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Looking up content for: Lord’s Day 10 For worship planning ideas on Lord’s Day 10, please link to our ministry partner at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and specifically to this page where you will find ideas for constructing a service around the theme of God’s providence: (posted on 10/2/2005)
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider
- As noted in our remarks on also Lord’s Day 9, pastorally there is an issue to be faced in Lord’s Day 10. The Catechism is a pretty accurate reflection of the larger Calvinist tendency to so emphasize the sovereignty of God that even sad, tragic, and horrid events in life get chalked up as that which was directly delivered to us by the hand of God. “. . . whatever adversity he sends me . . .” is how Q&A 26 puts it. “. . . all things come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand” is how Q&A 27 puts it.
- It should be noted that some people find this view comforting. Better to puzzle out how or why God might have sent some suffering your way than to live in a world where, as a matter of fact, bad things happen that God did not somehow control. But many others find such a view of God troubling at best. Sermons on Lord’s Days 9-10 need to be written with an awareness that these competing viewpoints are present in the congregation and should strive, therefore, to strike some kind of a pastoral balance in confronting the role of God in our suffering. In whatever form we engage on the question of God’s relationship to this world’s sorrows, due attention must be paid to the raw emotions that can swirl around this.
- Dealing with providence can tempt the preacher to traffic in certain areas of philosophical theology, especially that part of philosophical theology known as “theodicy,” justifying the ways of God in a fallen world where pretty terrible things happen on a regular basis. In one sense, certain areas of theodicy theology can be fruitfully mined and utilized in a sermon. Some of the work of a philosopher like Alvin Plantinga can be very helpful in trying to search out the possible explanations for why bad things happen to good people (indeed, to God’s people). (See Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil for a good summary of what has become his classic defense of God’s existence in the face of the evils that befall us in this world.)
- However, because we are dealing with sermons to people already acquainted with sorrow and burdened with grief, philosophy alone can’t have the last word. Yes, we can summarize scenarios by which to try to explain God’s role in our suffering. But in the end we still face the pastoral question to which there is usually no good, final, tidy answer, “Pastor, I can understand why in general bad things can happen in a world still superintended by God, but why did this particular and specific bad thing happen to me?”
- In other words, we cannot let any particular framework for understanding God’s providence to run roughshod over the particulars of people’s suffering in life. The bottom line of the lyric words in Q&A 28 is that even when the worst happens in life—even on a dark day long ago when no less than God’s own Son was murdered as a criminal—we can know that somehow God remains in control. We can (and we must) find our way through the Catechism’s blanket statements that make God the active cause of all that happens—including bad things, therefore—but in the end we must retain the confidence that “nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
Possible Biblical Texts
- Romans 8:28-39: Since a portion of these verses is directly quoted in Q&A 28, it makes sense to turn here. Unlike the Catechism, which attributes “drought, sickness, lean years, poverty” to the direct deliverances of God’s fatherly hand, Romans 8 claims that in all things God works for our good without commenting on the origin or source of a given life circumstance. What cannot be missed, however, is Romans 8’s clear message that although believers in Christ Jesus the Lord may not be spared “trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, or sword,” those things cannot detach us from God’s loving care.
- Psalm 42: Another option for a sermon on providence would be the psalms of lament that talk about God’s perceived absence during times of crisis. As many commentators have pointed out, the marvelous feature to note in most all psalms of lament is the fact that complaints about God’s distance and absence are addressed nevertheless to God! There is something about that combination of talking to the very God whom you feel has abandoned you that captures the essence of our belief in providence come what may. Pastorally, there may be something comforting about addressing providence from within the context of suffering—many people in the congregation could probably relate to this in the throes of their own suffering.
- Genesis 50:15-21: A sermon on this concluding vignette of the Joseph Cycle of stories in Genesis could be the occasion for a retrospective summary of the larger story of Joseph. If ever there were a biblical character with his share of ups and downs in life, Joseph is it. Joseph’s final remarks can be construed to bolster the idea that God is personally and actively behind even the woeful things that happen to us in life. But it can also be viewed as an example of God’s almighty and never-ending cleverness at being able to stick with us even when ill-intentioned people do their level best to harm us and work us woe.
Illustration Idea
Illustration #1: Frederick Buechner once whimsically defined theology by way of an analogy. Theology is the study of God and his ways. But for all we know perhaps beetles study humanity and its ways and call their observations "humanology." If so, we would probably be more touched than irritated by this beetle-size attempt to grasp us. One hopes, Buechner concludes, that God feels the same way about our attempts to grasp him!
Indeed, in the grand scheme of things, our attempts to understand the greatness and grandeur of God are puny compared to the subject matter at hand. We would never even be able to make a start in knowing God were it not for the fact that God himself took the initiative to reveal himself to us. Still, taking what we know, we do our best to say meaningful (and we hope mostly true) things about the One who is properly our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end, and our everything in between, too.
Within the larger scope of this theological enterprise, perhaps no area of study is quite as difficult as matters related to providence. And indeed, the providence of God has been generating a lot of heat in evangelical circles the past ten years or so. For the most part evangelicals have tended to hew quite closely to some version of John Calvin's thinking on the sovereignty of God and the exercise of divine providence. Calvin had a huge doctrine of God's sovereignty, very nearly insisting that everything that happens in the universe (including just possibly even bad things) must ultimately be traced back to the divine will. Elements of Calvin's thought persist even among those who would otherwise claim their theology has nothing to do with John Calvin. But echoes of Calvin can be heard every time someone says, "God has a plan for your life." These big thoughts on providence can be detected whenever someone responds to a tragic death by saying something like, "I'm sure God had a reason for taking her life" or "God must have needed that little one in heaven more than we did here on earth."
But not everyone is comfortable with the notion that everything, even the ugly, stems directly from God's plan. So some evangelical thinkers have recently begun developing a theology called "free-will theism" or "the openness of God." I won't go into all the details of this except to say that this new theology tries to steer a middle course between staunch Calvinist-types who say that God controls just about everything and the other extreme of process theology that sometimes comes close to saying that God controls very little.
Process theology claims that God travels with us through time. God does not really know the future because although God knows everything that is real, the future does not yet exist, and so even God can't know it. Instead God is a fellow traveler, knowing everything that happens as it happens but not really controlling all events. God weeps when we weep, rejoices when we rejoice, and is ever and always available to us no matter what. God's love is constant, his compassion is forever, but God is not simply executing some pre-determined plan, as though the entire cosmic story--including every last jot and tittle of your life and my life--were some pre-written script that both God and we can do no more than follow.
Whether or not you agree with that, it's not difficult to see where such retro-fitted notions of providence come from: these thoughts emerge from the tragedies of life. It is in many ways the classic "problem of evil" wherein we must reconcile a God who is utterly in charge of the universe with a universe that contains any number of sad, bad, and evil things--things we do not want to associate too snugly with God.