The Hand of God and Unseen Angels
Kerry Duke

I heard a preacher make fun of a song we sing. That song was “Precious Memories.” He was commenting on Hebrews 1:14 and ridiculed the line that says, “Precious memories, unseen angels.” He mocked the idea that unseen angels work in the world today. Hebrews 1:14 says angels are “ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.” His explanation of this verse was that the work of angels in the context was the giving of the law: “the word spoken by angels” (Heb. 2:2). The ministering of the angels in Hebrews 1:14 is not their delivering the law of Moses in Hebrews 2:2. Angels did work in the giving of the law of Moses. They ordained it (Gal. 3:19), and it was given by their disposition (Acts 7:53). But Hebrews 1:14 does not tell us what angels did. It tells us what they are doing. Hebrews 2:2 is not an explanation of the ministering in Hebrews 1:14. In this section, the writer of Hebrews shows that Jesus is greater than the angels. Angels are servants (1:7), but Jesus is God (1:8). Hebrews 1:14 continues this thought. It says angels are “sent forth” – in the Christian age. The wording of this verse is in the present, not the past. Angels minister in this age for those “who shall be heirs of salvation,” that is, Christians. What is their work of ministering for Christians today? It could not be to give more revelation, for that work is complete (Jude 3; Gal. 1:6-9). It could not be to work miracles, for that work has ceased (I Cor. 13:8-13). The ministering of Hebrews 1:14 is not ministering to God in heaven, for they are “sent forth” by Him for this work. This ministering must be providential and behind the scenes. A preacher may laugh at this, but the joke is on him.

Why would anyone sneer at the idea that unseen angels work in the world? Unseen angels fought with the prince of Persia (Dan. 10:13, 20). They did something to help cause the Persian empire to fall to the Greeks. We don’t know what they did or how they did it, but we know that they did something, and whatever they did was hidden, not miraculous. Unseen angels help God to remove kings and set up kings (Dan. 2:21; Dan. 4:17). How God does that is His business, and we are ignorant or foolish to deny this.

Do you believe Psalm 34:7 has application today? This verse says, “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.” Do you believe that Psalm 91:11-12 applies to today? This psalm says, “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” Our Lord showed that we cannot jump off a building and expect the angels to protect us, but He never denied the providential help angels give. Remember too, that this psalm, like many others, contains figurative, poetic language. The next verse says, “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder,” but this was not fulfilled literally in the lives of all the Israelites. The point of this language is that God takes care of His people, and angels help give this protection. But according to some preachers, the only way angels ever helped man was in a revealed miraculous way. This means that no Old Testament Israelite was ever helped by angels working behind the scenes, and no Christian has ever received this help!

God sent unseen angels to do His work in the Old Testament, then allowed certain men to see what they did behind the scenes. Balaam did not see that he was headed toward an angel with a sword drawn until God opened his eyes (Num. 22). God sent a plague or a pestilence upon Israel, but He opened David’s eyes and allowed him to see the angel who caused this plague (I Chron. 21). Elisha’s servant was terrified when he saw the Syrian army, but when Elisha asked God to open his eyes, the young man saw “the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (II Kings 6:17). But some preachers today close their eyes to the help God gives us, and are utterly terrified to admit that God is at work in the world in ways we cannot see or explain.

I remember a similar story about a well-known preacher. This preacher was joking about Christians with little food in a third world country praying for their cow. They asked God that the cow might give more milk than it had been giving – enough to give health to the people who depended on it. Why would a preacher make fun of this prayer? He had the same hypersensitive view of God’s relationship to the world, a view that presumptuously says the Creator must keep His hands off His own creation! He, like other preachers, held the simplistic view that if God does not work miracles then He does not work in the world at all! But the joke was on him. If God sends rain in answer to prayer (James 5:16-19), then why is it a funny thing for Him to cause a cow to give more milk? If those poor people had prayed a general prayer like, “Lord, please don’t let us starve,” God could have answered that prayer with more food, or more milk, and how He did so with His mighty unseen hand is nothing for a feeble preacher to mock! If we pray for God to help a sick person’s body to get better, then what is wrong with these people praying for a cow to give milk when their lives depended on it?

