R.C. Sproul

There's nothing that happens outside of the scope of God's ordination.

If there were anything that happened outside of the scope of His ordination, again, God would not be sovereign.

He'd be a spectator, wringing his hands, hoping that things turn out the way He wants them to turn out, but having no authority or sovereignty over them.

The great message of atheism here is allowing for chance doing anything.

When they let those cows go, they went straight to Beth Shemesh.

They didn't turn to the left, and they didn't turn to the right.

And when the people of Israel saw those cows coming and saw the cargo they bore, they screamed, kabod.

We have focused so intently on the proximate activity that's directly in our purview that for the most part we have ignored or denied the overarching causal power behind all of life, so that modern man has no concept of providence.

At lunchtime today I spent some time looking at one of the news programs and they flashed an advertisement on the screen advertising a series of books from Time Life Company.

And one of the books had to do with glimpses of problems of life in the past.

And the advertisement went on to say, read this particular book that tells us what it was like to be sick a hundred years ago.

That caught my attention because we as 20th century people are so bound to our own time frame.

And do you ever think about how people lived their daily lives in previous ages, in previous generations?

My mind thinks about that quite frequently because I have a habit of reading books that were written by people who lived

In many cases long before the 20th century, I particularly like to read the authors of the 16th century, the 17th century, and the 18th century.

And what I notice in their writings, in their personal correspondence with their friends, is an acute sense of the presence of God in their lives, a sense of an overarching

We even have a city in the United States by that name, Providence, Rhode Island, that was named, of course, in the 18th century, perhaps even earlier, by that generation of people who had this sense that all of life was under the direction and the government of

of Almighty God.

If you would go to Washington to the National Archives and read the samples of personal correspondence that can be found even from the pen of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and people of that sort, you will see that word providence sprinkled liberally throughout their language.

People talked about a benevolent providence or an angry providence, but there was again this sense