Devotional 28: Of Providence: Open your Bible to the first chapter of Job, and read it slowly

The Confession Read

The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness of God so far manifest themselves in his providence, that it extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sins of angels and men; and that not by a bare permission, but such as hath joined with it a most wise and powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering, and governing of them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends; yet so, as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 5, Section 4

Introduction

Open your Bible to the first chapter of Job, and read it slowly. There is a scene there that ought to undo every easy assumption about how God relates to the evil that afflicts His creation. The sons of God present themselves before the Lord, and Satan comes among them — not as an intruder, but as a being who answers when God speaks. The Lord says to Satan, "Whence comest thou?" And Satan answers. And then, with a directness that ought to make every reader catch breath, the Lord says: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?" God Himself draws the adversary's attention to Job. God Himself sets the stage. Before a single Sabean raider has touched a single ox, before the first bolt of lightning has fallen from the sky, before the first boil has broken out on Job's skin — the entire episode has been framed by a divine word. What follows is terrible. Raiders sweep down from the south. Fire falls from heaven. A great wind collapses the house where Job's children are feasting. And then Satan strikes Job's body with running sores from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. But read the narrative carefully. Satan can do nothing without permission. And when permission is given, it is given with limits: "Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand." And later: "Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life." The adversary is on a tether. His malice is real, his power is real, the suffering he inflicts is agonisingly real — and every inch of it operates within a perimeter drawn by the hand of God. This is the truth that Chapter 5, Section 4 of our Confession sets before us, and it is among the hardest truths the Confession teaches. We have walked through the first three sections of this chapter together. Section 1 gave us the grand vision of providence — God upholding, directing, disposing, and governing all things. Section 2 showed us how God works through second causes, ordaining that the free choices of men and the necessary operations of nature should serve His purposes. Section 3 declared God's freedom over means — He is not bound to any instrument but may work without, above, and against them at His pleasure. But now we arrive at the question that all of this has been driving toward. If God governs all things, if nothing happens outside His decree, if even the wicked acts of men serve His purposes — then what is His relationship to the evil of those acts? Is God the author of sin? Does the sovereignty of God make Him complicit in the wickedness He ordains? The Confession answers with precision honed in controversy and pastoral necessity. The providence of God extends even to the first fall and all other sins of angels and men — yet the sinfulness proceeds only from the creature. God's involvement is not a bare permission, a passive watching, a divine shrug. It is an active, wise, powerful bounding and ordering and governing of evil to His own holy ends. And yet God is not, and cannot be, the author or approver of sin. To hold these two truths together — to assert them both without sacrificing either — is the task of a mature faith. It is the work of a lifetime. And it is the only way to read Scripture honestly.

Scripture Foundation

The book of Job provides the narrative frame for our inquiry, but the doctrine we are considering appears throughout the canon, often in texts that are more direct and more unsettling than anything Job dares to say. Four passages, each approaching the mystery from a different angle, together provide the biblical foundation for what the Divines confess. We begin with the prophet Amos, whose words cut through every evasion the human heart constructs to keep God at a safe distance from the hard facts of life. "Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?" (Amos 3:6). Our English Bibles have struggled with this verse for four centuries, and the struggle reveals our theological discomfort. The Hebrew word is ra'ah — the ordinary word for evil, calamity, disaster, distress. Some translations soften it to "calamity" or "disaster," and lexically that is permissible, for ra'ah can mean both moral evil and natural calamity. But the softening misses the prophet's rhetorical strategy. Amos is using a series of cause-and-effect questions to drive toward an uncomfortable conclusion: when a lion roars, it has prey; when a bird falls into a snare, a trap has been set; when a trumpet sounds in the city, danger approaches. Each effect has its cause. And when calamity — yes, even the kind of calamity that looks and feels like evil — befalls a city, the Lord has done it. Amos is not teaching that God commits moral evil. He is teaching that God stands behind the events we experience as disaster, judgment, and affliction, and that to deny this is to deny the very structure of cause and effect that God has built into His world. The prophet's logic is relentless. If God is God, then nothing that happens in His city happens without Him. Now turn to a passage that takes this logic one step deeper, into territory that feels almost impossible to navigate. In 2 Samuel 24:1, we read: "And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah." The Lord moved David to take a census — an act that, we learn from the narrative, was sinful, an act of pride and self-reliance that would bring a plague upon the nation. God moved David to commit the sin for which God would then judge Israel. If ever a verse seemed to make God the author of sin, this is it. But now turn the page — or rather, turn to the book of Chronicles, which recounts the same event with a different emphasis. 