Some have the peculiar idea that God cannot do anything to the world without performing a miracle. How can they know this? How would they go about proving this belief? They are just as unable to prove this view as preachers are unable to prove that God cannot foreknow what a man will do in the future without causing his actions and without taking away the man’s free will. These preachers have overstepped their knowledge and their place. They are not defending the faith. They are defending their speculations – mistaken ones at that. They have gone from guarding the Word to guarding the world itself from the God who made it! They rightly teach that miracles such as speaking in tongues, raising the dead, and other such acts of God do not occur today (I Cor. 13:8-13). But they are extreme. They are as extreme in denying that God causes any event in the world as Pentecostals are in claiming that God causes every little event in their lives. They wrongly assume that if they admit that God could have worked behind the scenes to bring something to pass, then they will fall down the slippery slope into Pentecostalism. This is why they admit God’s providence and deny it in the same breath. This is why they use such hollow, meaningless expressions as “God works today, but He does so through nature.” Their loaded word is through. When they say God works through nature, what they mean is that God created nature and keeps it afloat, but that is all. So all that happens in life, according to this short-sighted, fear-stricken view, is what we choose to do and what the laws of nature – operating without any divine intervention – contribute to the world’s situation. Prayer to them is an empty ritual because whatever will be will be anyway, whether we pray or not. If this view is true – that everything that God has ever done in the physical world has either been natural or miraculous – then another incredible consequence follows, and that is that even in Old Testament and New Testament times, there was no providential intervention by God! Everything God did was by creation or by miraculous intervention, with no middle ground!

In a desperate attempt to keep God from touching the world as a result of our praying, some put a twist on the time element. God knows what we will pray for before we actually pray, they argue, and they are right. But they suggest that God may have done something years before the prayer was said that eventually brought the “answer” to the prayer. How does this help their case? Whether God does something years before we pray or seconds after we pray, the fact remains that He does something! If God can do something to the world before we pray, why can He not do something to the world as we pray or after we pray? If they believe God can act on the world in the past without working a miracle, why would they deny that God can do the same in the present? How does guessing about when God does something have anything to do with the question of what He does? Whether God did it or is doing it or will do it does not affect the fact or the manner of its happening by the hand of God.

These brethren are caught up in inevitable inconsistency when they try to explain providence and prayer. One preacher said that God “can produce a circumstance at one time that eventually leads to the fulfillment of His will.” He added, “God can act upon that chain of events well in advance of the prayer itself.” When a Christian prays for strength, he says that “God began, even before the man prayed for strength, to provide the opportunities whereby he might obtain that spiritual strength through the study of the Word.” Notice the words that this preacher is oblivious to in his use of them: God produces a circumstance, God acts upon a chain of events, and God provides opportunities. God does this, not nature itself, and God does this through means other than the Word or a miracle!

Do preachers who press this theory mean that because God can do something in the past to answer prayer that He therefore must? Do they suggest that if God answers some prayers in this manner, He therefore answers all prayers in this way? If so, let them prove these arguments. If not, why even bring this matter up unless it serves as a diversion from the issue? And do they apply the same reasoning to the devil? Does he act on the world to tempt us only by affecting circumstances in the past? Also, if this theory accounts for providence, then why does it not account for miracles? When Jesus walked on the water and turned the water into wine, did God do something at the time these miracles occurred, or did they happen solely because of something God did to the world years before? Do they think that because God is above time that He cannot act upon the world of time? Do they forget that God was in the world in Jesus Christ at a certain time in the world’s existence? Why are they so determined to put God as far away in the past and as far away from the world as they can?

Some see the world as an entity which exists and operates on its own. But it does not. Jesus upholds all things by the Word of His power (Heb. 1:3), and by Him all things consist (Col. 1:17). Now if the hand of God is responsible for the very existence and the continual operations of the world, then why is it strange that God specially intervenes in the world? And if God hears prayers that are offered in the world of space and time, then why would anyone think He does not answer prayers in that world?

