What Is God Doing?
“In case of God’s providences to his church, when we wonder what God is doing with us, and are ready to kill ourselves with care; let us rest in God’s wisdom. He knows best what he has to do. “His footsteps are not known” (Psalm 77:19). Trust him where you cannot trace him. God is most in his way when we think he is most out of the way. ”
This quote, in Watson’s A Body of Divinity, comes in the context of a long exposition on the wisdom of God. He exhorts the reader to rest in God’s wisdom when we can’t make sense of our circumstances. “Trust him where you cannot trace him.”
Or, as Charles Spurgeon would put it years later, “When you cannot trace his hand, trust his heart.”
And so often we can’t trace his hand.
Watson’s words in 1692, and Spurgeon’s in 1890, share the same reality in which we live. We are human and finite, and the ways of God are higher and unknown. Mysterious is the word. Mysterious for now, but not forever, as Jonathan Edwards reminds us,
Every atom of the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian — every particle of the air and every ray of the sun — so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy.
The mysteries of today will, in the future, be revealed, even amplifying our everlasting joy.
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.