1 Chronicles 21:1 says: "And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel." The same event. The same census. The same sin. And in one account, the Lord moves David; in the other, Satan provokes David. Is this a contradiction? No — it is the Bible's way of teaching precisely the doctrine that Section 4 confesses. Satan is the proximate agent, the tempter, the one whose malice drives the act. And yet behind Satan, over Satan, through Satan, the Lord is accomplishing His own purposes. Satan acts according to his nature, which is wicked. God acts according to His nature, which is holy. And the same event is at once a satanic temptation and a divine judgment. The sinfulness of the census — the pride, the self-trust, the desire to measure military might rather than to trust the God of armies — that sinfulness came from David's own heart and from Satan's provocation. But the event itself, as an event in the history of Israel, was ordained by God for wise and holy ends. The Chronicler does not correct Samuel; he complements him. Together, the two accounts give us in narrative form what the Confession gives us in doctrinal form: God ordains the event; the creature supplies the sin. We move now to the New Testament, where the same pattern appears with even greater clarity because the event in view is the crucifixion of the Son of God, and there can be no question that this event was ordained by God for the highest possible holy end. We have already heard Peter's declaration at Pentecost in Section 2, where he traced the cross simultaneously to the determinate counsel of God and to the wicked hands of men. But the early church's prayer in Acts 4:27-28 adds a dimension that we must now consider. The believers have been threatened by the same authorities who condemned Jesus, and their response is not to panic but to pray. And this is what they say: "For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done." Notice the precision. Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, the people of Israel — the full catalogue of human agents, Jewish and Gentile, ruler and ruled, every one of them acting freely and wickedly. And what were they doing? They were doing "whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done." Not "whatsoever thy hand permitted." Not "whatsoever thy hand reluctantly allowed." They were doing what God's hand and God's counsel had determined — predetermined, predestined, appointed before the ages began. The Greek word for hand here is cheir, and it carries the sense of active power, of effective agency. God's hand was not folded. It was extended. His counsel was not a spectator's foreknowledge. It was a sovereign's decree. And yet — and this is the second half of the confession's balancing act — the praying church does not for a moment suggest that Herod and Pilate were not responsible for what they did. The very context is their suffering at the hands of wicked men. The sinfulness of the act is entirely real, entirely culpable, and entirely the possession of those who committed it. One more passage brings the doctrine from the realm of great historical events into the intimate realm of the individual human soul. In Romans 9:17-18, Paul cites God's word to Pharaoh: "For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth." The verb "raised thee up" is the ordinary Greek word for raising up or causing to appear — exēgeira — but the context makes clear that God's raising of Pharaoh was not merely passive permission. God placed Pharaoh on the throne of Egypt at that precise moment in history for a purpose: that His power might be displayed and His name proclaimed. And how was that power displayed? Through Pharaoh's rebellion. Through his hardened heart. Through his repeated refusals to let Israel go. God did not infuse the hardness into Pharaoh's heart as one might inject a poison. The hardness was Pharaoh's own — the natural disposition of a proud human heart confronting the claims of a sovereign God. But God ordered it, directed it, and governed it to a holy end. And when Paul summarises, "whom he will he hardeneth," he states it as a divine act without for a moment suggesting that the hardened sinner is anything but fully responsible for his hardness. These four passages — Amos, Samuel and Chronicles, Acts, and Romans — together establish the biblical pattern. Evil is real. Human responsibility is real. And God's governance of all things, including the evil acts of His creatures, is real. The Bible never resolves these truths into a tidy system that the human mind can fully comprehend. It simply asserts them side by side and calls us to believe.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines drafted this section in the 1640s, they were navigating between errors that had plagued the church for centuries and were reappearing with fresh vigour in their own day. On one side stood the Socinians, who denied that God could have any foreknowledge of free human actions, let alone ordain them. On the other side stood certain strands of enthusiasm that made God the direct cause of everything, obliterating secondary causality altogether and, in effect, making Him the author of sin. And in the background stood the question that every theology of providence must answer: If God is sovereign, and evil exists, how can God not be responsible for the evil He ordains? The Divines answered not by retreating from the sovereignty of God but by carefully qualifying the manner in which God relates to sin. The key phrase is the one that appears early in the section: "not by a bare permission." This was a direct rejection of the view, increasingly common in post-Reformation theology, that God's relationship to evil is purely passive — that He merely permits sin to occur without in any way ordaining or governing it. The word "bare" is crucial. The