Christ in Providence
By him all things consist. — COI.OSSIAXS i. 17.
f~^ OD’S work of providence is “his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing of all his creatures and all their actions.” It has no Sabbath. No night suspends it, arid from its labours God never rests. If, for the sake of illustration, I may compare small things with great, it is like the motion of the heart. Beating our march to the grave, since the day we began to live, the heart has never ceased to beat. Our limbs grow weary; not it. We sleep; it never sleeps. Needing no period of repose to recruit its strength, by night and day it throbs in every pulse; and, constantly supplying nourishment to the meanest as well as to the noblest organs of our frame, with measured, steady, untired stroke, it drives the blood along the bounding arteries, without any exercise of will on our part, and even when the consciousness of our own existence is lost in dreamless slumbers.
If philosophy is to be believed, our world is but an outlying corner of creation; bearing, perhaps, as small a proportion to the great universe, as a single grain bears to all the sands of the sea-shore, or one small quivering leaf to the foliage of a boundless forest. Yet, even within this earth’s narrow limits, how vast the work of Providence! How soon is the mind lost in contemplating it! How great that Being whose hand paints every flower, and shapes every leaf; who forms every bud on every tree, and every infant in the darkness of the womb; who feeds each crawling worm with a parent’s care, and watches like a mother over the insect that sleeps away the night in the bosom of a flower; who throws open the golden gates of day, and draws around a sleeping world the dusky curtains of the night; who measures out the drops of every shower, the whirling snow-flakes, and the sands of man’s eventful life; who determines alike the fall of a sparrow and the fate of a kingdom; and so overrules the tide of human fortunes, that whatever befall him, come joy or sorrow, the believer says, It is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good.
In ascribing this great work to Jesus Christ, my text calls you to render him divine honours. In the hands that were once nailed to the cross, it places the sceptre of universal empire; and on those blessed arms that, once thrown around a mother’s neck, now tenderly enfold every child of God, it hangs the weight of worlds. Great is the mystery of godliness! Yet so it is, plainly written in the words, By him all things consist. By him the angels keep their holiness, and the stars their orbits; the tides roll along the deep, and the seasons through the year; kings reign, and princes decree justice; the church of God is held together, riding out at anchor the rudest storms; and by him, until the last of his elect are plucked from the wreck, and his purposes of mercy are all accomplished, this guilty world is kept from sinking under a growing load of sins.
“By him all things consist.” Wonderful words, as spoken of one who, some eighteen centuries ago, was a houseless wanderer, a pensioner on woman’s charity, and not seldom without a place where to lay his head! Yet how clearly do these words attest his dignity and divinity? More could not be said of God; and Paul will not say less of Christ. Nor, great and glorious as they are, do they stand alone. Certainly not. In language as lofty, and ascribing to Jesus honours no less divine, the apostle thus writes to the Hebrews, “God, who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, wrhom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who, being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” How wonderful! He left a grave to ascend the throne; he exchanged the side of a dying thief for the right hand of God; he dropped a reed to assume the sceptre of earth and heaven; he put off a wreath of thorns to put on a sovereign’s crown; and, in that work of providence to which I would now turn your attention, you behold Him, who died to save the chief of sinners, made “Head over all things to the church.”
I. His providence appears in those extraordinary events which lead his people, and often compel his enemies, to acknowledge the hand of God.