A preacher and editor of a gospel paper shows how men will strain to avoid admitting that God works in the world. He used praying for daily bread as an example. Christians, he said, pray for daily bread and get it when they work, and sinners get bread when they work even through they don’t pray for it. So what is the difference? According to him, “The difference is not in having or not having bread, but in recognizing and honoring or denying and dishonoring the blessed giver of that bread.” Prayer, then, is just recognizing and honoring God for what will happen anyway! In this view, prayer brings nothing, and James’ statement “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16) should read that this prayer avails nothing! According to this thinking, prayer is a formality, and to expect that God might do something in answer to that prayer is vain!

I wrote to this preacher and asked, “If a brother prays before a preacher gets up to preach, ‘Lord, help the speaker remember what he has prepared to say, and help him say something that will help us,’ is that prayer scriptural?” His response was, “Are you asking if God gives utterance to people today as He did in Acts 2:4, and as requested by Paul in Ephesians 6:19?” What an unbelievable response! The utterance of Acts 2:4 is speaking in tongues! I have never known any member of the church who thought this prayer was a request to speak in tongues! Men go to such ridiculous lengths only when they are defending a position that is unbiblical.

Sadly, this thinking is all too common. This world is the handiwork of God, but this view says God must keep His hands off of it. I hope these preachers do not practice what they preach. I hope they pray believing that God can answer prayer. I further hope that the Christians who hear them do not follow the implication of their teaching on prayer and providence, because if these men are right, we have the Bible and the laws of nature, and the rest is up to us – with no other help from God! I suppose it is good in one way that these men write in such an unclear manner on this subject. At least this prevents members from taking their teaching to heart. But they can write and speak in no other way, since they are unclear themselves, and it is impossible, given their hands-off view of God’s relationship to the world, to avoid contradicting themselves and to avoid making plain statements of Scripture meaningless. This is why they cry, “God works in His providence, but He does so through the laws of nature,” without considering that God must do something to the laws of nature to answer prayer. “God works through the laws of nature” and “God answers prayer through nature” are unexamined pat answers.

This view is dressed up in endless double-talk. Consider this comment: “Even prayers for help relative to the aiding of our memory, for example, actually involve a number of considerations – and many, without doubt that are unseen or unknown, in turn involving matters of a secondary causal nature that are indirect as far as the divine activity is concerned. Perhaps there are distractions that must in some way be dispatched or neutralized involving natural means, or some physical malady in the saint himself that requires a special medical treatment or such like, or other natural factors (like diet, exercise, etc.) to be dealt with in order for the prayer to be realized and the effect to be produced.” Most of these words are just air. The brother cannot speak clearly because he is unclear himself. Who would think that a prayer for the preacher to remember his lesson amounts to an exhortation for him to eat right and exercise? Besides, the brother distinguishes “unseen or unknown” aspects of providence from “secondary” aspects that are “indirect as far as the divine activity is concerned.” This implies that the unseen or unknown matters are direct as far as the divine activity is concerned – but this is the very thing he is denying! This hopeless inconsistency is inevitable in a doctrine that rejects God’s working in the world.

When a brother prays just before the preacher begins his lesson that God will help him remember his lesson, can God answer this prayer a second before the preacher begins speaking? Can He answer this prayer while the preacher is preaching? Of course He can, and He does not have to give a miracle such as prophecy or speaking in tongues to do so. Neither is God limited to medicines, diets, or exercise programs. Who would think that we are praying for these in a prayer made just before the preacher begins his sermon? A man is straining hard when he says such things. How then, does God answer this prayer? We do not know, and we do not need to know in order to know that the prayer is legitimate.

How cold and lifeless is a doctrine that takes the hand of God out of the world? If this idea is true, then Jesus’ promise, “I am with you alway” (Matt. 28:20) really means “Nature and the Bible are with you always”! John was exiled on Patmos, Paul was kept in prison, but we are stranded in a world God does not touch! This theory ties God’s hands, makes our prayers for divine help futile, and renders the word “providence” meaningless.

