The mystery of providence

Our forebears used to talk about the mystery of providence. This was mysterious to them in part because our forebears in the faith often suffered grievously. 

One of the enigmatic features of divine providence is the apparent randomness of divine providence. There are two popular explanations for this phenomenon. One is atheism. The argument from divine hiddenness. According to the atheist, this is precisely what we'd expect in a godless world. There is no God to rescue us. We're on our own. Better get used to it.

There are, however, some fundamental problems with that explanation. To begin with, that's not the actual pattern of providence. Providence isn't apparently random in the sense that God never intercedes. Rather, providence is apparently random in the sense that God intercedes sometimes, but not other times. There's ample evidence for Biblical and extrabiblical miracles. There's ample evidence for answered prayer. What's puzzling is their often inscrutable distribution in time and place. 

Another problem with the atheist explanation is that it reacts to the horrors of life by taking the horror out of the horrific. In a godless universe, there is no good and evil. In a godless universe, nothing happens contrary to the way things ought to be. For nothing is supposed to be one way rather than another. Atheism predicates the existence of evil in the premise, then denies the existence of evil in the conclusion. 

Another explanation is the spiritual warfare model of open theism (a la Gregory Boyd). God is struggling. 

However, Boyd has it backwards. What makes providence enigmatic is not that God is willing, but unable to prevent evil–but that God is able, but unwilling to prevent evil. God prevents some evils, but not other evils. The same kinds of evils. As John Piper once said, in response to Rabbi Kushner:

God does not need to be all-powerful to keep people from being hurt in the collapse of a bridge. He doesn't even need to be as powerful as a man. He only needs to show up and use a little bit of his power (say, on the level of Spiderman, or Jason Bourne) "he did create the universe, the Rabbi concedes" and (for example) cause some tremor a half-hour early to cause the workers to leave the bridge, and the traffic to be halted. This intervention would be something less spectacular than a world-wide flood, or a burning bush, or plague of frogs, or a divided Red Sea, or manna in the wilderness, or the walls of a city falling down "just a little tremor to get everybody off the bridge before it fell."

There are critics like Roger Olson who resent Piper's statement, but he's just stating the obvious. 

We see this in Scripture. In the Book of Acts, Peter is miraculously delivered in answer to prayer while James is executed. Why did God protect Peter, but not James? 

Job 1-2 and Dan 11 furnish a partial explanation. God delegates certain prerogatives to secondary agents. He puts Job at the mercy of Satan. Satan isn't given a completely free hand, but there's a lot he's free to do to Job.

In Dan 11, God delegates the success or failure of Daniel's prayer to angels. There's a fallen angel who's an impediment to Daniel's prayer. The fallen angel must be overpowered by a mightier, heavenly angel. 

On the face of it, you might expect Daniel to have immediate access to God in prayer. That answering prayer would be directly in God's hands. But, for whatever reason, God makes that contingent on secondary agents. 

That doesn't mean God has abdicated the outcome to secondary agents. They still do his bidding. Nevertheless, there are certain things that won't happen unless we do it. 

Prayer is both a first resort and a last resort. In prayer we invite God to make the first move. But prayer isn't necessarily or normally a substitute for our own action. Rather, it's deferring to God in case God chooses to act on our behalf. But in many cases he won't, so it's up to us. 

Many tragedies occur because a human failed to do something. Parents leave their older son in charge of their younger son. But the kid brother drowns in the swimming pool because the big brother was preoccupied. Or a child is disfigured by scalding water in the kitchen because her mother was momentarily distracted. 

Sometimes these tragedies are due to human negligence, but in other cases, these were conscientious adults. It was simply an accident. No one was a fault. 

It's a hard truth that we can't count on God to do certain things for us, not because God is unreliable, but because, for whatever reason, he won't intercede in that situation. 

Currently, many scholars are laboring to domesticate the OT. Deny that God really said or did the harsh things attributed to him. But even if that was plausible, it does nothing to account for equally harsh things that happen outside the Bible.

The best explanation I can think of for the mystery of providence is that God's intermittent absence is teaching us the hard way what it would be like if God were consistently absent. It's a terrible reminder of what life would be like if God never intervened. What a truly godless world would be like. The horrors of life without God. How utterly lost we'd be if he didn't exist. If he was never there. 

A middle ground between forgetting God and taking God for granted. Between presumption and infidelity. 

It deters us from becoming too attached to a fallen world. Makes us hate our continued existence in a fallen world, and long for the world to come.