Ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good
Good out of evil:
1.
God permits evil, but from the evil He unceasingly causes good to proceed. If good were not destined to conquer evil, God would be conquered, or rather God would cease to be.
2. Since the Scriptures call us to be imitators of God, like Him we must endeavour to draw good out of evil. For believing souls there is a Divine alchemy. Its aim is to transform evil into good. Evil, considered as a trial, comes from three different sources: it comes either from God, through the afflictions of life; from men, through their animosity; from ourselves, through our fault. We may learn Divine lessons from sorrow, and lessons of wisdom from our enemies; we may even gather instruction from our faults. (E. Bersier, D. D.)
Providence:
I. BY THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD I MEAN THAT PRESERVING AND CONTROLLING SUPERINTENDENCE WHICH HE EXERCISES OVER ALL THE OPERATIONS OF THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE, AND ALL THE ACTIONS OF MORAL AGENTS; or, as the Shorter Catechism has succinctly expressed it, “His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all His creatures and all their actions.” That there is such a thing is clearly taught in the Word of God, is matter of daily observation, and follows naturally and necessarily from the very fact of creation. That which could be produced alone by the will of the Omnipotent can be maintained and regulated only by the same volition.
II. Advancing now another step, it will follow from the reasoning which we have just concluded THAT THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IS UNIVERSAL, having respect to every atom of creation and every incident of life. Take any critical event, either in the history of a nation or the life of an individual, and you will discover that it has depended on the coming together and co-operation of many smaller things, which, humanly speaking, might very easily have been, and indeed almost were, different. Hence there can be no watchful superintendence over those things which are confessedly important unless there be also a care over those which to men seem trivial.
III. Advancing yet another step, we may observe that THIS UNIVERSAL PROVIDENCE IS CARRIED ON IN HARMONY WITH, OR RATHER PERHAPS I OUGHT TO SAY BY MEANS OF, THOSE MODES OF OPERATION WHICH WE CALL NATURAL LAWS. “This is, in fact, the great miracle of Providence, that no miracles are needed to accomplish its purposes.”
IV. But taking yet another step, we may lay it down as a further principle THAT GOD’S PROVIDENCE IS CARRIED ON FOR MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ENDS. There is a retributive element in the workings of Providence. We see, we cannot but see, that idleness is followed by rags, intemperance by disease, dishonesty by suffering or dishonour, and deceit by cruelty. One cannot take up a newspaper without having that fact sternly confronting him from almost every column; and though the Nemesis may be long in overtaking the guilty, sooner or later the wrong-doer is brought low, and men are constrained to say, “Verily He is a God that judgeth in the earth.” Thus in the universe of God the moral and the physical go hand in hand, and still the law is vindicated in morals as in the fields of the agriculturist: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
V. But if that be so, we are prepared now to put the copestone on the pyramid of our discourse by saying THAT THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD CONTEMPLATES THE HIGHEST GOOD OF THOSE WHO ARE ON THE SIDE OF HOLINESS AND TRUTH. “All things work together for good to them who love God.” “God meant it unto good.” (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
Difficulties in providence mitigated by revelation
The sound of the words is comforting. They were spoken by a brother to his brethren, in reference to events long past, yet still vivid and present to memory and to conscience. No sorrow, and no sin, ever quite dies. No lapse of time, no length of experience, no depth of repentance, can absolutely divide the one life into two, while the person is the same, or cut off the thing that was from the thing that is. But there may come a time when even suffering--in a certain sense, when even sin--may be regarded in a light subdued and softened; when the bitterest trial of the whole life, however mingled and entangled (as most of life’s bitterest trials are) with human unkindness and human sin, shall be seen to have had in it a kind as well as a cruel intention; when the old man, or the dying man, shall be able to distinguish in the retrospect between man’s part in it and God’s; saying, with the noble-hearted and saintly man who speaks in the text, “As for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” The mind is staggered and astounded by the sight of the prevalence of suffering amongst beings altogether or comparatively innocent of sin. The lower you descend in the scale of being, the more unaccountable does this suffering appear to you. That a wicked man should find misery in his wickedness; that, even as the vultures gather to the carcase, so sorrow and trouble should fasten upon the evil-doer--this is to be expected, if the rule is the rule of justice. It is more difficult to understand why this punishment should extend itself to persons not implicated in the particular ill-doing; why, for example, a profligate spendthrift son should be allowed to ruin his father, or why the sins of a drunken dissolute rather should be visited upon his children (as they often are seen to be) to the third and fourth generation. Still, in these cases, as none can plead absolute innocence, a perfectly upright nature and an entirely sinless life, it seems not wholly iniquitous that there should not be an exact discrimination, in effects and consequences, between the particular sin and the general. It is when we see the overflowing of that misery which is engendered of sin upon whole classes and departments of being which have never sinned and never fallen; when we see the animal world laid under the power, and subjected to the uncontrolled tyranny, of a race called rational, but employing reason, largely or chiefly, in ingenuity of sinning it is then that the heart revolts against the order of things established, and finds it most of all difficult to understand in what possible sense the text can have an application here, “But God meant it unto good.” Now, the difficulty, though it must ever press, and press heavily, upon thoughtful men, is evidently much lightened by the suggestions of revelation, as to a coming time of refreshing and restoration, when these innocent ones shall cease to suffer, and the whole creation, now “groaning and travailing,” shall be delivered, as St. Paul writes, evidently (to careful students of the passage) with reference not only or chiefly to the human creation, “into the glorious liberty,” into the liberty belonging to and accompanying the glory, “of the children of God.” There may be much that is unexplained--a dark fringe and border of mystery must ever lie around each revelation of the unseen--still, in so far as there is revelation, there is light and there is reconciliation. With it we can believe at least that all shall be well; we can wait, without credulity, for the key and for the lamp; we can expect, and not irrationally, a day, near or far off, when the text shall receive, in this connection, its warrant and its demonstration, “But God meant it unto good.” There are two thoughts, besides that of the glorious rest reserved for God’s people, which bring with them, wherever they are entertained, harmony and reconciliation at once.