Preachers tell people they should think about the words they sing. They should. What we say in prayer is no different. We should think about the words we use when we pray. Do these preachers consider this? What do they think that the prayer “Lord, help the speaker remember what he has prepared to say” means? Do they stubbornly and foolishly deny that God can answer this prayer right then in an undetectable way? When a brother prays, “Lord, give us strength and courage,” do they think God can do anything to answer that prayer in some way other than what He has already done (create the world and give us the Bible)? When they pray for the sick, are they just going through a routine, or do they actually believe God can help this person? Do the words “Lord, please help the sick to get better” really mean, “Doctor, I hope you do a good job?” Do the words “Lord, please protect us on the highways” merely mean “I hope our cars make it” or “I hope nobody hits us”? If these preachers are right, we should stop asking God to do anything. We should just thank Him for what He has done and hope that the laws of nature have mercy on us.

Are these prayers scriptural? If they are not, then these preachers need to do a better job helping the rest of us see the error of our way, because as of now they have only spoken out of both sides of their mouth about this issue. They need to tell us plainly whether they think these prayers are biblical or not. And if they think these prayers are unscriptural, they need to stop praying similar prayers themselves. Meanwhile, the rest of us will keep praying and trusting in the fact that the loving and mighty hand of God is at work in the world.

Some of these preachers are so extreme that they refuse to believe that God can touch the forces of nature to motivate men to do right. One preacher mentioned that the Baptist debater, Ben Bogard, said that God can use storms and earthquakes to help bring a sinner to his senses, suggesting that this idea takes away from the all-sufficiency of the Bible. How absurd! God did use natural disasters to bring men to their knees (Amos 4:6-12)! The prodigal son came to himself when he felt the hunger the famine had caused (Luke 15:11-17)! How ridiculous is a doctrine that says the world cannot by God’s special intervention have an effect on our soul?

I have even heard preachers say that the chastening of Hebrews 12:5-11 is the correction of the Word. They would never arrive at such a ridiculous position unless they were shackled by the belief that God is inactive in the world. This passage says nothing about the Word chastening Christians. Other passages teach that the Word chastens us (II Tim. 3:16-17; II Tim. 4:2), but this context is different. These Christians had suffered for Christ. The writer exhorts them to consider Jesus’ suffering (Heb. 12:1-3). He then reminds them that they have not been persecuted to the point of death (Heb. 12:4), so the context concerns their sufferings. The next word in verse five is “and,” which connects verses five through eleven to verse four! The chastening of these verses is the chastening of hardship, and it came from God! It could not have come from the laws of nature, since the chastened ones here are Christians, not sinners! When preachers go to such unbelievable extremes to get around a passage, it is high time they give up their position.

Another preacher, totally oblivious to the issue, said he can explain how God’s providence works. His answer was, “By God’s Word,” and he then cited Scriptures which say God commanded a thing and it was done. Like others who hold to the hands-off view of God’s providence, he has no understanding of the question. Who would deny that God commands things in the world and they occur? The real issue is: does God do anything to these things in the world? They utterly refuse to face this question. They have put up a “No Trespassing” sign on the world! The laws of nature do not operate on their own. God Himself sustains these operations. They are not self-sustaining forces, and they are not above God. God rules them; they do not rule God. We call them “laws” because of the regularity we observe in them. But this is where many miss the point. Nature is not run by the laws of nature. It is run by the power of God. We have seen the sun set, objects fall to the earth, and fire burn wood so often that we call these effects laws. When God alters these operations that men see, He works a miracle. That is the purpose of a miracle: to cause men to see that the hand of God and no other power is behind the act. But why would men vainly imagine that God cannot alter His creation in ways we cannot see and that are therefore not miraculous?

