Providence - Robert Bayley

The story of the providence of God in our lives begins before we do: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." Jeremiah 1:5.

And what did God know about us before our conception? Our personal history from start to finish: "...all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." Psalm 139:16

So these two profound statements by God in His eternal, trustworthy Word, set before us the definition of providence: to know or see beforehand, from the Latin prepositional prefix "pro," to know or be aware, and the Latin verb "video" meaning to see: God sees, knows, is aware beforehand what will be.

The best way to understand and define God's providence is to ask the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of our heart that we might see His providence in our personal history.

While born and raised, baptized and confirmed in the Presbyterian church, I experienced a powerful conversion and an equally powerful Holy Spirit baptism, both during my senior year of high school. Upon graduating from high school I found myself a full-time student at a Pentecostal school, Southern California College.

It was there during my senior year, that the professor who taught systematic theology asked me to take the class when he had to be away, which I gladly did. Unbeknownst to me, because of how I handled the teaching of that class, my name was shared with individuals putting together the faculty for a new Christian university being founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Pentecostal school, Oral Roberts University. I was contacted and offered a full ride in the graduate school of theology in exchange for teaching two undergraduate systematic theology classes.

Here was an offer I couldn't refuse -- or so I thought. For me it was a dream come true. Yet every time I prayed about it there was a subtle but persistent check in my spirit, which I can still sense within over sixty years later: this was not God's will for me. Nothing wrong with the offer, it just wasn't his will. So I said "no" to an incredibly attractive proposition.

What to do? I was graduating that spring with a B.A. in religion and now had a future that looked like a blank slate, a rather bleak blank slate. Then one day a retired pastor called and asked me to drop by his house near the college. After exchanging pleasantries, he told me that as he was praying the Holy Spirit told him he was to encourage me to go back to school and get a teaching degree and, to help me do that, he handed me a check for the tuition for the first semester. So I did just that, enrolled for the fall semester in the education B.A. track.

While this scenario was unfolding, another, unbeknownst to me, was running parallel to it.  A missionary to Switzerland was speaking in chapel for the first week of school. She was accompanying a young lady enrolling as a foreign exchange student from Switzerland. As she sat on the platform watching the students as they entered, the Holy Spirit caused her to focus on one student who stood out from all the rest, and told her, "That young man is going to be Ruth's husband." She told us that story two years later when we announced our engagement.

The providence of God is a characteristic of the God who sees ahead of time the details in our lives before they happen. Had I persisted in moving forward with the tantalizing offer from Oral Roberts University, I would have enjoyed that chapter in my life but missed the woman who has now been my wife for 60 years.

So the providence of God involves guidance, if we will listen and not be tempted to choose something in which we can discern nothing wrong just because we want it, and in the choosing miss what God sees ahead of time that he has waiting for us that we will miss if we make the wrong choice. Paying attention to what the Quakers call the checks and nudges of the Spirit involves trusting without knowing ‘why,' learning to walk the walk of God's providence in our lives who always knows ‘why.'

And so we pray in the words of a great Welsh hymn:


It was a hot and humid summer in Arlington, Texas, where I stayed for a few weeks with my college roommate, Cleddie Keith, and his parents. While Cleddie lined up some preaching opportunities for me in several churches, I was there primarily to travel to the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in East Texas where I was scheduled to preach a week of revival meetings in the Indian church. there. This southern California boy found himself confronted with two unfamiliar cultures, southern culture in general, and southern Pentecostalism in particular. I felt like a fish out of water, and a part of me wanted to cancel all meetings and hitchhike back to LA. But the Holy Spirit said "no," just as he said to Paul as he sought the Lord's providential guidance as to where to preach in Acts 16, a discernment which, if we will read the text carefully, was as clear about where Paul was NOT to preach as well as where he WAS to preach -- we can't be in two places at the same time. It was clear to me that I was to be in Texas preaching that summer.

So one day in Arlington, standing at the curb in that hot and humid Texas summer, and for reasons which I have long since forgotten, I was feeling disconnected, insecure and alone. Then, in the providence of God, I looked down and saw a dead sparrow in the gutter in front of the curb just where I was standing, not up the street, not down the street, but right in front of me and the quiet voice of a loving Father said to me, "Not one of these sparrows falls without my knowing exactly where it is, (Matthew 10:29), including the dead sparrow in the gutter in front of you, and I know where you are as well."

It was then that I began learning that the purpose of the providence of God is not only there to provide us with guidance, but also to envelope us with a sense of assurance as we follow that guidance, an assurance born of an awareness that He always knows where we are and will never abandon us enroute. While I was tempted to go my own way that day, I remain grateful I did not, and instead experienced God not only working in my life but through my life that summer. At the end of the summer all was well with my soul, and I returned to college thankful for the providence of God in my life, although I didn't know to call it that yet.

