Providence is merely the outworking of God’s
predestination. God does nothing in time
which He had not decreed to occur in eternity past. To assert otherwise depicts our God with a mind that is mutable towards the particular act in question until the
time of its execution. If God only “intervenes”
from time to time in those most visible acts of providence while leaving the
events in between up to libertarian free-will or a first cause apart from
Himself, what guarantee exists that these acts will in fact occur? Unless all the circumstances needed for an
event to occur had not themselves been ordered in some way by the sovereign God
then all trust in the fulfillment of prophecies and the certain performance of God's great acts is lost!
My Conditionalist friends of the “Primitive” Baptists do
therefore greatly err by divorcing these two concepts. They are caught between a joyful admission that God works His will "among the inhabitants of the earth" (Daniel 4:35) but a refusal to acknowledge the basis of that truth lest they give semblance to dreaded absolutism! In my former days I can recall many, many times an elder citing some divine act of God in history as an example of His providence, "but He didn't predestinate it", as if the two can be separated. An act of divine providence is the product of the decree of God. One may very well consider it an intervention on God’s part, but it must be understood that this
is only as it is viewed from our perspective.
This is what I personally have come to see, being a former denier of this doctrine. Not only is there scripture and profound statements made by greater minds than my own to support what the London Confession plainly states, but the doctrine makes sense to me when I consider what must be the mind of God in relation to human affairs.
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