(a) Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”; 1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand” (Saul to David); Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all” (i. e., equally, one as well as another); Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”; 19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah, [pg 423]that shall stand”; 20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?” 21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will” (i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman); Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”; Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”; Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”; James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”
(b) 2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him [Shimei]: Curse David”; 24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”; Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”; 2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
Henry Ward Beecher: “There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.” John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all. “As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.” Dr. Deems: “The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.” See Bruce, Providential Order, 183 sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231 sq.
God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:
(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.
Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech: “I also withheld thee from sinning against me”; 31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”; Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”; Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the “thorns” and the “wall” may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Bible in loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied: “Death!” Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.
(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.
2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him [Hezekiah], to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”; cf. Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.” Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”; Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!” Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.” Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim [pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”; Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”; Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”; 3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.” To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred 1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.” As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said: “The God of glory thundereth” (Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In 2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in 1 Chron. 21:1 the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.
Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism: “God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.” Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of “the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.
(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.