The world is like a clock, but not in the way that the most extreme of deists claim. Those advocates of deism believed God created the world as a man winds up a clock. The man does not touch the clock until it runs down, so God does not touch the world until it ends. This view is utterly false. But the world is like a clock to us in another way. We see the face of a clock. We see its hands and numbers, but we rarely look behind the face of it to examine how it works. Even then, its intricate and complex machinery is beyond our understanding. Somehow all those tiny cogs and wheels fit together and turn in harmony to give us the proper time. In the same way, we see the world, but we do not see what God does behind the scenes. God has allowed us a few glimpses, as He did in Job 1-2, but even then we only see that certain things happened and we see who caused them, but we have no idea how they were done. In His infinite power and wisdom, God perfectly coordinates and controls all the behind-the-scenes elements, giving the results we experience in the world which affect our lives but which never override our free will.

To attribute everything in this life to nature is ludicrous. Do the laws of nature create the spirit of man? “Yes,” someone says, “you have proved my point. God creates a soul through natural means – conception.” Notice again the clever but empty use of the word through. This statement is at best unclear and at worst false. God does not create a spirit by means of physical conception. He creates a spirit when conception occurs, at that very moment. But physical forces and elements cannot be combined in such a way as to produce a spirit. Only God can create a spirit. Flesh is material, but the spirit is non-material. The creation of the spirit accompanies conception, but physical conception does not and cannot create the spirit. God creates the spirit simultaneously with this process of nature, but nature does not produce the spirit. Every day, spirits are brought into existence by God and joined to a body of flesh and bones (Heb. 12:9). This is an act of God above the physical world and above the “laws of nature.” It is therefore a supernatural act of God.

Who can explain the spirit of man “dwelling” in the body? What does this mean? How can this happen? Can anyone explain how an immaterial spirit can be “in” a body? Who can understand how a spirit moves a body? The spirit is non-physical, yet it causes our physical body to move. We see that our hand, which is physical, moves a book, which is also physical. But how can immaterial spirit “move” our hands and feet? What is the connection? This question has perplexed the shrewdest philosophers for thousands of years. It will always elude us because we cannot understand how this can be. We cannot understand how our spirit is able to move the dust of our body by a mere thought but it cannot move any other physical object by a similar thought. We hear stories of people communicating with others or moving physical objects by pure thought. But these things do not happen today because they would be miracles. Yet by pure thought we are able to move the limbs of the body. There is a link, a connection between the spiritual realm and the physical realm of which we are ignorant. But one thing is sure: that connection is not explained by the “laws” of nature.

When death occurs, the spirit “leaves” the body (James 2:26; Eccles. 12:7). What does this really mean? A spirit does not occupy space. Only physical things do that. How is the spirit “removed” from the body? How is it disconnected from this life? How can a spirit at one moment be aware of this world and then immediately after death be fully aware of the next life, totally shut off from this life? Do the laws of nature account for this transition? “But that is simple,” someone argues. “When the body dies, the spirit leaves, and that is death.” So how does the spirit go to hades? Do the forces of nature take it there? Do the laws of nature transport the spirit to hades? This transferral is outside and above natural means and is therefore supernatural.

The forgiveness of sins is an act of God. Forgiveness occurs to the obedient while they live in the natural world, but nature has nothing to do with this act. Who would argue that God forgives sins “through” natural law? Forgiveness of sins is an act of God, not a process of nature, and is therefore supernatural. The word supernatural includes miracles but is not limited to them. Supernatural is a broader term than miraculous. All miracles are supernatural; but not all supernatural acts are miracles.

God hears our prayers – even silent prayers that are said only in our minds. The laws of nature cannot explain and do not govern this communication. When God answers our prayers, He does something to the world and this providence is for the same reason supernatural. Before God can help us through nature, He must do something to nature and this is the point these preachers miss. When God answers prayer, He acts on the world. Nature does not answer prayer. God does.

These brethren have erected a wall between God and the world. They have placed us on the other side of the wall with the Bible. Nature is plugged into an outlet on the wall so that it continues to run, but God does nothing more than supply the energy for the world to run. Outside of direction from the Bible and the laws of nature we are on our own. We can cry to God for help, but according to these brethren, the wall keeps God from helping us, and God’s answer is, “Nature will take care of you. Everything in the world is fixed and cannot be altered. Do not ask me to do more. Just acknowledge what I have done and thank me for it.”

