natural properties of created things to accomplish His redemptive purposes. Every miracle in Scripture is a testimony that the means serve God, not God the means. The God who established the laws of nature is the God who may, at His pleasure, transcend them. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, observes that God's ordinary use of means is itself an act of divine condescension. The Almighty need not use any instrument. He who created the worlds by the word of His power could sustain and govern them by the same word without any intermediate agency. That He chooses to employ means — that He dignifies the farmer's labor, the physician's skill, the minister's preaching, the parent's instruction — is an act of divine kindness. He permits the creature to participate in His work, not because He needs our help, but because He delights to honor His image-bearers with real agency. The farmer who sows his field is, in a creaturely and derivative sense, a fellow-worker with God. This is not a necessity of God's nature but a generosity of His will.

Theological Depth

Thomas Watson, the Puritan pastor whose writings still warm the heart three centuries after his pen fell silent, devoted sustained attention to this very question in his Body of Divinity. "The means we use are not the cause of success," Watson wrote. "The chameleon lives on air. Can we live on means? No, it is the blessing of God that gives the increase." Watson presses the point directly: we must not make an idol of the means, for the same means with God's blessing are efficacious that without it are barren. The physician comes, the medicine is administered, the diet is observed — and the patient dies. Why? Because means are not causes. They are channels, and the channel is dry unless the fountain flows. Watson would have us learn to look through the means to the God who stands behind them, trusting the Giver more than the gift. The means are like the sails of a ship: they catch the wind, but they cannot create it. Without the wind, the finest sails are useless canvas flapping in the dead air. Yet Watson balances this with equal force on the other side: the neglect of means is not faith but temptation. "Though we must not idolize means," he warns, "yet we must not neglect them. He who will not sow his field shall reap thorns. Christ could have kept Paul alive without food, yet Paul ate." The Christian who refuses medicine and calls it faith, who neglects his vocation and calls it trust, who spurns the ordinary channels of grace and calls it spirituality — this is not the faith of the Scriptures. It is the presumption that our Lord Himself refused when Satan tempted Him to cast Himself from the pinnacle of the temple. Christ refused the spectacular precisely because it would have been tempting God — demanding that God work without means when means were readily available. The stairway down from the temple was as much a provision of providence as the angels' hands would have been. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, writing two centuries later in his Reformed Dogmatics, anchors the doctrine of means in the doctrine of creation itself. God created a world of genuine secondary causes — real agents with real properties and real powers. The sun truly warms, the rain truly nourishes, the seed truly germinates according to its kind. These are not illusions or mere occasions for divine action, as the occasionalists would have it. God's governance is so perfect that He achieves His infallible ends through the voluntary, contingent, and free actions of His creatures — without violence to their natures. Bavinck observes that the threefold freedom of God over means — without, above, against — corresponds to the threefold need of fallen humanity. We need God to work without means because our sin has so corrupted the natural order that creation alone cannot save us. We need God to work above means because even the appointed means are insufficient apart from His supernatural blessing. And we need God to work against means because the course of this fallen world, left to itself, runs toward death and judgment, and only God's reversing power can turn it toward life. The resurrection of Christ is the supreme instance of God working against means — against the irreversible decay of death, against every natural law that decrees finality to the grave. And in that resurrection, every believer finds both the pattern and the promise of God's freedom over every means that threatens to become a prison. B.B. Warfield, from his study at Princeton at the turn of the twentieth century, took up the question of miracle and means. In his essays on the supernatural, Warfield argued that what distinguishes a miracle is not that God acts in it while remaining absent from ordinary providence — for God is equally present and active in both. Rather, a miracle is distinguished by the mode of His action. In ordinary providence, God works through secondary causes, according to their natures. In miracle, He works without, above, or against them — that is, He produces an effect that secondary causes, left to their own powers, could