How do we understand or make sense of the idea of God's providence when we're facing

personal trauma or worldwide tragedy? How do we trust his will and his way when suffering and

devastation are unrelenting? We're exploring the answers to these questions today on Truth for Life.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Proverbs 16, we're focusing on verse 9.

The Providence of God extends to all people, the entire world, and that in a general sense,

and in a particular and personal sense to his own people, to the church as with a big C,

and therefore to those who are included in Christ and thereby in the church.

Now when you see that, a number of things immediately strike one, at least they strike me.

First of all, what I've just said to you, if you think about going back out into tomorrow,

amongst the routine of your life and amongst friends and family members, surely what I'm just

affirming here is absolutely radical. I mean, it is a radical notion, isn't it, in the environment,

in the philosophical milieu in which we live our lives. To go out and to affirm that the providence of

God extends to all places and to all occurrences. That notion alone flies in the face of the kind of

world view that is pervasive in our day. If you just listen to people talk, they betray from their

own lips their view of the world. They either believe themselves largely to be held in the grip of fate,

a blind and personal force that controls them over which they have no opportunity to respond,

or that they regard themselves as just somehow being caught up like a cork on the ocean and are

a tumbleweed in the winds of Albuquerque. The deism that was prevalent the end of the 19th

into the 20th century has been replaced, at least in Western thought, by the pantheism of today.

The pantheism of today that suggests that God does not stand out of time, that he is not

beyond his creation, but somehow or another, he's wrapped up in his creation. And since we are part

of his creation, we are thereby, so fact-a-part of God. And if we're looking for God, then maybe what

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