The definition of divine providence is: "the care or benevolent guidance of God or an instance of this." Now mankind has been arguing about this benevolence of God for thousands of years. The answer to the question of God’s benevolence has been for many people, one of the greatest obstacles to faith they have encountered. This is also known as the dilemma of good and evil, or good vs. evil.

The late Gilda Radner, the comedienne from Saturday Night Live, in her book called "It’s Always Something," describes her ordeal with a terminal case of ovarian cancer. Nowhere in her book does she mention a belief in God or a higher power. She was not a believer in divine providence, to my knowledge. She summarizes mankind’s predicament in one paragraph of her journal. She says:

"It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It’s really crazy, isn’t it? We get to live, and then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then get hit by a car. Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed. It’s such an act of optimism to get up every day and get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death. What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal—all the pleasures of life, and then death. I think some people just can’t take the variables; they just can’t take the deal—that is why they drink themselves silly or hide away or become afraid of everything. Sometimes I feel like I couldn’t take the deal—it was just too much. Cancer brought life and death up close."

Who of us in their life has not had some similar thoughts? But the meaning of divine providence, the care or benevolent guidance of God runs counter to that train of thought that Gilda describes. But Paul Tillich in "The Shaking of the Foundations" seems to be in sympathy with Gilda’s point of view when he says: "The reality of our world seems to be in opposition to the almighty power of a wise and righteous God. . . The human heart can no longer stand the power borne by the daemonic forces on earth." So as you might presume, we have the makings here for a great debate around the dilemma of good versus evil and the existence of divine providence. So one burning question is: Is there such a thing as divine providence?

Paul Tillich starts us out by telling us a few things that providence is not.

First, he says, "it is certainly not a vague promise that, with the help of God, everything will come to a good end; there are many things that come to a bad end." If one needs a few examples to support this point, one only needs to look briefly at the Holocaust during World War II, or the killing fields of Cambodia during the 1970’s, or the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.

Tillich’s second point about providence is that: "It is not the maintenance of hope in every situation; there are situations in which there can be no hope." Examples of this abound in mankind’s injustice to one another, or in the unending problems of hunger, poverty, and the mindless violence that is war. So for Tillich, divine providence is not the maintenance of hope in every situation.

Thirdly, Tillich says that: "Providence does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined, as in an efficient machine." Tillich probably bases this opinion on his belief in man’s gift of ‘free will’. The question of the existence of ‘free will’ has been a hotly disputed question of philosophers down through the ages, but many thoughtful people do believe we have the power to decide between good and evil and that we carry out those decisions everyday with varying amounts of self-awareness. Tillich is basically refuting the model of human beings as puppets that are completely controlled by the great puppeteer in the sky that we might call God. If we agree with Tillich that everything is not predetermined, this does not necessarily preclude the possibility that God does know what the end of the script of life in our world and the universe will be. God might be an all-knowing God—but not an all controlling one.

So we have three opinions on what divine providence is not: (1) It does not mean that everything will come to a good end. (2) It is not the maintenance of hope in every situation. (3) And it does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined. So where do I go from here? Not too long ago I read a book by Dr. Robert Schuller called: "Life’s Not Fair but God is Good." It has dozens of true-life stories that have the potential to truly enlighten. One example is the story of Serena Young. These are a few excerpts from her story.

"Serena was born in Taipei, Taiwan, of Chinese heritage. Then, at the age of two, in 1957, Serena contracted polio. . . . When Serena woke up one morning, she was not able to move a muscle below her neck. She remembers her mother telling her to get out of bed but she just couldn’t move.

Dr. Schuller asked Serena, "You were two at the time? Do you remember any of this?

"Oh, yes! In fact, the next thing I remember, I was in a hospital, and my mother was kneeling by my bed. She was praying. She later told me that she had asked God that if He would bring me back, that she would dedicate my life to him."

"And you did get better."

"Yes."

"And how did you get from there to America?"