I do not speak of miraculous events; — as when the sea opened her gates to the flying Israelites, and man’s extremity proved God’s opportunity; as when the ravens, deserting their nests and young to cater for the prophet, hunted the fields to supply his table; as when hungry lions, like gentle lambs, crouched at Daniel’s feet; as when the sun set at noonday over the red cross of Calvary, or shone at midnight on the hills of Giheon. It is to another kind of events that I refer; and of these —
1. Job’s history furnishes a notable example. Satan has gone forth from the presence of the Lord, armed with this commission, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. The devil can never go a step further against the saints than God chooses to give him chain. That is great com fort. Yet how ruthlessly, how pitilessly, how malignantly the Enemy of man used his power on this occasion, you know. The gallant ship that, with songs below, and gay dances on her deck, was sailing on a summer day over a glassy sea, in her sky no portentous clouds, in her snowy sheets but wind enough to waft her home, and of which, by nightfall, the only vestiges are some broken timbers afloat in the foam that the wild waves are grinding on the horrid reef, presents a striking image of the change that one short, eventful day brought on the house and fortunes of this man of
God. One following hard upon another, like successive shocks of an earthquake, the messengers of disaster come. Ruin, ruin, is on their lips, as, pale with terror, panting for breath, they arrive with their tidings, and that doleful echo, that ever-recurring close of the woful tale, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Cattle, flocks, camels gone, all his property sunk, Job is a beggared man. Yet his children are safe; and with seven gallant sons and three fair daughters, he still is rich. These spared, let all else perish. But ah! the next wave, towering, cresting high over head, falls on his labouring bark, and, sweeping the deck clean, leaves none standing there but himself and a frantic mother; nor is theirs the consolation of the mother who, reaching the shore with her living babe, presses it to her bosom, and holds herself compensated for all other losses. They are dead, cries the last messenger; they are dead, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Dead? We almost expect to see himself full dead; stunned, killed by this crowning, this overwhelming stroke. But no. Greatest of heroes, spectacle for angels to admire, pattern for believers to imitate in the hour of their most adverse fortunes, he arose and worshipped — arose as the ball which rebounds the higher the harder it is struck; as the eagle which reaches her loftiest flight not in serene, but in tempestuous skies. Owning the Providence in whose hand Sabean and Chaldean, fiery thunderbolt and roaring whirlwind, were only instruments, Job bows before the throne of God, and says, with a patience more uncommon even than his trials, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
2. The history of God’s church is filled with remarkable illustrations of marvellous, though not miraculous providences. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” said our Lord; and when — now sleeping, now gently breathing, now sighing as in sorrow, now shrieking as in pain, now roaring in mad-like fits of rage, and now howling round the house — it shakes every door and window to get in, the wind seems as uncontrolled and uncontrollable a power as any in nature. But when, some three hundred years ago, it rose in its resistless might, and swept down in hurricane gusts from heaven to scatter the hopes of Rome and the pride of Spain, it was surely, to use the words of scripture, “stormy wind fulfilling his word.” I believe that. In that crisis of the church’s fate, Popery and secular despotism, ecclesiastical and political tyranny, united their forces, as they now threaten to do again. Their object was to crush the liberties of mankind, and to quench the light of the Reformation in the life-blood of its professors. Never had winds wafted, never, since keel first ploughed them, had the waves borne such a fleet as, armed for that pur pose and confident of victory, came ruffling down in the pride of its power on the coasts of England. The hearts of many trembled; and some were but little comforted by the noble attitude in which England rose, headed by her maiden Queen, to meet the danger in the name of God. Who could not fight could pray. Earnest supplications were therefore made continually, nor made in vain. And so, when the cannon’s thunder pealed along the deep, and gun to gun, yard-arm to yard-arm, they fought the Spaniard in sight of their homes. One mingled in that protracted battle, as unlooked for by the foe as was the fourth person who walked the fiery furnace with the three Hebrew children in the brave days of old.
God descended into the fight. He did fly upon the wings of the wind, and with the black tempest swept the enemy to destruction. Storm rose and roared upon the back of storm, scattering that boastful navy. Until, where it had ridden in its pride, nothing was seen but the crests of the angry sea; nothing heard but thundering breakers, and the scream of the wild sea-mew. And while the hurricane was pursuing them along our island, and strewing these northern shores with the corpses and the wreck of that proud Armada, the people of England repaired to the house of God to acknowledge his providence in this memorable deliverance, and sing of the stormy wind fulfilling his word.
3. Again, the finger of God has been often marvellously revealed in the detection and punishment of crime. Men have stood astonished, and have been constrained to say — There was a providence in that. By some remarkable and unlooked-for circumstance, God himself has cleared away every doubt; and said, as it were, with his finger pointed at the confounded, trembling wretch, Thou, thou art the man! One night, for instance, some years ago, a person in this city awoke to find that his house had been plundered. The alarm was raised, nor was it long ere the officers of justice found a clue. The thief, wounding his hand as he eecaped by the window, had left a red witness behind him. The watchman flashed his lantern on the spot. Drop by drop, blood stained the pavement. They tracked it on, and on, and ever on, till their silent guide conducted them along an open passage, and up a flight of steps — stopping at the door of a house. They broke in; and there they found the bleeding hand, the booty, and the pale, ghastly criminal. Now, a shower of rain would have washed away the stain; a fall of snow would have concealed it; the foot of some wretched street walker, some midnight reveller, would have effaced it; but no, the crime was one of peculiar atrocity, and there God kept the damning spot. And, unless they be for given, covered by the righteousness, washed away in the blood of Jesus, so shall your sins find you out. Wash them away in Calvary’s fountain, or they wait to meet you at the bar of judgment. The step of divine justice may be slow, but it is sure, and I implore sinners to flee from the exposures and the wrath to come: for, what saith the scriptures, Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the house tops, — God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.
