God Is In Complete Providential Control of His Universe

From Lesson 23 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

Let’s look at the direct implications this has for our our doctrine of nature. If it is true, let’s draw planet earth, that God promises there will be no flood on the earth, so this is a no-flood earth, no global flood earth, what is implied when He made that promise? What else can we infer if He makes a no-flood earth? We know very well something out there in the Chesapeake Bay, and anybody that’s been out there, if you’re a fisherman or a boater, what happens every 10 or 12 hours? Tide, you have a tide effect. Where’s the tide coming from? The tide is because of the moon. Can the moon and extraterrestrial bodies then affect water on the earth? Yes. Suppose we had a powerful pass-by of an asteroid that passed by with its gravitational field in resonance with the earth, and picked up the waters of the ocean into a super tide and smashed across the continent with it. Would we have a global flood? Sure. So what then does God have to control to have a no-flood earth? He’s got to control nearby astronomical bodies, all of them.

So we extend the power of the promise, because to make the promise work for the earth, He’s got to protect the near environment of the earth. But now in order to control those astronomical bodies that are close by the earth, they in turn can be influenced by astronomical bodies beyond them. Then what has God got to do in order to keep the no-flood earth? He’s got to control the nearby bodies but to control the nearby bodies He has to control the far off bodies, etc. What have we done here in this line of reasoning? Let’s look at it carefully. We have said that in order to promise anything at any point in the universe, God has to control every other point in the universe. Either He controls every point or He can control no point, it’s either/or. So we have here a very powerful implication for nature, and for our whole idea of nature, that God’s words control astronomical bodies of unbelievable distance and force.

In Gen. 9, pretend you were there with a tape recorder, you’re standing there with Noah when God speaks these words, you hear God speaking in whatever the language was that He was speaking, and He speaks to Noah and He says the earth will never, ever again be destroyed by water, I guarantee that. Click off the tape recorder. What you have heard and got on that tape recorder is something that is superior to every law of physics in the universe. Think about this, because this is an exercise we as Christians really need to do, because every day of our lives we’re walking around in a world that thinks exactly the opposite way. Every news article we read, every magazine article we read, and this is Easter and Newsweek and U.S. World News Report and everybody had to run convenient little stories about why Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, and why He couldn’t have been God, and at Christmas He couldn’t have been born of a virgin, and Easter He couldn’t rise from the dead, but we’re very religiously neutral and all this stuff, don’t get us wrong, we’re being very objective, this is scholarly opinion. Of course, they suppress the conservative scholars, and what they define as scholarship is liberalism. But let there be a conservative speak out, oh, we can’t do that because that’s religious.

We have this situation where we are contaminated intellectually, and you have to take a bath, and what I am suggesting is to take a bath intellectually, get rid of all the dirt, and the way to think this through is to cycle the implications of the Word of God imaginatively through your brain. In other words, through the medium of imagining a tape recording, and hearing God’s Words in Gen. 9, actually being spoken, and looking up at the stars and looking at the moon and think to yourself as you hear the tape recording, and you look into the sky, and you see what’s going on, a lunar eclipse, and you see this, you look out into the expanse of the universe and you hear God’s Word saying this is a behavioral pattern I have imposed on the geophysical universe, it will always be so. What that does for you, it puts above any concept of natural law the Word of God, and here’s how we can restore the Word of God to its primacy.