Ezekiel 1:16

A wheel in the middle of a wheel.

God in human activity

By a wheel within a wheel God governs and makes all things work together for good to those who love Him: all pleasant and all painful things; all that is mean, contemptible, slanderous, all that vexes and annoys. So we may put on gladness, knowing that He overrules each event of life, and while we work, He worketh in us according to His pleasure.

1. The Scriptures affirm this truth. They are as full of evidences of it as the daily press is full of the records of man’s workings in individual and national life. Eyes see clearer, washed with tears. Paul could glory in his infirmities, for he saw even in them that the power of Christ was made glorious. In all the pains and penalties, the joys and griefs, the thoughts and imaginations of life, God is busy, out of evil still educing good.

2. History proves this. Never did men meet behind closed doors without God seeing them. Every plot and conspiracy is known to Him. The Jews were persecuted and peeled, they were ever an easy prey to the spoiler, now they are the bankers and traders of the world; many hold seats of power among the nations. The thing you intend to accomplish carries with it a score of things you did not intend to do. Luther and Columbus accomplished more than they ever dreamed of doing, because God was in their movements.

3. The laws of nature illustrate this. The thunderstorm is His scavenger, driving off malaria and noxious vapour. The earthquake is a safety valve by which imprisoned gases are set free. Weeds, thistles, insects, are made to work out some good.

Conclusion--

1. We cannot get along without God. If we choose to rebel against His working, He will curb and overthrow us. If we lead selfish, prayerless, cruel lives, He will thwart and destroy.

2. Nothing happens which does not help him who loves God. Losses, crosses, abuse, and injury lead to the growth of patience, watchfulness, and the silent bearing of sorrow. Burn your own smoke and go on. Trials help to build up character.

3. The love of God is emphasised by the truth before us. He reigns--not sin. (H. M. Gallaher, D. D.)

The symbol of Providence

I. Your troubles, difficulties, losses, whatever they may be and whatever may be the instruments of them, are all from God. Your times are in His hands. Your ways are ordered by Him. Your breath depends upon His will. All your sorrows and all your joys are parts of His one great plan of education for you to make you meet to be His own forever.

II. Succeeding events explain the providence and purposes of God. We learn what He intended to do, by what He has done. If we study the Lord’s providence, remembering that all its events come from God, and that God alone can teach us what is their meaning and design; if we wait upon God with patient faith in His Divine teaching, to see what He means to do with us, all the flames will unfold themselves in due time. The whirlwind will pass by. The clouds will scatter, and light alone, the purest light, will remain to shine around us, “clear as amber.”

III. All the providences of God have a fixed purpose, and are wisely arranged in their operation. There is no blind chance in the government of God or in the affairs of men. When one asked Dr. Payson if he could discern any reason for his great personal sufferings, he answered, “No; but I am as well satisfied as if I saw ten thousand reasons. The will of God is the perfection of all reason.” The ways and thoughts of God are not like ours. He does not give to us a previous account of His plans and purposes. But He knows the thoughts which He thinks concerning us. And He makes us to see and acknowledge at last how wire and how perfect they all were. Thus every providence appears to us with the face of a man, open, intelligent, and clear, having a manifest design, and perfectly adapted to accomplish it. It has also the eye of an eagle, which seeth afar off. It is watchful over the least of the affairs which it includes. The very hairs of our head, the stones in our path, the moments of our unconscious sleep, are all the subjects of its provision and control. These providences are also perfectly steady and uniform in their operation. The Lord is of one mind, and changeth not; the same yesterday, today, and forever.

IV. The same providences are often designed to produce separate and sometimes apparently opposite results. These various results of Providence, and the instruments by which they are completed, are not generally wonderful or strange things. They are perfectly natural and common things, but brought about by ways which we had not anticipated. They are things which occur just as naturally as a wheel revolves, or as wings support in flight. But they come and go in their particular occurrence as God directs, and they bring to pass the designs which God has formed.

V. In this gracious and wonderful scheme all providences have a secret purpose of blessing for those who love God. This is a very precious lesson. The plans of Divine providence are always subservient to the plans of Divine grace. They are designed as blessings for the chosen people of God. Whom He loves, He protects and prospers. There can be no one to harm those who are followers after that which is good. However God may try His people on the way, and however dark, unintelligible, and hard to bear these trials may appear, the triumphant and happy result is always the same, perfectly sure, and entirely compensating. He refines His chosen ones like gold and silver, and they glorify Him in the fires.