Who should not own in such remarkable events the hand of providence? That man incurred double guilt,
s who, when passing dryshod through the sea between two crystal walls, thought no more of God than you or I, perhaps, have done, when, on a bright summer day, beneath the flickering shade of overhanging trees, and, on a carpet of heath and wild flowers, we were threading some mountain gorge. He too, incurred double guilt, who, having risen with the dawn, and left his tent, ere the sun had shot one slanting ray across the desert sands, to gather food fallen fresh from dewy skies, thought no more of God than yonder merry band, that, with talk and songs and laughter, sweep down the golden corn, or, when sheaves are stacked and fields are cleared, with gleesome dances keep harvest-home. “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter,” were Jehu’s orders; and doubly guilty were his messengers if, as they drove off the dogs that were crunching Jezebel’s skull, and saw the curse of an avenging prophet, they thought no more of God’s righteous judgments, than does the rude, brutal mob which executions gather from low lanes and alleys around a gallows-tree. It is good to see God’s hand in every extraordinary event, but it is better to see his providence in every thing, saying with David, I have set the Lord always before me. How happy is such a frame of mind! I cherish the memory of one over whose chequered life it shed a perpetual sunshine. A widow with a helpless family, she had literally left father and mother, and house and lands, for Jesus’ sake, and had had her full share of trials. Yet nothing came wrong to her; nor did leaden cares ever sit long or press heavy on her saintly breast — hers, a bearing that often reminded me of the beautiful words of Luther, when, in an hour of alarm and anxious councils, he pointed his companion to a little bird, that, perched on a bending branch, was pouring forth a gush of melody in the ear of evening, and said, Happy fellow! he leaves God to think for him. Do that; leave God to think for you, and to care for you. Let clear-eyed Faith behold Christ on his throne, with the strong hand of a God, and the sympathies of a man guiding in heaven the helm of your fortunes, and you may go to sleep in the rudest storm. What storm should hinder him whose head is pillowed on Jesus’ bosom, and who feels himself enfolded in the arms of providence, from fulfilling this high, this happy command, Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Child of God! take your rest. He who keeps watch by you, never sleeps.
II. God in Christ presides over ordinary as well as extraordinary events.
By him all things consist. Every object in nature is impressed with his footprints, and each new day repeats the wonders of creation. Yes; there is not a morning we open our eyes, but they meet a scene as wonderful as that which fixed the gaze of Adam when he awoke into existence. Nor is there an object, be it pebble or pearl, weed or rose, the flowerspangled sward beneath, or the star-spangled sky above, a worm or an angel, a drop of water or a boundless ocean, in which intelligence may not discern, and piety may not adore, the providence of Him who assumed our nature that he might save our souls. If God is not in all the thoughts of the wicked, he is in everything else. And since the comfort of his people rests so much on the conviction that the Lord reigneth, that his hand rules every event, that a wise, and most kind, as well as holy Providence presides over our daily fortunes and all things besides, let me proceed, by some familiar examples, to illustrate that noble truth.
1. Let me show you Providence in a snow-drop — a flower we all know and love, and hail as the fair harbinger of spring. And in this I follow the example of him who extracted from flowers truths more beautiful than their colours, more precious than their most fragrant odours. All the plants that clothe and adorn the earth with such varied beauty, and combining, as is God’s way, utility with beauty, supply food to the animal creation, depend for their continued existence on their flowers turning into fruit. Now, the fructification of the snow-drop depends, if I may say so, on the modesty, in it as elsewhere the usual associate of purity, with which, shrinking from its own boldness, it hangs its beautiful head. Let it lift its head up with the pride of a lily, and this herald of spring perishes from the face of the earth, like the race of a childless man. But God has provided against such a nevent. Wonderful, and instructive as teaching us how the greatest and smallest things in providence have often mutual and important connections, this vast globe, and that little flower, in regard to their weight, have been calculated the one so to suit the other, that its bells are and must be pendent. Drawn downwards by the force of gravity, they assume a position without which they had produced no fruit, yet one which they had not assumed, had our planet been no larger than Mars or Mercury. See, then, how God takes care of a humble flower! how much more of you and of your families, 0 ye of little faith!
