Divine Providence...

Thinking on divine providence this morning...something I so need to remember in the trials that I face.  Our God orders some things and permits others.  When He permits affliction to come into the lives of one of His (even though it originates in an evil mind intent on evil) He always goes before such events and it becomes to the believer of God, His providence to them.  And God's providence to His saints is ALWAYS a good thing!  It is what allows us as believers to say in the midst of all our misery and pain here on this earth,

"it is the Lord; let him do what seemeth him good.:"  

Look at Job...his name has become synomous with the word patience throughout history.  Why?  Job did not charge what was happening to him as an accident, blind chance or even to Satan...he accepted them as from his God...his God whom he loved and trusted and said this when his life as he knew it lay in ruins before him:

"The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

Read Job's conversation with his wife directly after he had been smote from his head to the souls of his feet with boils and had taken a potsherd to his skin.

 Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.

 But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.

Job saw the hand of His God in everything.  Job's faith and patience has been an encouragement to saints throughout history. God took hold of the evil works of Satan in Job's life and worked them into His plan and brought great good out of them.  In effect Job said with Paul, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purposes."

The end of Job's story is that he received back more in the end than he had ever lost.  He came through his trials victoriously having trusted His God through them.

This same story is evidenced over and over again throughout God's word with the most magnificent being the overruling of the darkest of evil seen at the cross...the place where our redemption was secured.

E.M. Bounds sums it up nicely: "The providence of God goes before his saints, opens the way, removes difficulties, solves problems and brings deliverances when escape seems hopeless."

Fear not then, beloved of God....Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord!

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;--2nd Corinthians 4:17