Introduction.

On the 26^th of December 2004 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. This was the fourth largest earthquake in the world since 1900. The earthquake generated tsunamis which swept across the Indian Ocean within hours. Over 120,000 people lost their lives in this disaster in areas of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and India. Why did the Lord send this catastrophe? Only the Lord can answer this question, nobody else knows the answer. Reading the providence of God is an exercise of folly, yet all of us do it in the events of our lives.

The Folly of Reading of God's Providence.

1. The doctrine of God's providence is a doctrine full of wonderful comfort and strength for believers. It is God's providence that gives us the security to enjoy the fullness of the grace and peace Jesus gives to all who are reconciled to God through him. To personally know God who totally controls everything that takes place in the world is very reassuring. To know God loves you and that nothing can happen to you unless it is God's will and purpose provides great stability to the way you live your life. I find it very comforting to know that my life is not ultimately controlled by others or myself, but is ultimately controlled by God who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Scriptures like Matthew 10:29-31, ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows' should fill us with a sense of amazement at God's involvement in our lives. The very thought that you will not loose a single hair from your head unless it is your heavenly Father's will ought to give you great security in trusting God's control over your life.
   
   
2. The truth of God's providence ought to supply believers with a real sense of settled-security and contentment. We are meant to enjoy God by living with the sure and certain knowledge that our God is in total control. We undermine our own enjoyment of God's sovereign rule over all things, by reading providence and believing the conclusions we draw. Listen to what A.J Gordon said about reading providence, ‘God's providence is like the Hebrew Bible; we must begin at the end and read backwards in order to understand it.' Until you know the end of events or situations which God has ordained you really can not read the providence of God with any accuracy. In Isaiah 55:8-9 the Lord tells us, "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." Compared to God who is omniscient our knowledge, understanding, insight and power of deduction are totally insignificant. Compared to God who is omnipresent we witness a very minute part of life. We live in the present and see the past, but we know nothing about the future. The eyes which we use to look at the present and the past are blinkered; we see a minute slice of the present and the past, our understanding is limited to our own experience. We have almost no knowledge of how our present and past touches and influences the lives of others. Exactly how the Lord has used your life in the past, or will use it in the future to accomplish his purposes in the lives of others and their circumstances is totally unknown to you. What is God's will and purpose in me preaching this sermon today? I know nothing of how God will use it in the lives of those who hear it or read it. Before I try to read God's providence I need to remind myself of my great and profound ignorance of God's thoughts and ways. When we seek to read God's providences it is like us determining the full picture by looking at one piece of a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle or by trying to read a tapestry from the back looking at the tangled mess of knots and strands. We simply do not have sufficient information to read God's providence with confidence.
   
   
3. Drawing the wrong conclusion is the most likely outcome when we read God's providence. Thomas Watson said, ‘God is to be trusted when his providences seem to be contrary to his promises.' Everything the Lord wants us to know is written in his word and we should focus on what he has revealed, rather than what we can at best guess through reading his providence. Our understanding of the actions of God and his will for us must come from the Bible. Your full confidence must be in the Scriptures and not your subjective reading of his providence. In Ruth 1:20-21 we find Naomi reading God's providence, she says "Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?" This is Naomi's commentary on the Lord's dealings with her; she has drawn her conclusions and believes that her name should be Mara (the bitter one) rather than Naomi (the pleasant one). Was it God's will and purpose to make her a bitter and empty person? I cannot believe that conclusion, Naomi was very wrong in the conclusions she drew. God had far greater purposes than Naomi could ever dream of or ever imagine. What was God's purpose? A.J Gordon told us to read God's providence backwards; starting with God's purpose and conclusion. The book of Ruth ends with the genealogy of Perez the great, great, great, great grandfather of King David. The opening words of the New Testament are, ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.' God's purpose was to prepare the lineage of David for the coming of Jesus Christ the Saviour. Naomi, according to God's providence had an important role to play in the greatest and most profound historical event the world would ever witness, the coming of God incarnate.
   