2. Let me take an example from a circumstance which, at first sight, appears to shake rather than to confirm our confidence in a presiding Providence. That plants may produce fruit in our climate, their flowers, warmly wrapped within the folds of the bud, must sleep the winter through — waiting for the genial breath of spring, and the embraces of a summer sun. Well; we are meditating on the care which God takes of many tender plants, by either wrapping them in a warm mantle of snow, or causing them to seek shelter beneath the surface, when our meditations are suddenly arrested, and our trust in God’s providence is at first sight perhaps shaken, by a plant which spreads out its blossoms, like unrequited love, to the cold beams of the winter day. The frost has bound the soil, the ice has chained the streams, ‘and the hoary rime, like a work of magic, has turned every tree to silver, and there is not heat enough in the keen cutting air for that unhappy flower to produce fruit. It is with it as with our souls when God withdraws the joys of salvation and the in-
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fluences of his Holy Spirit. There is something wrong here ‘? No. The Maker of all has made no mistake. Nor may Deist, Atheist, or sneering scoffer put his foot on that flower, and, to crush with its frail form our faith in providence, ask, Where is now thy God? Ask that plant its history! It speaks with a foreign accent; the truth comes out that God never made it to dwell here; an exile, it has been torn from its native home, and still clings, like other exiles, to the habits and memories of its fatherland. Belonging to a region where the day is longest when ours is shortest, where they pant under summer heat when we are shivering in winter cold, the flowers that it spreads on our snowy ground but show how correctly God had wound it up to blow in its proper habitat at the proper season, and how clearly his providence may be seen even in the fading blossoms of a flower. I say again, if God takes such care of plants, how may you trust yourselves and your families to him? What may you not trust to him, who spared nor pains, nor pity, nor care, nor kindness, nor even his beloved Son, but gave him up to death, that you might not perish, but live?
3. Let me select an illustration from the animal kingdom. Over the honeycomb, in which a vulgar taste, in common with the bear, finds only the means to gratify its appetite, the philosopher may bend with admiration and amaze. He can have little reflection who has not marked the beauty and delicacy of those cells, which, though built in the darkness of the hive, and the work of a humble insect, man, with his reason and the aids of art, attempts in vain to imitate. Yet there is here something more wonderful than beauty. Examine them closely. See how each has the same number of sides with its fellow, and is its exact counterpart. In that a child could discern plain evidence of design; but there is a depth of wisdom there which only science can fathom. Repair to the study of a Newton, of one who is tracking that wandering comet on its fiery path into the far realms of space, or weighing, not the Alps or Andes, but worlds in the scales of science, and ask him — for no man else can solve the question, simple as it seems — to find out for you the form of the vessel which combines with the greatest strength the largest capacity? Having wrought out this problem by a long series of abstruse calculations, he presents the result. How wonderful! You find such a vessel in the cell of a bee-hive!
1 dare to say that he is a fool who ventures, in the face of such a fact, to deny a providence, or to assert that there is no God. Why, at a period in man’s history when he was little better than a naked savage, when he was robbing the beast of his skin for clothing and of his rocky den for a home, when he had no tools but such as he could fashion from a stone, nor vessels but of the rudest form and the coarsest clay, this humble insect was building the most beautiful fabrics from the most delicate materials, with the skill of an accomplished architect, and according to the laws of a high philosophy. What a proof of an over-ruling providence? and that He, who teaches birds as well as angels to sing, guides the movements of the meanest creatures — presiding in a hive as well as in heaven! Why, then, should God’s people ever despond? What can be too hard for them? too heavy for you to bear, too difficult for you to do! He is with you, with whom all things are possible. And if, by the most feeble creatures, he achieves works of such skill and beauty, how may you take heart to believe, that by the aids of his holy Spirit, and the help of the grace promised to earnest prayer, you shall work out even your salvation with fear and trembling; God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure? 4. Let me show a divine providence in the most common circumstances of life. Most people are ready to acknowledge the hand of God in such events as disease and death, births and burials, any remarkable escape from danger, some either very favourable or unfavourable turn in their fortunes. Who has not noted down certain occurrences in his history as plainly indicating a providence? Yet the largest number of men have their type in the son rather than the father, of whom this circumstance is told. They had parted in the morning, not to meet again till nightfall. On meet ing, the son said that he had been most wonderfully preserved; for his horse had thrown him, and but for God’s good guardian hand, he had certainly been killed. Whereupon his father replied that he had met with a yet more remarkable providence, had still more cause to praise God; for, he added, addressing the other, whose curiosity was now wound up to the highest pitch in expectation of some strange and stirring story — I have travelled the livelong day, preserved from all alarm or accident whatever. Happy the man who thus sets the Lord always before him!