Pretty Serena remembered it all. She said, "Well, after I survived the crisis, my parents brought me to a lot of medical specialists in Taiwan. I had all kinds of treatments, ranging from ancient Chinese herbs to acupuncture. And over the ensuing year, I regained strength in my upper extremity, but my legs remained paralyzed. My father had heard that the medical technology was far more advanced in the United States. He was working for the American Embassy at that time in Taiwan, so he petitioned the government to let our family immigrate. After two years, in 1959, our family was granted permission to immigrate to the United States."

"Now, when did you get the dream of becoming a surgeon?"

"When I got to the United States, I became a patient at Orthopaedic Hospital in Los Angeles. Within a year’s time, they put me in braces and crutches and I was walking! So I was really impressed with orthopaedics at a very young age. I was in and out of the hospital between the ages of four to twenty-one. But the thought of becoming an orthopaedic surgeon really did not occur to me until high school."

Dr. Schuller asked her, "Were you ever bitter about this whole experience?"

Her answer surprised me, but I loved her honesty. I felt that she spoke for millions of people. Serena said: "I was very bitter and angry at God, because I thought that if God was truly a loving God, how could He allow this tragedy to happen to me? How could He allow sickness and disease in this world? And for a long time, I was really angry and I couldn’t figure out the answers.

"One summer during high school, I volunteered at Orthopaedic Hospital. I worked with handicapped children. At first their deformed bodies really bothered me. I went home and I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so. I finally realized that the reason why it bothered me was because I couldn’t accept my own physical deformity. That caused me to start searching.

"I started wondering if there was even really a God and how could any of this make sense? In my search, I started to read the Bible, and there was one verse that really stuck out in my mind. It was in Romans 8:28, which says, ‘And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.’

"…Did that mean that my tragedy actually could work for my good? Well, I started praying about it, and I challenged God. I said, ‘God, if you’re real, I want you to use this tragedy to make it something good.’

"That’s when He helped me get over my disability. He helped me accept it. And that’s when I started to have a desire to help other people with disabilities. It was during that summer that I decided I wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon."

Dr. Schuller said to this remarkable young woman, "And did you get encouragement on your decision to become an orthopaedic surgeon?"

"Oh, no! I was told that I had to be out of my mind even to consider the thought! But I just had a real conviction in my heart. I really felt that this was my calling, that God was giving me—giving me the desire. There were times during my residency where I really wanted to quit. There was a point where I really thought I was not gonna make it. But, God gave me a husband that never stopped believing in me."

Dr. Schuller looked into bright, sparkling dark eyes. Glistening black hair. A radiant smile and said, "The picture of you in the paper showed you propped up on crutches leaning over an operating table. Is the job worth all the effort it took you to get there? You hung in there. You never quit. You got through with all of the challenges that you faced. Now you’re there. Is it worth the price you paid?"

"My career is more fulfilling than I thought it could ever be. The price was really high, but it’s really been worth it."

Dr. Schuller said: "Here stood a living testimony to the power of God’s grace. A mother prayed for a dying little girl. A loving God delivered her from bitterness and replaced it with a magic, marvelous, miraculous dream, and now she is healing, helping, operating, repairing."

Schuller concludes by saying: "God is good. He doesn’t create the problems—He redeems them. He doesn’t make the mistakes—He fixes them. He doesn’t cause cancer. He heals. He doesn’t kill dreams or bodies. He gives life. He gives the big picture—the ability to see beyond this temporal set-back to a glorious comeback!"

One of the important teachings in Dr. Schuller’s book is that we should not confuse the facts of life with the acts of God. What does he mean by that? Well, the facts of life can be a natural disaster such as a flood or earthquake, or it can be the evil that men do to one another when they are given free will. In either case, he says they are not the acts of God—God does not cause them to happen. That seemed to make sense to me—it was certainly reassuring.

But the next leg of my journey on this inquiry into the meaning of providence was to be in more turbulent waters where confusion abounded, and my ship became temporarily grounded. This journey took me back to scripture, more specifically, to the book of Job. To some of you who may not be familiar with Job’s story, the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, synthesized it for us in one of his edifying discourses.