Divines did not deny that God permits sin. They denied that His permission is bare — that is, mere, naked, empty of any active governance. God's permission, they insisted, is joined with "a most wise and powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering, and governing of them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends." Each of these terms carries theological weight. "Bounding" means that God sets limits to evil. Satan could afflict Job's possessions and his body, but he could not take his life. The Assyrian could conquer Israel as God's rod of judgment, but he could not destroy the nation utterly. The waves of persecution could break against the early church, but the gates of hell could not prevail against her. There is a line that evil cannot cross, and that line is drawn by the hand of God. No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able. The bounding of evil is an act of divine mercy, and without it, the malice of Satan and the wickedness of men would consume the world in a day. "Ordering and governing" goes further. God does not merely fence evil in; He directs it to ends that serve His purpose. The brothers sold Joseph into slavery — an act of pure malice. But God ordered that malice so that Joseph arrived in Egypt at precisely the right moment, was imprisoned under precisely the right circumstances, and was summoned to interpret Pharaoh's dreams at precisely the right hour to save the household of Jacob from famine. The brothers meant it for evil; God meant it for good. And this "meaning" was not an afterthought, a redemption of something that had slipped from God's control. It was His purpose from the beginning, woven into the very fabric of the events that the brothers, acting freely and culpably, set in motion. "Manifold dispensation" is one of the Confession's richest phrases, and it rewards careful meditation. A dispensation is a distribution, an administration, a manner of ordering things. The word "manifold" — many-folded, varied, diverse — suggests that there is no single pattern for how God governs evil. Sometimes He restrains it, as when He kept Abimelech from touching Sarah. Sometimes He permits it but turns it to an opposite end, as with Joseph. Sometimes He permits it and judges it immediately, as with Ananias and Sapphira. Sometimes He permits it and allows it to run its full course for generations, as with the Canaanites, whose iniquity was not yet full. The variety of God's dispensations toward evil is as manifold as the variety of His mercies toward the saints. There is no formula, no simple algorithm that will tell you why this evil is permitted and that one restrained. But there is a God who in every case is working, governing, bounding, ordering — always holy, always wise, always good. And then comes the concluding safeguard, the line that must never be omitted when this doctrine is taught: "yet so, as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin." The Divines understood that the doctrine they had just affirmed could be misrepresented as making God the author of sin, and they closed the door on that misrepresentation with all the force they could muster. God is not the author of sin. He is not the approver of sin. He is most holy and righteous. The sinfulness — the moral quality of the act that makes it evil, the corruption of the will from which it springs, the guilt that attaches to it — comes from the creature alone. God ordains the act; the creature supplies the wickedness. How this can be so, the Confession does not pretend to explain. It simply states what Scripture states, bowing before a mystery that finite minds cannot fully penetrate but that faith can and must receive.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has not merely recited the Confession's words; it has laboured to understand them and defend them against objection and distortion. Four theologians, spanning three centuries, repay study. Calvin devoted an entire chapter of the Institutes to how God uses the wicked without being tainted by their wickedness. "The wicked man," Calvin wrote, "who has been raised up by the Lord to execute his judgments, devises mischief in his heart, and yet does nothing but what has been ordained by the secret counsel of God." The image Calvin uses is of a ray of sunlight passing through a foul place. The sunbeam is not defiled. The filth is not cleansed. The beam passes through unchanged, unstained, fully itself. So God works through the wicked acts of men. His holiness passes through their corruption without contracting a particle of their stain, and His purpose is accomplished without their guilt being diminished by a single degree. Calvin distinguished the act itself — which God ordains — from the moral quality — which arises from the human will. The distinction does not resolve the mystery, but it draws the boundary line where faith must rest and speculation must stop. William Cunningham, the Scottish theologian whose Historical Theology traces the development of Reformed doctrine, examined the debate over divine permission with meticulous care. The Socinians, the Remonstrants, and the Jesuits had all converged on the same conclusion: God's relationship to sin must be described as bare permission, a passive allowing that involves no divine ordination. Cunningham showed that this view cannot be reconciled with Scripture and ultimately makes God dependent on the creature. If God merely permits sin without ordaining it — if He sees that a sin will occur and decides not to prevent it, though He could — then the occurrence of sin is not part of His plan. It is an intrusion into His world that He did not will. But Cunningham insisted that this is not the God of the Bible. The God of Scripture does not merely react to evil; He ordains it for His holy purposes, ordering, bounding, and governing it to ends the creature could never imagine. The crucifixion of Christ is the irrefutable proof. No Christian can say that the cross was not part of God's plan. No Christian can say that God