A reflection on divine providence and sustaining hope

March Madness is upon us. The NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament begins Tuesday night. The women’s tournament begins Wednesday evening.

If, like me, you don’t know much about college basketball, your odds of predicting each game of the men’s or women’s bracket correctly are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (approximately 9.2 quintillion). If you are familiar with the game, your odds improve to 1 in 120,200,000,000.

This is just one example of the extreme finitude with which humans live regarding the future. Others are more humorous than injurious:

• “Cinema is little more than a passing fad” (Charlie Chaplin, 1916).
• “The Beatles have no future in show business” (executives at Decca Records, 1962).
• “I think there is a worldwide market for maybe five computers” (Thomas Watson, IBM president, 1943).
• “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share” (Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007).
• “Everything that can be invented, has been invented” (Charles H. Duell, US Patent Office Commissioner, 1899).

Others, however, are catastrophic:

• A dead power line unintentionally brought back to life may have caused the deadly Eaton fire in Los Angeles. If this is true and could have been foreseen, horrific tragedy could have been avoided.
• At least thirty-nine people were killed by tornadoes, wildfires, and dust storms that wrought havoc across multiple US states. If the storms’ precise location and timing could have been foreseen, perhaps these lives could have been spared.
• A massive fire tore through an overcrowded nightclub in North Macedonia last Sunday, killing 59 people and injuring 155 others. If the fire could have been anticipated and prevented, the tragedy could have been avoided.

This article, thus far, may seem to be a moot point. We cannot see the future, as so-called “expert” predictions so often demonstrate. So why contemplate an omniscience that cannot be ours?

Because Christians claim to worship and serve a God who does know the future. If that’s true, why doesn’t he make it clearer to us?

One of the most ironic chapters in Scripture

If you knew what would cause a deadly wildfire, wouldn’t you warn someone who could prevent it? If you had perfect meteorological foreknowledge, wouldn’t you alert people in the path of storms? If you knew a tragedy would strike a crowded building, wouldn’t you tell those inside?

Christians often wrestle with the fact that an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God permits so much suffering in this world he created. Leaving his omnipotence aside (which is a large issue, given that he not only could foresee the tragedies we’ve described but had the power to prevent them himself), let’s just focus on his omniscience.

Why doesn’t God tell us today what we need to know to prevent disasters tomorrow?

Now let’s make the problem even worse: He sometimes does.

I find 2 Kings 6 one of the most ironic chapters in the Bible. Here the king of Syria is at war with Israel. However, every time he decides when and where to camp, the Lord warns the prophet Elisha, who sends word to the king of Israel (vv. 8–10). The Syrian king is distressed and sends servants to arrest Elisha, which is foolish since he should assume that the prophet will have foreknowledge of this strategy as well.

But rather than avoid the Syrian army, the prophet prays for God to use his angelic army to strike them with blindness (v. 18). Elisha then feeds them and sends them home, “and the Syrians did not come again on raids into the land of Israel” (v. 23).

If God knew when the Syrians would attack his people and warned them beforehand, why doesn’t he do the same when tragedy threatens us today?

Three plausible facts

A skeptic’s answer would be that this conversation demonstrates the absurdity of the question. God doesn’t do such miracles because (a) he does not exist; (b) he exists but does not do miracles; or (c) he could do miracles but, like Zeus and his cohort atop Mt. Olympus, he is too capricious to be trusted.

None of these options are required by the facts on the ground, however, assuming that plausible answers to our question can be given. And they can.

One: God can give only what we will receive.

If we do not believe he exists, we obviously will not pray for his guidance or follow what wisdom he attempts to provide. Our atheism then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, like the person who doesn’t believe doctors exist, does not consult them with his disease, and dies as a result.

Two: God can lead only those who will follow.

He chooses to honor the free will he has given us. As a result, he can reveal the future only to those willing to receive such revelation and guide only those who will follow his guidance. I believe that many of the tragedies we wish we had foreseen could have been avoided if more of us had sought God’s leadership more often.

Three: One aspect of God’s omniscience is that, by definition, it cannot be understood by our finitude.

St. Anselm described God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” If my mind could understand this Supreme Being, either I would be God or he would not be. I should, therefore, not expect to comprehend his providential ways even in the suffering of our broken world. As he told the prophet:

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lᴏʀᴅ. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9).

Consequently, even when we believe in God and seek his guidance, there will be times when he does not answer us as we wish. On such days, however, we can claim the fact that one day we will understand what we do not today (1 Corinthians 13:12). And we can trust our Father to redeem all he allows for his ultimate glory and our ultimate good.

A simple prayer for each day

I harbor serious doubts about whether God would reveal the “perfect NCAA bracket” to us even if we believe in his omniscience and pray for his guidance. But I do believe that he would lead us into an uncertain future more often if we sought his leading more often and were willing to follow it faithfully for his glory and the common good.

As James noted, “You do not have because you do not ask” (James 4:2). Alternately, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (v. 3).

Some years ago, I learned a simple prayer that I seek to pray every day:

“You lead, I follow.”

Will you offer it to our Father with me today?

 

Denison Forum