not produce. The feeding of the five thousand was not a violation of natural law but a royal exercise of the Creator's prerogative to act upon His creation as He wills. The same hands that multiplied the loaves are the hands that, every spring, multiply the seed cast into the ground. The difference is not in the presence of God but in the pace and pattern of His working. In the field, God takes months to turn seed into bread; on the Galilean hillside, He took moments. But the same God fed His people in both instances, and neither feeding would have occurred without His active power. Thomas Boston, the Scottish pastor whose Fourfold State and Crook in the Lot have nourished generations of believers, traced the experiential contour of this doctrine with pastoral sensitivity. When the means fail — when the doctor shakes his head, when the bank account empties, when the prodigal child refuses every entreaty — the believer is driven to this very confession. "God is free to work without means." Boston knew this not only as a doctrine but as a lifeline. His wife suffered prolonged illness; his own health was fragile; his congregation lived under the shadow of poverty. He learned that the drying up of means is often the appointed path to the discovery that God alone is sufficient. "When the creature fails, the Creator is revealed," he wrote. "The brook dries up that we may learn to drink from the fountain." Boston would have us understand that the exhaustion of means is not a sign of God's abandonment but the clearing of the stage for a more direct display of His power. When every human prop is knocked away, the soul learns to lean on God alone — and finds that He is entirely sufficient. Finally, we may draw from the well of Louis Berkhof's Systematic Theology, which categorizes the ways God relates to means in His providential governance. Berkhof notes that means are not bridges that God needs to cross from His will to the world's reality; they are the regular pattern of His working, established by His wisdom for our good. The farmer who understands that God causes the grain to grow is not thereby excused from plowing and sowing. Rather, he plows and sows precisely because he knows that God works through these very actions. Faith does not eliminate diligence; it sanctifies it. The Christian who truly trusts God's providence will be the most diligent in the use of means, because he knows that these are the channels God has appointed. And the same Christian will be the most peaceful when the means fail, because he knows that the God who appointed the channels is not confined to them.

Puritan Application

First, use the means diligently, for God hath joined the end and the means together. When a farmer prays for a harvest, he does not fold his hands and wait for sheaves to fall from heaven. He rises before dawn, harnesses the ox, and breaks the stubborn ground. Why? Because the same God who promises bread commands the plow. The Christian who prays for holiness must set himself to the reading of Scripture. The Christian who prays for the salvation of his children must speak to them of Christ and bring them under the preaching of the Word. The Christian who prays for provision must labor faithfully in his calling. God will not be mocked. To ask for the end while despising the means He has appointed is not faith — it is the sin of the slothful servant who buried his talent in the earth. As Paul told the storm-tossed sailors, "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." The means are not optional accessories to the promise but the divinely appointed path to its fulfillment. Let no man say he trusts God for his health while he neglects sleep and nourishment. Let no woman say she trusts God for the conversion of the nations while she refuses to give or go or pray. True faith always works through love, and love always works through the channels God has ordained. Second, trust not in the means, but in the God of the means. Here is the delicate balance that only grace can teach. The same act of plowing that is commanded must not become the object of our confidence. Woe to the farmer who trusts his strong arm and fertile field, for "except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it." The means, separated from the blessing of God, are a dry channel and a broken cistern. Have you been faithful in your calling and yet seen little fruit? Have you raised your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and yet they walk in rebellion? Have you prayed long and earnestly and yet the heavens seem brass? Have you preached the Word with all diligence and yet the congregation slumbers? Then hear this: the means are not the cause. God is the cause. And He is free — free to grant the blessing in His own time, free to withhold it for reasons we cannot fathom, free to work by other means or by no means at all. Rest in the God who appoints the means, not in the means themselves. The soul that has learned this secret can labor without anxiety and wait without despair. Third, when the means fail, despair not — for God's freedom is thy hope. Every child of God will come, sooner