merely permitted the cross and made the best of it. The cross was ordained from before the foundation of the world — and yet the men who carried it out were wicked, and their wickedness was their own. The cross is the touchstone. Any theology of providence that cannot say of the cross both "God ordained it" and "the men who did it are guilty" has failed to speak as Scripture speaks. We may also draw from the contemplative depth of John Howe, the Puritan whose Living Temple explored the relationship between God and His creation with a reverence that still instructs. Howe addressed the question of divine permission through an analogy of light and shadow. Darkness, he observed, has no positive existence. You cannot add darkness to a room; you can only remove light. Darkness is the absence, the privation, of light — and yet God, who is light, ordains that darkness shall exist and serve His purposes. Sin, Howe argued, is like the darkness. It is not a substance, not a thing created by God, but a privation, a defect, a falling-short of the goodness that God created and requires. When God ordains that sin shall occur, He does not create the sin or infuse the sin or cause the sin in any way that would make Him its author. He ordains that the creature, acting from the defect of its own will, shall produce the sin, and He governs that sin to His own holy ends. The analogy is not perfect — no analogy for sin can be — but it helps us see that the question "Why did God create sin?" is the wrong question. God did not create sin. Sin is not a created thing. It is the corruption of a created thing, and the corruption arises from the creature, not from the Creator who ordains the context in which the corruption appears. Finally, we may listen to a voice that was not yet heard in the Jerusalem Chamber but that speaks with the same confessional accent on the question before us. Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, argued that the highest end of creation is the communication of God's own glory — the display of His perfections before the eyes of intelligent creatures. And Edwards saw, with a clarity that many find unsettling, that some of God's perfections can only be displayed against the dark backdrop of sin. God's justice cannot be seen where there is no guilt to judge. His mercy cannot be seen where there is no misery to relieve. His wrath cannot be seen where there is no rebellion to oppose. His patience cannot be seen where there is no provocation to endure. This is not to say that God needed sin — God needs nothing outside Himself. But it is to say that God, in His infinite wisdom, ordains a world in which sin exists because a world in which sin is overcome, judged, forgiven, and defeated displays more of His glory than a world in which sin never appeared. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world — which means that before the first sin was committed, the remedy was prepared. And the remedy, the cross of Christ, brings more glory to God than an unfallen creation ever could have. This is the answer the Reformed tradition gives to the question of why God ordained the fall: not because He takes pleasure in sin, which He hates with infinite holiness, but because He takes pleasure in His own glory, and the redemption of sinners through the blood of His Son displays that glory in a way that nothing else could. We may find this answer hard. We should find it hard. But we should also find it worshipful, for it sets the cross at the centre of the universe and insists that the darkest evil the world has ever seen was the instrument by which the brightest glory was revealed.

Puritan Application

First, be humbled into the dust by the doctrine of God's governance over sin. The natural man, when he hears that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, including the evil acts of men, rises up in indignation and demands that God give an account. "Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?" That is exactly the objection Paul anticipates in Romans 9, and his answer is not a philosophical resolution but a theological rebuke: "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" The doctrine we have been considering is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be adored. It is given to us not so that we may comprehend the incomprehensible but so that we may trust the God who is trustworthy. If you find yourself bristling against the teaching that God extends His providence even to the first fall and all other sins, examine your heart. Is your indignation truly a zeal for God's holiness, or is it a wounded pride that cannot bear to be told that your reason is not the measure of all truth? The posture of the creature before the Creator is not cross-examination but adoration. Where Scripture speaks, we bow. Where Scripture is silent, we wait. And the secret things belong to the Lord our God. Second, let the distinction between God's ordination of the event and the creature's responsibility for the sin protect you from ever charging God with evil. The Confession draws a bright line, and we must draw it as brightly in our own hearts. God is not the author of sin. He cannot be the author of sin. The thought that He could be is blasphemy, and the Confession guards against it with the strongest possible language. When you suffer at the hands of wicked men — when the betrayal cuts deep, when the slander spreads, when the injustice seems to triumph — you may trust that the God who ordained the suffering is working through it for your good, but you must never imagine that He takes pleasure in the sin by which the suffering came. The sin is the sinner's own. The purpose is God's. And the two are not the same, even when they occupy the same event. This means that you can forgive the sinner without excusing the sin, because you know that behind the sinner's malice stands a Father's love, ordering the malice to an end that the sinner never intended. As Joseph forgave his brothers — not because their sin was small but because their sin