VI. All the providences of God are under the control of the great Redeemer and Saviour of the people of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The government of the world is on His shoulder, and He upholdeth all things by the word of His power. (S. H. Tyng, D. D.)

The whole universe is ruled by God

1. He rules in the world of physical nature. The “whirlwind” which the prophet saw was under the throne. All forces of nature, however strange and irresistible they may appear, are subject to God. What science reveals as laws, are no more than means and methods of Divine operation. God was seen in Jacob’s dream above the ladder; so above all secondary causes is the great First Cause who originated them, and who still inspires them with energy and guides their courses.

2. He rules in the world of spirit. The cherubim which the prophet saw, with their mysterious forms and motions, were also under the throne. Freedom appears inseparable from spirit, but all creaturely freedom moves and acts within the will of God. “He doth according to His will in the army of heaven” (Daniel 4:35). Holy beings ever obey lovingly. His will is not only their law, but the ground and means of their blessedness. Devils are compelled to obey. This is the cause of their constant rage and misery. Inspired by hatred to God and goodness, they are obliged to see that not only are their plots defeated, but they are eventually made to promote the very ends they sought to destroy. It is so also with men in this way: the renewed are “workers together with God”; the unrenewed, though unwilling and rebellious, must subserve Divine purposes (Romans 9:17).

3. He rules in the order of history. The wheels the prophet saw symbolised the government of the world in its entirety. There was an appearance “as of a wheel within a wheel”--the multiform agencies and complications employed by Providence. The wheels “went straight on”--the direct course of Providence, which never halts, and is never turned aside from its purposes. The “rings were high and dreadful”--the vastness of the Divine purposes, awful in their sweep and grandeur. The “rings were full of eyes”--the omniscience of God, so appalling to the wicked, so comforting to saints. The “noise” of the moving wheels and of the accompanying cherubim was as “the voice of the Almighty”--all nature, and life, and the course of history, a revelation of the living, omnipotent Deity. (Christian Age.)

The mysteries of Providence

I. God carries on all things by a secret and an invisible virtue, that though you see the hand without, yet you see not the spring within.

II. Men’s spirits are many times raised unto an extraordinary pitch beyond the spirits of men. Drawn out to higher resolutions, they pitch upon higher thoughts and purposes than ever the times require: why now, mark, here is a mystery in this, that at one time a man should rise higher than at another time, and their resolutions and courages rise higher, and they should dare to encounter with those difficulties that even formerly they did tremble to think of. What is the reason of it? Oh, here is the mystery of Providence (Zechariah 12:8).

III. God puts impressions and apprehensions upon men many times, that they run to their own ruins.

1. Sometimes impressions of discouragement (Judges 7:13).

2. Sometimes impressions of encouragements (2 Kings 3:22).

IV. God many times raiseth up instruments, and He qualifies them for His work. Girding up their loins and strengthening their hands, that they shall go through that at one time that you would have thought ten thousand instruments could not have done it at another (Isaiah 45:1). God lays the same instrument aside again at another time. Many times the Lord will make a combination, and there shall be a conjunction of instruments, and afterwards the Lord will make use of these, even to destroy one another. Abimelech and the men of Shechem.

V. God many times destroys men by those means by which in all human judgment they think they shall be preserved. The people of Israel, when they were in any necessity, then by and by unto King Jareb, which some expound to be a helping king: sometimes in the way of Assyria, sometimes in the way of Egypt; yet, notwithstanding, they were destroyed by those that they brought in to their help. They bound Paul that he should not preach: “My bonds tend to the furtherance of the Gospel.” They banished the Church out of Jerusalem, on purpose that so they might have destroyed it: but that is the Church’s preservation, when Jerusalem is destroyed. These are the strange actings of Providence.

VI. When things are brought to the lowest ebb, the means weakest, and the confidence of the enemy and their expectations highest, then many times God is pleased to destroy the power of the mighty. When Gideon hath but three hundred men, he is fit to fight God’s battles; yea, Sisera must fall by the hand of a woman. Uses--

1. In all actings of Providence subscribe to His wisdom.

2. In all actings of Providence submit to His will. (W. Strong.)