What a dreadful and pitiable life we have if this teaching is true! When our hearts are overwhelmed with anguish and we feel utterly helpless, this view says God will do nothing to comfort us other than what He has already done in giving us nature and the Bible! This ridiculous and extreme doctrine makes many of the prayers and promises of the Bible void. How can we pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:13)? How can we pray that God “will send forth laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:38)? How can we pray that God will open doors for us to teach the gospel (Col. 4:6)? Why should we pray for the church, pray for the lost, pray for the sick, and pray for our rulers when the only forces at work in the world are the laws of nature and the Bible influencing free choices of men?

I am afraid that some church members, especially young ones, have encountered this extremism and equated it with “conservatism.” Disgusted with a mentality that banishes God from human affairs, they have turned to liberal churches, thinking, “At least these people believe God answers prayers.” They are wrong for turning to liberalism. But they are right in feeling that these preachers tried to rob them of the comforting assurance that God works in our lives. I have seen the pain and disappointment in the faces of Christians who have not turned to liberalism or Pentecostalism, but felt betrayed because they had been mistaught on this subject.

Extremism is usually not planned or intentional. This extreme view of God’s relationship to the world did not begin deliberately. It grew out of our battles against Pentecostalism and it continues because of those battles. But it is time to wake up and come back to a sensible view of this matter. It is time to examine the cliches and ready-made responses we make to Pentecostals to see if our statements are precise. It is time we realize that in fighting Pentecostalism some have gone too far in the opposite direction. It is time we admit that there are many things we cannot explain.

The bottom line to this and other issues is the effect they have on how we live. If a person actually believes that God is as uninvolved with the world as these brethren claim, his attitude and outlook will be affected. His prayer life will not be what it should be. It will be a cold routine. When he reads the Bible, he will not even see providence in Bible stories, for this view reduces events in the world to either nature or miracles. And how will he make sense of such themes as trusting in God (Prov. 3:5-6) or all things working together for good (Rom. 8:28)? But if a person genuinely believes that the hand of God is at work in the world, and yes, in his life, what a difference this makes! He does not have to see what God does behind the scenes any more than he has to see God in order to receive great encouragement and motivation from this conviction! It will affect the way he prays, how he thinks, and how he looks at life itself!

There is a twist of irony in this whole controversy. Preachers who spend a lot of time developing arguments for their position may end up with little time to do the praying that is in the end what is really important! Is it not strange that we can argue so much about how God answers prayer that we forget to pray? On the other hand, there are Christians who know little about this whole controversy. They don’t even understand the questions much less have the answers. They hear and read some of what the preachers have said, but they are confused by obscure, technical, and sometimes ambiguous words they use. They cannot say a lot about which side is right in the dispute. But one thing is sure. They pray, and they pray to God fervently with all their heart day and night. This is what we all had better do. Some will continue to believe that God has neither part nor lot in the affairs of this life. We cannot force them to change. But the rest of use will go on believing that verses like this one have meaning for us today: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles” (Psa. 34:6).

Editorial

I read with interest brother Tom Wacaster’s article in the January 2005 issue of the Gospel Journal which topic was “All-Sufficient Word.” He said a few things I want to look at and for the reader’s consideration.

Brother Wacaster is very happy with his idea that God does work things out but He did it way ahead of time. According to brother Tom, God must keep His hands off of everything today. He does nothing now but God has done plenty in days gone by. It may have been done before the creation of the earth because God has known about all things from eternity past.

According to brother Tom’s reasoning, we cannot pray “give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11). We should pray according to his reasoning, “you have already given us our daily bread and thank you for it.” We cannot pray according to Wacaster, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). We can pray according to Wacaster’s reasoning, your will is already planned from somewhere back yonder and we are thankful for it.