had been swallowed up in a larger purpose — so you may forgive those who sin against you, entrusting the justice and the outcome to the God who judges righteously. Third, let the bounding of evil be your comfort in the darkest hour. The same hand that permits the storm sets its limits. The adversary could touch Job's possessions, then his body, but not his life. The waves of affliction can rise high, but there is a shore they cannot pass. There is a line that God has drawn, and hell itself cannot cross it. When you are in the midst of trial, it is easy to feel that there is no limit, that the pain will go on forever, that the darkness has no boundary. But the doctrine of bounding assures you that every trial is measured. Every temptation is proportioned to the strength that God supplies. Every affliction has an appointed end. The God who said to the raging sea, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further," has spoken the same word to every force that threatens you. The trial may be severe — Job's was — but it is not infinite. It is bounded. And the One who drew the boundary knows exactly what your soul can bear and exactly when to say "enough." Fourth, let the manifold dispensation of God's providence teach you not to demand that He govern your life according to your expectations. The word "manifold" reminds us that God's ways with evil are not uniform. Sometimes He delivers us from the trial; sometimes He delivers us through it. Sometimes He removes the thorn; sometimes He gives grace to bear it. Sometimes He silences the enemy; sometimes He lets the enemy speak and turns the curse into a blessing, as He did with Balaam. The error we so easily fall into is to fix in our minds the one way God must work and then to charge Him with unfaithfulness when He works differently. Naaman wanted the prophet's dramatic gesture. Job's friends wanted a tidy moral calculus in which suffering equals punishment. We want a God who fits within the lines we have drawn. But the God of manifold dispensation will not be confined. He will save by many or by few, by the Jordan or by the Red Sea, by the physician's skill or by the word of His power. Do not prescribe to God the method of your deliverance. Trust the God who chooses the method, and bow before the wisdom that selects the instrument. Fifth, let the truth that the sinfulness proceeds only from the creature drive you to Christ as your only refuge from your own sin. The doctrine we have been considering is not merely a piece of intellectual furniture for the theological parlour. It is a mirror in which you must see your own face. The sinfulness of the sin — the evil of it, the guilt of it, the corruption that produces it — that belongs to the creature. That belongs to you. When you sin, you are not carrying out a divine script in a way that excuses you. You are acting from your own will, your own desires, your own corrupt nature, and you are fully, entirely, damningly responsible. The Confession's careful distinction between God's ordination and the creature's sinfulness is not a loophole through which you may escape accountability. It is the framework that makes sense of your accountability while preserving the truth that God is sovereign. And what it should produce in you is not theological pride but evangelical desperation. If your sin is truly your own — if the evil you have done really proceeds from you and not from God — then you have no one else to blame. You cannot point to your circumstances, your upbringing, your biology, or even the decree of God. The fault is yours, and the guilt is yours, and the punishment is what you deserve. And that realisation — that full, crushing, unqualified realisation — is the only doorway to grace. The sinner who knows he is wholly responsible for his sin is the sinner who will flee to Christ and cling to the cross with the grip of a drowning man. The gospel is not for those who think their sin is God's fault. The gospel is for those who know their sin is their own and who have nowhere else to go but to the Savior who bore that sin in His body on the tree.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, whose power is without limit and whose wisdom is without search, we bow before Thee in fear and wonder as we contemplate the mystery of Thy providence over sin. We confess that our minds are too small to comprehend how Thou canst ordain whatsoever comes to pass, even the evil acts of men and angels, and yet remain unstained by their sinfulness. But we believe Thy Word, which declares both truths together, and we trust Thee where we cannot trace Thee. Keep us, O Lord, from ever charging Thee with evil. Guard our lips from blasphemy and our hearts from the pride that would summon our Creator to the bar of our judgment. Teach us the humility of Job, who laid his hand upon his mouth and repented in dust and ashes before the majesty of Thy ways. We thank Thee for the bounding of evil, for the limits Thou hast set that the adversary cannot pass. In the midst of trial, remind us that the storm has its appointed end, that the darkness has its measured depth, and that the hand that permits the suffering is the hand that was pierced for our redemption. We praise Thee for the manifold wisdom of Thy dispensations — that Thou dost govern evil in so many ways, to so many holy ends, that the very malice of Thine enemies becomes the instrument of Thy praise. And we stand in awe before the greatest of all Thy dispensations: the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, where the worst sin ever committed became the ground of our salvation, and where the wrath of man was made to praise Thee. Grant us faith to rest in Thy governance, hope to endure under Thy bounding, and love to adore Thee in the darkness as well as the light. And when we sin — for we do sin, and the sinfulness is our own — drive us quickly to the cross, where Thy justice and Thy mercy meet, and where the blood of Thy Son cleanses us from all unrighteousness. We ask it in His name and for His sake. Amen.