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But the mentality of our day seems to be that in matters of religion, truth is insignificant. We learn truth from science. We get good feelings from religion.
So, the word providence literally means “to see beforehand.” The providence of God refers to His seeing something beforehand with respect to time.
If there is anything about the character of God that repels people from Him more than His holiness, it is His omniscience.
To me, there is nothing more comforting than knowing that there is a God of providence who is aware not only of every one of my transgressions but of every one of my tears, every one of my aches, and every one of my fears.
Rather, the classical Christian notion was that God is both the primary cause of the universe and also the primary cause of everything that takes place in the universe.
God is the source of primary causality; in other words, He is the first cause. He is the Author of all that is, and He continues to be the primary cause of human events and of natural occurrences.
The basic concept here is that what God creates, He sustains. So, one of the important subdivisions in the doctrine of providence is the concept of divine sustenance. Simply put, this is the classical Christian idea that God is not the great Watchmaker who builds the watch, winds it up, and then steps out of the picture. Instead, what He makes, He preserves and sustains.
if God is not sovereign, God is not God. If there is even one maverick molecule in the universe—one molecule running loose outside the scope of God’s sovereign ordination—we cannot have the slightest confidence that any promise God has ever made about the future will come to pass.
The simple answer is that there is something in the creature that does not reside in the Creator—sin. That does not mean that the creature has something greater than the Creator; rather, the creature has something far less than the Creator.
He ordained that His creatures should have the capacity for evil. He did not force them to exercise that capacity, but He knew that they would exercise it.