1. One of these is the length of the Divine vision. “A thousand years are with the Lord as one day.” “He sees,” it is written again, “the end from the beginning.” “God meant it unto good”--yea, the loftiest good and the most durable of all--if He taught one soul, by the unroofing or the unbuilding of its home here, the comparative, the superlative importance of a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. If when He severed from you, by death or banishment or (sadder still) alienation, that friend who was your life, He thus made you look onward towards heaven, or upward towards Himself; if He strongly, sharply, roughly, rudely rebuked your tendency to make man your trust, and to hew out for yourself broken cisterns which can hold no living water--was it not unto good? Or if, by a more conspicuous visitation of one of His four sore judgments, He should at last teach a frivolous though gallant nation that by Him alone counsels are established, by Him alone republics, like kings, govern, and that without Him there is neither strength nor permanence, was not this too “meant unto good”? Learn of God the length of His vision; learn not to weigh with the light weights and false balances of time, but with that “ shekel of the sanctuary” which is the recollection of eternity, and you will find no cause to impugn God’s wisdom or God’s justice in the arrangements of His providence, whether as concerning men or nations. You will say, “He hath done all things well”; and even when He seems to provoke the prophet’s question, “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” you will be able also to answer it in the end, out of a full heart and a firm conviction, “But He meant it unto good.”
2. The other thought which suggests itself as tending powerfully towards the justification of the ways of God is that of the largeness of the Divine view. It differs in some respects from the former, as the breadth differs from the length of the vision. It has special reference to those dealings in which sin is concerned. No reflection, because no revelation, reconciles the true heart to the existence of evil. That mystery lies still in its darkness. We fret and we struggle against it in vain. But that mystery is not one of God’s mysteries. God’s secrets are always secret’s told. You will find no instance in Scripture of the term “mystery” applied to things incomprehensible. God’s mysteries, indicoverable to human search, are apprehensible, when revealed, to human faith. The existence of evil is no mystery, because it is a fact; the origin of evil is no mystery, in God’s sense, because it is not revealed. But, evil being recognized as a fact and unexplained as a secret, the question which remains is all-practical, and the text forces it upon our attention--Is there any sense in which God has to do with it? any sense in which God, in His mercy and compassion, deigns to use it as His instrument “unto good”? Does He merely threaten it with judgment present and to come? Or does He, as the text seems to say, coerce and even rule it for the welfare of His children? We would tread warily on this perilous ground; yet firmly too, under the guidance of the Holy One. We say that even sin is made, in some sense, to confess and to glorify God. The sin of these men addressed in the text was made to save life. The sin of the murderers of the great Antitype of this saint was made to save souls. Yes, we cannot evade the conclusion, “As for you, ye thought evil, but God meant it unto good.” And it gives a very magnificent, however incomplete, conception of the greatness and goodness of God, that He forces even this inexplicable, this adverse existence, this sin which He hates, into subserviency to the good of His redeemed. (Dean Vaughan.)
God’s providence
In the ancient city of Chester, which is one of the few links connecting the world of this nineteenth century with the age of the Roman rule in Great Britain, there is an old building, which some of you, perhaps, have seen, having these words engraved on the lintel of the door; “God’s providence is mine exheritance.” It is said that when the plague last visited the city that was the only house which escaped the visitation, and so its inmates sculptured these words upon it as a record of their gratitude. I trust that God’s providence was the heritage of many who died as really as of those who were preserved. But the Christian may always adopt that inscription as his own. God’s providence is his inheritance, and is so as much and as really when he is suffering calamity or enduring persecution as when he is prosperous and honoured. Friends, if we could but believe that, how much of the bitterness would be taken out of our trials! (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
God’s providential care
In Palestine and Asia Minor the winter of 1873-4 was unusually severe. The snow lay at one time from two to five feet deep in the streets and on the flat roofs of the houses. Many roofs were crushed, and many houses fell in ruins under the unwonted burden. In Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, thirteen houses were thus prostrated. In Gaza, where of old the temple of Dagon fell and slew Samson and three thousand of the Philistines, the following remarkable incident occurred in connection with the great snowstorm of February 7th and 8th:--A robber during the night broke into the house. After having collected several articles on the lower floor, he entered the chamber where the master of the house was peacefully sleeping. His little child was also asleep in his cradle. The robber reflected that he might be betrayed by the child, so he took the cradle and set it outside of the house near the door. The child began to cry. The mother hastens to the cradle, but finds it gone. The child kept on crying. The father awoke and exclaimed, “The child is crying out of doors. How can that be?” They both hasten to the cradle, wondering who could have taken it out. While they are wondering and speculating on the strange circumstance, the roof, pressed under the burden, falls, and in a moment their house is in ruins. But they are all three unharmed. In the morning, when the stones and lumber were taken away, a man was found dead among the ruins. The things he had stolen were found partly sticking out of his pockets, partly tied up in a bundle on his back. Thus God and death had overtaken him. He carried out the child lest he should wake his father and mother by crying, and so, without meaning it, by the wonderful providence of God, he rescued the lives of all the family, while he himself died in his sin. How truly were the words of Joseph to his brothers fulfilled in him--“Ye meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” “Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” God’s angel averted the evil which the enemy would have gladly done. It would be difficult to find a more striking instance illustrating God’s providential care--saving those whom He resolves to save, even by the agency of the wicked, whose sin He condemns; and while He employs the agency of the sinner as a means of life, visits upon him, according to his deserts, judgment and death.