"…In the land toward the east there lived a man whose name was Job. He was blessed with lands, innumerable herds, and rich pastures; "his words had lifted up the fallen, and had strengthened the feeble knees"; his tent was blessed as if it rested in the lap of heaven, and in this tent he lived with his seven sons and three daughters; and "the secret of the Lord" abode there with him. And Job was an old man; his joy in life was his pleasure in his children, over whom he watched that no evil might come upon them. There he sat one day alone by his fireside, while his children were gathered at a festival at the oldest brother’s house. There he offered burnt offerings for each one individually, there he also disposed his heart to joy in the thought of his children. As he sat there in the quiet confidence of happiness, there came a messenger, and before he could speak there came another, and while this one was still speaking, there came a third, but the fourth messenger brought news concerning his sons and daughters, that the house had been overthrown and had burned them all. "Then Job stood up and rent his mantle and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground and worshipped." His sorrow did not express itself in many words, or rather he did not utter a single one; only his appearance bore witness that his heart was broken." "Since he had thus surrendered himself to sorrow, not in despair but stirred by human emotion, He was swift to Judge between God and himself, and the words of his judgment are these: "Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither." Then follows the confession from the man whom not sorrow alone but worship as well had prostrated on the ground: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!""

I think Job understood something that few of us can easily grasp. He understood the mysteries of faith, with all its power and strength. This thing called faith does not lend itself to being put into words, but Job succeeded in doing this better than most when he said: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Please take special note that Job said that the Lord took. "Was it not a windstorm from out of the desert which overturned the house and buried his children in the ruins?" points out Kierkegaard. This is surely what Dr. Schuller would categorize as a fact of life, not an act of God. "Yet Job said, "The Lord took"; in the very moment of receiving the message, he realized that it was the Lord who had taken everything", Kierkegaard is quick to emphasize. Job believed that it was God, not a desert windstorm that took all his children and his possessions from him.

Do you sense a conflict here between the words of Dr. Schuller and the words of Job? So who is right and who is wrong, or is it possible for them both to be right when seemingly saying opposite truths? This is the place where my inquiry came to a sudden halt. I became stuck in a seeming paradox. I had to step back and try to gain a larger perspective on what each person was saying. Slowly, a new understanding began to germinate. For wasn’t it true that the essence of Dr. Schuller’s position was that God does not cause bad things to befall us and, therefore, we shouldn’t lose ourselves in blaming God? I believe that.

But Job, it seems, was saying something much larger. He was not speaking of causation per se. He was describing God’s creation where God was the creator and giver of all things. God created a temporal world of living and finite beings with beginnings and endings. His creation was one containing matter, and energy, and time where all kinds of physical and earthly things happen—things like love and adversity, sacrifice and suffering, living and dying. At the moment of creation God established all the laws of nature that determine, in Dr. Schuller’s terms, the ‘facts of life’. So Job was correct, in a figurative sense, in saying that the Lord gave and the Lord took away. God is responsible not for just the beginning or creation, but the endings too. God created a world in which the possibility for both good and evil coexist-- the beauty of birth, alongside the mysterious horror of death. And Job says we are not capable of knowing or evaluating the mind of God. Can we logically conceive of a universe in time and space, with the accompanying laws of nature, where bad things, such as a tree falling on a house, could never take place? Isn’t that just immature wishful thinking? Our task as a child of God is to carry the baton of faith passed onto us by our forefathers. I am a child of God, not one of God’s peers. I do not get to sit in on His counsels and make decisions. But our task of faith as children of God is an ambitious one. It is tough. It is difficult sometimes, and yet, ever mysteriously, it may be everything. It is the source of the greatest power. Because our faith in God is able to transform us, from it flows our being and our task—the task, simply put, is to love God with all our heart, our soul, and our mind. Maybe Kierkegaard best said the last word on Job:

"Hence the Lord did not take everything (from Job), for He did not take away Job’s praise, and his peace of heart, and the sincerity of faith from which it issued; but his confidence in the Lord remained with him as before, perhaps more fervently than before; for now there was nothing at all which could in any way divert his thought from him."