   
4. Naomi read the providence of God from her subjective responses to the events of her past and she made herself the ‘focusing-lens' in order to interpret God's action. God's providences are always God-centred, focused on his glory and for the good of the church. Naomi would never have imagined her part in the great and glorious purpose of God in sending his only begotten Son to redeem his people from their sins. Naomi's summery of her life reveals that she was in a very poor spiritual state. When Naomi says, ‘Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara' she is revealing the innermost feelings of her heart and the deepest thoughts of her mind; she believes God has made her a bitter person. God by his providence had stripped away everything that filled her life and made her a pleasant person and left her bitter and empty. The fact that Naomi asked the people of Bethlehem to call her Mara reveals that this was the dominant thought that demanded the attention of her mind and the sympathetic feeling of her heart. Throughout the day, everyday she would think to herself ‘God has made me bitter and empty; the Almighty's hand has afflicted me.' This thought and accompanying feelings would have played over and over like a video in her mind and reeked havoc in her spiritual life. Dozen of things in her everyday life would either cause her to think about herself, or her husband or her sons and set this video tape off once more. This continuous playing of the video tape over and over again kept the pain of the events of the past very much alive and current. Her emotions were still as raw as they were on the day that Elimelech, Mahlon and Chilion died. The events of the past kept her emotions and thoughts in bondage. Her subjective conclusions drawn from reading God's providence were given authority and veracity (truth) above the written word of God. In Naomi's heart and mind what she felt and thought were more influential and authoritative than what God said in his Word.
   
   
5. When your subjective feelings and thoughts drawn from reading the providence of God are given greater credence than God's Word you are in spiritual trouble. We are given a wonderful insight into how the false reading of God's providence corrupts a person's thoughts and emotions in Psalm 73. The Psalmist, Aseph looked at the providence of God as he saw it touching the lives of the ungodly and drew this conclusion. ‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who are always at ease; they increase in riches.' (Psalm 73:12) The ungodly have a life of ease and their wealth continues to grow and they want for nothing and lack no pleasure. He looked at the ungodly and looked at himself and envied their lives, he thought about the struggles, difficulties and hardships of his own life and longed to be like the ungodly. How did these thoughts and emotions touch his faith, love, trust and enjoyment of God? Listen to what he says in Psalm 73:13-14, ‘Surely I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued and chastened every morning.' He sought to cleanse his heart by loving God with all his heart and mind and strength, he sought to express his love for the Lord by applying the Law of God to every aspect of his life. He endeavoured to live a godly life by walking with the Lord. His reading of God's providence in the lives of the ungodly caused him to feel and think that his striving to live in fellowship with God in submission to the Scriptures was in vain. The Hebrew word translated here as in vain, could have been translated as ‘emptiness, vanity, idleness or with no purpose.'  His faith in the Lord, his struggle with sin, and his obedience to the Law of God seemed empty and purposeless. The ungodly he felt and thought were enjoying God's blessing, while he, a godly man was smarting under the chastening rod of God. The conclusion he drew from reading God's providence in his own life and the lives of the ungodly was; ‘the lives of those who trust, love, serve and obey the Lord are harder, more difficult, more painful and miserable than those who reject, scoff and mock the Lord. It is better to be ungodly and enjoy life than to be godly and miserable.' These thoughts and the feelings generated by his envy played through his mind every time he saw a rich man or he experienced any hardship in his life.  Aseph's feelings and thoughts generated by his false conclusions concerning God's providence pushed him beyond the point of backsliding on to the point of renouncing his faith. Reading God's providence set him on a course that would shipwreck his faith.
   
   
6. What rescued Aseph from ending up on the rocks of destruction? He tells us in Psalm 73:17, ‘Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end.' He heard the preacher declare the judgement of God. Aseph understood that the ungodly faced eternal life in hell, and that the judgement of God was continually upon them and that he set the feet of the ungodly in slippery places. The facts of God's Word made it clear that to envy the lives lived by the ungodly was gross stupidity. Listen to what Aseph says about himself for thinking and feeling that his faith was in vain, ‘I was so foolish and ignorant; I was like a beast before You.'  The wrong conclusions he drew from reading God's providence lead him on to respond to the Lord in idiotic and dumb ways. When you have a friend who tells you he is about to do something really dumb, you say to him, ‘don't be a goose.' We need to grasp how very detrimental to our faith wrong conclusions drawn from providence can be. Aseph's faith recovered and his life was stabilized by the great truth he expressed in the opening verse of Psalm 73; ‘Truly God is good to Israel, to such as are pure in heart.' The tense of this verse is the present continuous which for emphasis could be translated, ‘truly God is always good to Israel to such as are pure in heart.' This truth stands as an immovable, unshakable fact God is always good to those who belong to him. If what you read in providence ever tells you that this is not the case, then your reading of providence is wrong, you have drawn a conclusion based on foolishness and ignorance.
   