We cannot pray for the sick to get well as taught in James 5:13-16 because brother Wacaster says this has been worked out back yonder by the Good Lord. Now we can pray and thank God for working out this plan back there sometime. He does not want God to do anything today but he has no problem if it was worked out and done by the Lord hundreds or thousands of years ago and it may have been done in eternity. These brethren are always talking about Calvinism; Wacaster’s view of things is very close to Calvinism – maybe a double first cousin in some ways. But Wacaster does have God working directly even though it was back yonder sometime.

Wacaster says that indwelling is not the issue. We beg to differ with him. Many faithful brethren believe the Holy Spirit dwells in them in a personal way. They believe the Holy Spirit strengthens them (Eph. 3:16) not miraculously but in some way. They believe that God gives wisdom (James 1:5-6) but not in a miraculous way. Many faithful Christians believe that God heals the sick (James 5:13-16), but not in a miraculous way. God does these things in a supernatural way. When we talk about this supernatural we are not talking about a miracle. A thing can be supernatural and still not be a miracle. When God gives a begotten baby a soul or spirit, is this natural or supernatural? When God forgives our sins is this natural or supernatural? When God adds us to His church is this natural or supernatural? Wouldn’t you hate to go through this world having no hope that God has anything to do with you except in the past he planned some things as Wacaster thinks?

Wacaster talks about providence in this article. It, too, is and was planned back yonder sometime, but hands off of things for God now according to Wacaster. He then cites Phillip and the eunuch and talks about that incident. Brother Tom says that God started the preacher (Phillip) by a miracle so he would be on time. But what about the eunuch and when he started? Who started him at the right time? Wacaster says he may, as far as we know, have been started “by natural” or “providential” means. Would Wacaster tell us what he means by this? Providence includes the working of God. Does he equate nature and providence? Does Wacaster think that nature has a providence through which it works?

Wacaster talks about the all sufficient word of God and he contends that it is all sufficient but I cannot tell what he means by this. I believe in the all sufficient word of God by which I mean the Bible is sufficient to guide us in every way to get to heaven and please God. I do not believe the Bible is all sufficient to fix a tractor wheel, to guide in wiring a house, to operate on a brain in a physical way so as to make it believe the Bible about prayer, providence, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I wish these brethren would tell us what they mean by the all sufficiency of the Bible. Wacaster has it in his article but what he says is not sufficient to know about his belief in the all sufficiency of the Bible.

On page 17 and the last paragraph, Wacaster says, “No, the Bible is not all sufficient to do God’s providential work.” He has just argued about the all sufficiency of the Bible and condemned Mac Deaver for not believing it. (Mac does believe in the all sufficiency of the Bible. I have talked many hours with him.)

When brethren try to get into the mind of God and the wisdom of God and figure out unrevealed things, they are getting into realms of no profit and I believe Wacaster has done this to some extent in this article. Who knows the mind of God (Job. 40:1-2)? The secret things belong to God (Deut. 29:29). How does God now work in providence and prayer? I do not know. How does God strengthen the inward man? I do not know. How does God help me to say what I need to say? I do not know. How does He give me a remembrance of what I have prepared to say? I do not know. Think of all the things we ask God to do for us in the public prayers at church. If the brethren knew what some of the preachers believe about providence and prayer today, they would fire them. Believe the Bible brethren, God still lives and works in the world today and all is well (Dan. 4:25; Dan. 4:32; Rom. 8:28).

These brethren can write and argue all they want to about God, prayer, providence, and the work of the Holy Spirit. Their arguments may lead them to the place to where they tell the Good Lord to keep His hands off of His created earth and the working of it and His people. But I am going to ask God to help me be a good Christian. I am going to ask God to be with me. I am going to ask God to help me preach and say what needs to be said. I am going to pray for the suffering and the dying. I am going to pray that God will heal the sick. I am going to pray for God to protect me in my journeys. I am going to pray to God to give me strength to go through trials and tribulations. I am going to pray to God to give me wisdom from above, and many other like things. I certainly am going to pray that God will deliver me from those who do not believe He is doing anything in the world today and rob Him of the praise, glory and honor due Him, for all His many blessings and working today in answer to prayer and His work in providence.
—Malcolm L. Hill