I don’t think it is accidental that in every life there are personal experiences that shake our foundations. They lead us in the direction of a subjective experience of self-examination. And not too long after that we arrive at the crossroads of faith, where we consciously or not choose between faith and despair. For some this can be a dramatic and/or traumatic event. For others it is a crossroads traversed quite frequently. God, it seems, has built this process into His creation, into the very fabric of life. It is inescapable. We choose for God or against God, over and over again. Sometimes we will choose by not choosing. But He will be there with us every time we arrive at that crossroads. Scott Peck describes this juncture of critical choosing in his book, "The People of the Lie". He says:

"In my own view, the issue of free will, like so many great truths, is a paradox. On the one hand, free will is a reality. We can be free to choose without ‘shibboleths’ or conditioning or many other factors. On the other hand, we cannot choose freedom. There are only two states of being; submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one’s own will—which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong either to God or the devil. This paradox was, of course, expressed by Christ when he said, "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, will find it."

In my view we must negotiate the obstacle course of life in order to learn to use our freedom to choose God—to truly depend on Him; to allow our identity, in part, to be absorbed into Him. Kierkegaard wrote that man’s need of God constitutes his highest perfection. And when we learn to truly depend on God, our troubles will not seem so intimidating and fearful. We will know that He is our redeemer and our provider. So many of the troubles we face serve a saving function. Dr. Schuller asks the question: When is trouble, not really trouble? He answers that question in part this way:

"When trouble makes you furious enough to fight for a good cause you were too busy to serve, or frustrates you so that you quit a job that was too long hiding your real talents and forces you to discover new skills and hidden talents that were lying undetected like veins of gold under cabbage fields, then trouble is not trouble!

"When trouble causes two parties, long unspeaking, to bury the hatchet; when it makes a person forget himself and start thinking of others; when it makes a greedy man generous, a hard man compassionate; a cold heart warm, a thoughtless man considerate—then trouble is not without its reward!

"When trouble teaches you valuable lessons that you would have been too blind to see, too arrogant to believe, or too stubborn to accept any other way than by this bed of pain; when it slams a door in your face to force you out of a rut that you would never have had the courage to leave and leads you down a new road through an open door, then trouble may be a most valuable experience!

"When trouble stirs up gratitude for gifts you have taken too long for granted, or creates an opportunity for you to think, read, write, pray, then trouble is really a friend who comes to your door wearing your enemy’s jacket!

"When trouble breaks your heart and makes your knees buckle, and forces penitent tears from eyes sealed in prayer to Almighty God, then trouble may turn out to be the redeeming agony before new birth!"

With the thoughts of Paul Tillich, Kierkegaard, Scott Peck, and Dr. Schuller in the back of our minds, what answers come forth from within us to the original question: What is the meaning of divine providence? As those thoughts percolate upwards, let us look at Paul Tillich’s final answer to the meaning of providence:

"…When death rains from heaven as it does now, when cruelty wields power over nations and individuals as it does now, when hunger and persecution drive millions from place to place as they do now, and when prisons and slums all over the world distort the humanity of the bodies and souls of men as they do now—we can boast in that time, and just in that time, that even all of this cannot separate us from the love of God. In this sense, and in this sense alone, all things work together for good, for the ultimate good, the eternal love, and the Kingdom of God.

"…Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted."

Truth is often times not simple. Sometimes it is best expressed within the confines of a paradox. On the one hand as Gilda Radner said, "life is a pretty cheesy deal—all the pleasures of life, and then death. …What we put into every moment is all we have. …It’s such an act of optimism to get up every day and get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death." On the other hand there is the faith of a man called Job who says: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!" His faith provides him with this incredible courage to face it all, to accept it all (what others might refer to as the ultimate ‘cheesy deal’), and to wring out of his heart any negative emotions leaving him with nothing in the end but gratitude and praise for his God.

I am struck by the richness of the lives of both these people, and regardless of their theology or viewpoints, by the power of both their personalities. What incredible people. What an incredible creation we live in. Many people define or equate God with love. That’s too simple—it may be true, but it falls terribly short. What I see in God’s handiwork is a creative genius beyond all description. For He created Job and He created Gilda, as well as you and I. And it was good—it was very, very good! All roads and the mysterious essence of our lives lead us back to Him.

Thomas Vaillancourt, August 1992