The Bible is actually a book, a whole book about the providence of God.

From Genesis 315 onwards, it tells the story of how God works to provide salvation for

his people in Jesus Christ.

And with a view to that, he governs everything so that this will happen.

I think I've probably had a sense of this since I was a very small boy, although it was

some time before I really began to understand the gospel itself.

A family didn't go to church and we probably only had a few shelves of books in our home.

But one of them was my maternal grandmother's old Bible.

I remember it was bound in black leather, it was small and it was thick and it had really

small print. My memory is a little hazy,

but I think I'd learn to read before I went to school. My mother taught me. And since we didn't

have any central heating in the house in those days, in the winter months, I used to get into my

parents' bed once they'd got up and enjoy the warmth they had left

behind, my own central heating system, and I would read my grandmother's Bible. Well, to be honest,

there were two stories, more or less, I read all the time. One of them was the story of Daniel,

which took me quite a while to find because it was so far

on in the Bible.

And the other one was a bit elusive too since the hero didn't have a Bible book named after

him.

But he was tucked away in the last quarter of the book of Genesis.

Yes, it was the story of Joseph. And sometimes when I look back, I think, maybe

this was one way God was preparing me to be a minister, a pastor, because one of the big questions

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