Skip to content ↓

Trusting God with Creation But Not Providence

Trusting God with Creation But Not Providence

Each of us is prone at times to lose our confidence in God’s wisdom and to assume that he would benefit from a bit of our own. How often do we grumble and complain against God’s will? How often in prayer do we attempt to direct God according to our own limited knowledge, our own limited wisdom?

online pharmacy metformin for sale with best prices today in the USA

Yet God’s creation has a way of redirecting our thoughts, for it displays the greatness of his wisdom. God created it without the least bit of input from any man, yet he made it good and very good. And if God exercised his wisdom in creating so wonderful a universe, shouldn’t we trust him to exercise his wisdom in the affairs and circumstances of our lives? Will we trust him with creation but not providence, trust him to create but not to direct?

To ask the question is to highlight its absurdity. Faith directs us to believe that God’s providence is every bit as beautiful as creation—as beautiful as the mighty mountains, as awesome as the expanse of the oceans, as stunning as the most wondrous of all the creatures that live on the earth.

As Matthew Henry once wrote, “God did not consult us in making the world, yet it is well made; why should we expect then that he should take his measures from us in governing it?”

(This is an excerpt from my forthcoming devotional book Understanding and Trusting Our Great God)


  • The Paradoxes of Christianity

    Learn how to engage with cultural issues in a deeply countercultural way. When we embrace the paradoxical character preached by Jesus in the Beatitudes, we experience rich and surprising blessing.

  • Foggy future

    On the Far Side of Obedience

    To be human is to be finite—to be limited in our knowledge of past, present, and future. We exist within strict boundaries of time and space, so that we cannot see beyond our present location or beyond our present moment. This is a feature of our humanity and not a bug…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (October 13)

    A La Carte: I miss the stars / Count the cost / Shame as the vicious trap of sexual sin / Clouds of shame and unbelief / When you’ve been blindsided / Book and commentary sale / and more.

  • For All the Noise We Make…

    We must be as eager to hear the Scripture as to hear the sermon, and we must be as expectant that God will speak to us through the Word as through the message. Rightly do many churches preface their Bible reading with words like, “Listen as I read God’s holy Word.”

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    Weekend A La Carte (October 11)

    A La Carte: Why dads still matter / Character in absurd times / Don’t get baptized in the Jordan / Gen Z is spiritually hungry / Extending hospitality to children / and more.