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The sermon presents providence as God’s continual, personal activity in every part of creation, from cosmic events to sparrows, tears, and daily needs. Human beings are wholly dependent on God for life, health, provision, comfort, and spiritual blessing. For believers, this doctrine should produce prayer, courage, submission, and joy under God’s reign. For the unconverted, God’s sovereignty exposes the futility of resistance and creates an urgent call to be reconciled to God through Christ.
Theological center: God is omnipresent and sovereignly sustains and governs all creation, while sinners are called to submit to Him and receive reconciliation through the gospel.
Applications: Remember God’s presence · Take everything to God · Trust God through trials · Be reconciled to God
Primary texts: Job 12:7-10 · Matthew 10:29-30 · Hebrews 3:15
“Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.” Job 12:9-10 THESE verses occur in Job’s answer to Zophar the Naamathite. Job had his failings, but certainly he appears less faulty in this dialog than those three men who sought to reprove him and convict him of error. Zophar the Naamathite had the very highest opinion of his own personal wisdom. He addressed Job as though he had been an inferior, and in the eleventh chapter he used language which though extremely beautiful, must have been very grating upon the ear of such a sufferer as Job, for it is a lecture full of high-flown language, abounding in poetry and noble images, but containing little solid sense and less sympathy. Job being exceedingly irritated both with the style and with the matter of Zophar’s speech, begins at once to pluck off his plumes and to pull to pieces his fine language. In biting irony Job cries from his dunghill—“No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you; yea, who knoweth not such things as these?” You have put into flowery language things which an ordinary observer might discover. You have pointed to the heaven above, and to the depth beneath, to prove a truth which the creeping insect of the earth could tell you, and which the fishes of the sea might proclaim. “Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?” There is much temper here, but there is very much also of good common sense. I would we had another Job to chastise the high-sounding language of modern theologians. There are starting up in our midst men, who if they are not heretics in doctrine, are aliens in speech. They are men described by the old preachers who say, “Mark!” and there is nothing to mark, and who shout, “Observe!” and there is nothing to observe, except the want of everything that is worth observing. We know ministers who cannot speak in the common language of mankind, but must needs adopt the jargon of Carlyle, who sets language on its head, and puts the last word first. These men must needs make the English language a slave to the German—the glorious grand old Saxon must truckle to their heresies and conceal the depths of their falsehoods. I pray God the time may come when some man may u…