A testimony born of great loss in the Chicago fire of 1871 and the subsequent loss of his four daughters two years later in a shipwreck, Horatio Spafford, a Presbyterian elder, was able to pen these words of confidence in the providential assurance God gives no matter the circumstances.


Back in college, one day I received a call to drop by the finance office. When I met with the finance officer she handed me an envelope with cash in it but no name. She explained that someone had been watching me as I worshiped at Glad Tidings Assembly of God near the college, and would watch as at every opportunity I would join others going forward to kneel at the altar benches to pray and seek the Lord. One Sunday they noticed my shoes -- they were worn through and had holes in them. The money was to buy a new pair of shoes.

Here we encounter a different take on the word "providence," for the word "provide" is found, letter for letter, in the word providence, and contains, therefore, the same prepositional prefix and verb from Latin as our word providence. He knew ahead of time that my shoes were going to wear out. He knew ahead of time that I wouldn't have the money to replace them, and He knew ahead of time the individual He could trust to place it in their heart to anonymously provide new shoes for me. This characteristic of God is confirmed in one of the Hebrew Old Testament names for God, Jehovah Jireh, "the Lord will provide."‘ God's providence not only means God's guidance and God's assurance but also God's provision. The providence of God backs the promises of God: "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus."

These snapshot testimonies of God's providence help us to understand a little more of Who He is as a providential God, a God who sees ahead.

There is one more way in which God's providence works in our lives: in our past, a past that before it came to be He saw ahead of time. The French Reformer John Calvin, 1509-1564, in his singularly greatest work of theology, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, made the sovereignty of God the centerpiece of his treatise. "A summary of the doctrine of divine providence," he wrote, "...embraces both the future and the past."  Here is a great mystery regarding God: he sees both past and future as present.

Sometimes the landscape of the past in our lives is littered with anger, resentment, unforgiveness, bitterness, all of which are relational in nature - and even hatred, which can maintain a stubborn presence in our lives in the present and wounding our future. How does God's providence interact with such personal histories in ways that are freeing and healing even though the events that sowed such seeds in our lives happened years ago?

As the heavy metal doors of the prison slammed shut behind me, I felt a moment of anger that I should even have to be there, visiting my father incarcerated for doing to other children what he did to me so many years ago. So egregious was his behavior that he made it to the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Now here I was, again, going to spend time with the man I grew up hating but a hatred the Holy Spirit had converted into love for him over the years.

As we sat at a picnic table in the prison yard he began to cry, and asked me to forgive him for the things he had done to me as a child. My response was immediate and sincere; "Of course I forgive you." God had been preparing me for that moment years ago.

Years earlier, driving our youngest daughter to school, she asked,  knowing our family history, "Dad, do you sometimes wish you had a different father?" "Yes," I replied, "but this is the father God has given me, and if on his deathbed I have the opportunity to lead him to Christ then that is why he is my father, and I am his son." A few years later this is exactly what happened. In our last meeting before he died, the man who would not help me with college because the school was run by a church, and the man who made it clear to me he wanted nothing to do with Jesus, asked this same Jesus into his heart and life and also asked Him to forgive him for all the terrible things he had done to children and their families. The past and the present met there in that exchange that prepared him for the future when he died, and brought past and present for me into one time frame. Only a providential God can do that.

The great English hymn writer Isaac Watts, 1674-1748, paraphrased Psalm 90, giving us a memorable hymn of praise and prayer to God for his providence covering all time.


Here's a fundamental prior principle when it comes to seeking an understanding of God's providence in our lives: It is always about his purpose, not our particulars. What do I mean by that? When I was tempted by a perfectly legitimate offer to teach at ORU, what God was after was not my teaching ability but my obedience above the particulars, the formation of Christ's person and character within me. Dietrick Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis in the closing days of World War Two, puts this principle bluntly before us in his classic, The Cost of Discipleship, when he says, "Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes." The particulars are secondary.

Asking questions helps us get at least a bit of a hold on providence from God's perspective, found in His eternal, trustworthy Word.

The why of God's providence - John 3:16-17

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."

The where of God's providence - John 14:2-3

"...I am going to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

The what of God's providence -- 1 John 3:2

"Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

The when of God's providence -- 1 Thessalonians 5:1-2

"Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you very well know that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night."

The who of God's providence -- Revelation 22:3-4

"The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face..."

Not what we expected, is it, but ultimately God's providence is always about another world, not this one, and we would be well-advised to keep this in mind when seeking his providential engagement with who we are and where we are.

Here's the end of the matter: "...he who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion..." Philippians 1:6, a completion echoed in that great worship hymn "All Hail the Power of Jesus Name." :


"Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus." Revelation 22:20