or later, to the end of all visible means. The physician says there is nothing more to do. The bank says the money is gone. The counselor says the marriage cannot be saved. The grave closes over the beloved. In that hour, the tempter whispers: God has abandoned you. But the faith that sustains in the darkness answers: No — God has only removed the means to show me Himself. He is free to work without means. When the brook dried up, Elijah was not abandoned; he was being led to Zarephath, where a widow's handful of meal and cruse of oil would teach him a deeper dependence than the ravens ever could. When the Red Sea barred Israel's escape, God was not surprised; He was preparing to work against the means — to make a highway through the deep, to turn the seabed into dry land. When Sarah's womb was dead, God was not late; He was waiting until all natural possibility was exhausted so that the child of promise would be unmistakably the child of miracle. Your exhausted means are not the boundary of God's power. They are the theatre of His freedom. Fourth, when God works against means, fall down and worship. The miracles of Scripture are not merely proofs of divine power but summons to adoration. When Jesus walked upon the sea, the disciples worshipped Him, saying, "Of a truth thou art the Son of God." When He raised Lazarus on the fourth day, when the corpse already stank, the glory of God was displayed in a way that ordinary providence could never have revealed. And yet, do not imagine that the age of miracles is the only age of worship. Every conversion is a miracle of grace, a work against the means of a hard heart and a stubborn will. Every time a sinner turns from darkness to light, God has worked against the natural course of the fallen soul — against the current of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Every time a prodigal comes home, it is because the Father ran — and the Father's running is a miracle of grace that defies every natural expectation of what a wronged patriarch should do. Let every remembrance of God's extraordinary works — in Scripture, in church history, in your own life — drive you to your knees in awe. Fifth, bind not God to thy preferred means, but submit to His wisdom in choosing them. Naaman wanted the prophet's dramatic gesture; God gave him the muddy Jordan. We want the powerful sermon; God gives us the quiet whisper. We want the sudden deliverance; God gives us the daily discipline. We want to be carried to heaven on eagles' wings; God bids us walk the narrow path step by faltering step. The means God chooses are often humbling — and that is precisely the point. The proud heart would use even divine assistance as an occasion for self-congratulation. But when God saves through the foolishness of preaching, when He nourishes through the simplicity of bread and wine, when He purifies through the ordinariness of suffering — He puts an end to all human boasting. Bow before His wisdom. The means He has chosen, however humble they appear, are the exact instruments that His love and wisdom have determined are best for your soul. In the end, the humility of the means magnifies the glory of the God who works through them. A muddy river and a Syrian leper — and the name of the God of Israel was proclaimed among the nations. A cross of wood and a dying criminal — and the redemption of the world was accomplished.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, who workest all things after the counsel of Thine own will, we bow before Thee in wonder at the mystery of Thy providence. Thou hast appointed means for our preservation and growth — the daily labor of our hands, the ordinances of Thy house, the fellowship of the saints, the reading and preaching of Thy holy Word. Give us grace never to despise these channels of Thy kindness, nor to neglect them in a false pretense of faith. Teach us to sow when the season calls for sowing, to plow when the ground must be broken, to wait when waiting is Thy will. Yet keep us, O Lord, from making idols of the means, from trusting the channel rather than the Fountain. When Thou dost send success, let us not say in our hearts, "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this." And when Thou dost withhold the blessing, let us not despair as those who have no God, but remember that Thou art free — free to work without means, above means, and against them, at Thy pleasure. We praise Thee for every miracle recorded in Thy Word, for every instance in which Thou hast bared Thine holy arm and shown Thyself to be the living God. But we praise Thee no less for the quiet works of ordinary providence — for daily bread, for steady rain, for the slow growth of grace in the soul. Both alike declare Thy glory, and both alike depend upon Thy sovereign will. When our means are spent and our strength is gone, be Thou our portion. When the physician has no remedy, when the bank has no resource, when the grave has closed its mouth — be Thou our resurrection and our life. We ask this in the name of Him who is Himself the supreme Means of all our blessing, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.