“Belief in God’s providence is an article of the Christian faith. For the ‘natural’ human being, so many objections can be raised against God’s cosmic government that one can only adhere to it with difficulty.
But the Christian has witnessed God’s special providence at work in the cross of Christ and experienced it in the forgiving and regenerating grace of God, which has come to one’s own heart.
And from the vantage point of this new and certain experience in one’s own life, the Christian believer now surveys the whole of existence and the entire world and discovers in all things, not chance or fate, but the leading of God’s fatherly hand.
It is above all by faith in Christ that believers are enabled—in spite of all the riddles that perplex them—to cling to the conviction that the God who rules the world is the same loving and compassionate Father who in Christ forgave them all their sins, accepted them as His children, and will bequeath to them eternal blessedness.
In that case faith in God’s providence is no illusion, but secure and certain; it rests on the revelation of God in Christ and carries within it the conviction that nature is subordinate and serviceable to grace, and the world is likewise subject to the kingdom of God.
Thus, through all its tears and suffering, it looks forward with joy to the future. Although the riddles are not resolved, faith in God’s fatherly hand always again arises from the depths and even enables us to boast in afflictions.”
–Herman Bavinck, Ed. John Bolt and trans. John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2: God and Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 594-595.
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