   
7. Naomi's conclusions about herself were in direct contradiction to the covenant promises of God. Rather than believe that God is always good to those who belonged to him as his Word says, she chose to believe that God had made her bitter and empty and that  the Almighty's hand had afflicted her as her reading of God's providence told her. Naomi needed to submit herself to the Lord and then live and interpret her life in the light of the clear facts that God makes plain in his Word. We are very much like Naomi; we are ready to believe our conclusions drawn from past providences rather than believe the Word of God. In order for God's people to restore this biblical balance to their outlook on life, they need to recognise four methods used by the devil to deceive us.
   
   
1. Satan is the one who keeps rewinding and replaying the video tape of your past for you to listen to how sad, tragic, unjust and unfair your past has been. He wants that tape to play over and over again to stop you from thinking, because he knows that when you start thinking the Holy Spirit will minister to you from the Scriptures to show you that the video tape is very wrong. In 1 Peter 1:13 we are told, ‘Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.' This is a call for you to prepare your mind for action, for a fight, to take control and get ready. Its time to get off the emotional rollercoaster created by your wrong reading of providence and the emotions that accompany the lies you believe.
   
   
2. Peter calls on us to be sober. The Greek word used here means, to be sober, to be calm and collected in spirit and to be temperate, dispassionate, and circumspect in behaviour. If you are not sober, you are under the influence of alcohol, drugs, deception, emotions or demons, you are not in control, and you are being controlled. Paul in Ephesians 5:18 commands believers, ‘Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit.' Being sober minded for a Christian means nothing less than being filled with the Spirit of Christ. John Calvin approaching the Scriptures from a practical rather than a mystical view makes the point that to be filled with the Spirit is to be filled with the Word. To be sober minded in the true biblical sense means to look at life through the truth of the Word, refer constantly to the facts God has revealed. The Devil would urge you to go with your gut feelings. Rather than have you scrutinize your feelings by the Word, he would have you scrutinize the Word by your feelings. He would urge you to follow the philosophy of the age and simply follow your heart.
    
3. The third thing Peter calls on believers to do is to rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. If you are a Christian you can never be in a situation that is devoid of hope. Your hope is in the Saviour who has extended grace upon grace to you to enable you to know the permanence of his salvation. Those saved by Jesus Christ will always receive grace from God. God will never deal with saved sinners according to what they deserve, but always according to what Jesus Christ deserves. The Almighty is always gracious towards those who belong to him. In the Garden of Eden Satan urged Eve to focus on the fruit of the one tree God had forbidden them to eat, rather than on the great number of trees God had give them. Satan wants you to think that God is hard, harsh, and mean, treating his children poorly. The Devil would have been very content to have Naomi think that God had made her life bitter, empty and miserable. The grace of God towards you in Christ ought to drive away every thought of God not being generous, merciful, kind and good to you.  Our God is filled with loving-kindness towards his children.
    
4. The fourth method Satan uses to stop you restoring a biblical balance to your outlook on life is to convince you that God owes you an explanation for the working of his providences. The Devil would press you not only to demand an explanation, but to demand an explanation that allows you to understand God's action so that you can see exactly how it is for your good. Satan makes you think it's your right to fully understand the actions of God's providence. God is God and he does not owe you or anyone an explanation for what he does according to his free and sovereign will. Satan uses this tactic so that you subtly put yourself on the same level as God and undermined God's authority over you. We must never forget that we are servants and God is our Master.

Conclusion.

Life does not always make sense and we often do not understand why things happen. We can punish ourselves by persistently asking why, but never getting an answer, or we can be content by focusing on who is in control of our lives. Knowing that God loves you, and counts you precious because you were bought by the blood of Christ, ought to be more than sufficient for you to fully trust him. We need to resist the temptation to read God's providence we must accept the wisdom of the Lord and trust Him fully.