I used to box competitively. The first time my trainer put me in a ring for a sparring session, I was not allowed to throw any punches. My instructions were to keep my hands up and move my feet. Avoid being punched in the face!
Boxing is a hard sport for so many reasons, but perhaps the hardest thing about boxing is actually punching someone squarely. You would be surprised how hard it is to land a shot on someone’s nose when they are focused on not getting hit. Without proper instruction and training opportunities a boxer would be insane to step into a ring with a seasoned fighter.
Trainers are invaluable to the career of a boxer. They teach you defense, footwork, offensive skills and recognize what style each individual should fight in. But, most of all, a good trainer teaches a boxer where the danger is in each fight and helps him stay away from the danger.
You might be wondering how I fared throughout my short boxing career. Well, if you look closely at my face, you will see evidence that I did not keep my left hand up and now sport a permanent dent in my nose.
On that note, let’s take a look at what God’s providence is and what it does for us.
Questions 11 & 12
Q. 11. What is God’s providence?
A. God’s providence is His completely holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing every creature and every action.
Matt: I like to think of God’s providence as His sovereignty expressed through provision for humankind. God sovereignly directs or permits all things to happen for the purpose of His good plan. As the Lord interacts with humanity in his sovereignty, He exercises His providence.
The most obvious example of the providence of God is the salvific work of the Son, Jesus Christ.
In the beginning, God granted humanity choice, and through that choice, we have rebelled to the point of physical and spiritual death. All the evil in the world exists because of our choices because God sovereignly allows us to make choices. God could intervene and eliminate the desire for autonomy that drives all rebellion, but we would not have the ability to freely love if He did. We would be programmed software, driven solely by the direct instructions of our creator without the capacity to think a single thought of our own. The elimination of free will is not God’s plan. Far from it.
The Lord desires a relationship with you. However, we are/were utterly lost in our sin and unable to make the first move toward a right relationship with God without His intervention. The only way for humanity to be reconciled to God was for our humanity to be restored through God’s providence – Jesus.
Through His providence, Jesus restored humanity through His incarnation in a human body, and through the Holy Spirit, we die to our old self and are born again as a restored creation. Fully capable of freely seeking a loving relationship with our Savior.
Q. 8. What did God’s providence specifically do for man whom He created?
A. After the creation, God made a covenant with man to give him life, if he perfectly obeyed; God told him not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or he would die.
Matt: I grew up with an understanding that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was placed in the garden as a warning, “eat of this tree, and you’ll be sorry.” As I grew in my understanding of God and his providence, I became skeptical of God’s goodness for putting such a tree in the garden. Why put a bad choice in the garden? Why not just leave the tree out and forgo all the pain and suffering involved with eating the fruit of that tree? This is clearly a wrong view of what the tree represents.
Some skeptics go further and paint God’s motive for putting the tree in the garden as sinister. For example, “God must have been afraid of choice so he rigged the game.” Ironically, this sounds exactly like the serpent who said, “For God knows when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5).
I suspect the modern skeptic and Satan sound the same because they speak the same language with the same mind. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing full-well I would have failed the same way, Eve should have asked the serpent, “What is evil?” Or, “What are you offering that could surpass the goodness of God’s providence?”
Fourth-century theologian Athanasius may have had these questions in mind when he clarified the purpose of the tree. In his seminal work, On the Incarnation, Athanasius explains that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not placed in the garden as a temptation to man but rather as a provision for Adam and Eve to fend off the temptation of their wills. Paraphrasing Athanasius further, he states that God knew, through His foreknowledge, that humans with free will would rebel and fracture His good creation. So God gave Adam and Eve a guardrail.
In His providence, God made a covenant with humanity for our protection, where if we simply followed His command, we would live in perfect harmony with God. More simply, had humanity just held up our end of the covenant we would be living in perfect harmony with God, free from sin and suffering. Everything would be perfect.
Alas, we did not fulfill our end of the contract, and here we are, awash in the effects of sin. But, in His providence, God gave us the tree. And through the tree, we understand our folly and why we had to leave the garden. Through Christ, we understand how to get back to the garden.
