The Providence of God

"Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. (Rev. 19:6)
"My times are in Your hands" (Psalm 31:15)

Not only are we ourselves in the hand of the Lord,
but all that surrounds us. Everything is under divine arrangement.
We dwell within the palm of God's hand.
We are absolutely at his disposal, and all our
circumstances are arranged by him in all their details.
We are comforted to have it so.

How did the psalmist's times come to be thus in God's hand? I should
answer, that they were there according to the eternal purpose
and decree of God. All things are ordained by God, and
are settled by Him, according to His wise and holy predestination.
Whatever happens here does not happen by 'chance' but according to the
counsel of the Most High.

The acts and deeds of men below, though left wholly to their own wills,
are the counterpart of that which is written in the purpose of heaven.
The open acts of Providence below, tally exactly with that which is
written in the 'secret book', which no eye of man or angel as yet has
scanned. This eternal purpose superintended our birth- "All the days
ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
(Psalm 139:16)

In Your book, every footstep of every creature was recorded before the
creature was made. God has mapped out the pathway of every man who
traverses the plains of life. It is no small comfort to a child of God
that he feels that, by divine arrangement and sacred predestination, his
times are in the hand of God.

It would be a hideous thought to us if any one point of our life-story
were left to 'chance', or the the frivolities of our oun fancy. "My
times are in your hands" -then there is nothing left to chance. Events
do not happen by a 'fortune' that has no order or purpose in it.
CHANCE is a heathenish idea, which the teaching of the Word has cast
down, even as the ark threw down Dagon, and broke him in pieces.
Blessed is that man who is done with chance, and who never speaks of
'luck'; but believes that, from the least even to the greatest, all
things are ordained of the Lord.

We dare not leave out the least event. The creeping of an aphis on a
rosebud is as surely arranged by the decree of Providence, as the march
of a pestilence through a nation. Believe this; for if the least be
omitted from the supreme goverment, so may the next be, and the next,
until nothing is left in the divine hand.

-C.H. Spurgeon-