Now, for an example of providence in the most common things, let me select sleep — our nightly rest. “He giveth his beloved sleep,” “Thou holdest mine eyes waking,” so says the Bible; and events occasionally place that truth very vividly before us. Do you remember a terrible shipwreck which occurred not many years ago on our west coast, and how those who were saved out of a large number that perished, owed their life to one wakeful man? He was no watchman of the coast-guard, no pilot on the look-out for homeward-bound ships, but only an old infirm seaman, who had gone to bed with the rest of the world. He had courted sleep that night; but, for no reason that he could fancy, his eyes were kept waking. Weary of turning and tossing on a sleepless bed, he rose and walked the floor. With an old sailor’s love of the sea, he drew aside the curtain of his cottage window to gaze out on the heav ing deep. And while the sight of it was waking up the memory of former years, his eye, ere a landsman could have descried it, caught an object coming shoreward through the gloom. Horror seizes him. It is an ill-fated ship rushing, like a reckless soul bent on destruction, through the fog on that iron coast, right into the jaws of death. Many were hurried that night into a watery grave. Yet, but for the circumstance that sleep had fled the old man’s couch, but for the alarm he gave, but for the boats that were launched to the rescue, many more had been drowned, and some, perhaps,
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damned, who, converted to God, are now living to his glory on earth, or, beyond the reach of all storms, safely housed in heaven. God held his eyes waking; he had wrork for that ancient mariner to do.
But, to take an example on a scale involving world wide interests, 1 can show that not the life of individuals only, but the existence of a nation, and, since the Saviour sprang from that nation, the salvation of the world, once turned on a sleepless night. Strange, yet true! The king of Persia — like many other kings, a mere puppet in the hands of unprincipled ministers — has signed a decree to exterminate the whole Jewish race. Conscience, uneasy for the deed, does not keep him awake when he retires to rest in Shushan’s palace. Her hand has planted no thorns in the royal couch, yet he cannot sleep; nor is there balmy virtue in silence, or wine, or music, to make his weary eyelids drop. It is strange that he cannot sleep; and yet more strange his choice of something to relieve the tediousness of the night. He calls for the chronicles of his kingdom. Dry reading, one would think; yet you know the issue, and how the page turning up that related the story of Mordecai’s forgotten service, these wakeful hours led on to the honour of the Jew, the hanging of Haman, arid the preservation of the race from which our Saviour descended. Was there no providence in that? Was it accident or blind chance which kept slumbers that night from the downy pillow? Accident, that instead of music, the revel, the dance, the soft arms of pleasure, led a voluptuary to seek entertainment in the musty records of his kingdom?
Accident, that opened the book where it recorded the story of Hebrew loyalty? No. I believe that God’s own finger turned these leaves, and held the king’s eyes waking. He had work for that king to do.
These events draw aside the veil. We see all the reins that guide and govern the world gathered into the hands of God. We see Jesus standing by the helm of affairs; that there is no such thing as chance; that his care of his people extends to the most common, minute, and apparently trivial matters; how even waking hours, or dreamless slumbers, are links in the golden chain of providence. A happy belief, too precious to be parted with! Let the thought that Jesus watches over your fortunes, and guards your welfare, and guides your way, banish every care. I do not say that you will never be disappointed, but certainly you ought never to be discontented. Many things in your circumstances may occasion anxious thought, but nothing should occasion or can excuse repining. Child of God! he has numbered the hairs of thy head, as well as the stars of heaven. Charge of angels! they shall keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
By him all things consist; and on raising our eyes to Jesus exalted, crowned, enthroned, with the government on his shoulder, two thoughts suggest themselves. First, our mind reverts, by way of contrast, to Jerusalem, to Calvary, to the doleful day when he sank beneath the weight, and expired amid the agonies of his cross. If he, who now bears the weight of worlds, once staggered under the burden of our sins, oh! what an incalculable, mysterious load of guilt must there be in sin! It bent the back that bears with ease the burden of ten thousand worlds. That load you cannot bear; and if you would not have it sink your souls into the deepest hell, flee to Calvary, leave it at the cross. Cast sins and sorrows, cast both on him who invites the burden, saying, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Again, beholding Christ thus exalted to the right hand of God, we think of the security of his people. They are to watch and pray, and rejoice with trembling. Yet they cannot sink whom he holds up, nor lose the battle on whose side he rights. Believer, what art thou doing, going groaning through the world beneath a load of fears and cares? What should discourage thee? What should disturb thy peace? What ruffle the calm spirit of a man who knows that the hands once nailed for him to the tree now hold the helm of his fortunes; and that the blessed Saviour, who by love’s golden sceptre reigns within his heart, holds sovereign sway over earth and heaven; and by both bitter and sweet providences, by coffins and cradles, by disappointments and joys, by losses and gains, shall make all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.