A Thousand Wheels of Providence

God is doing more in our hardships than we can possibly conceive. Imagine you come down with an illness, or maybe you do not need to imagine it because you are facing something like that right now. This malady is not a short illness; it is something long and troublesome, so you ask the Lord to remove it, but he does not.

As you consider what God may be doing through this illness, a couple of options come to mind. Maybe he is using this to challenge you and your family’s faith to help you grow spiritually. Or perhaps he is forcing you to slow down because you have been going too fast. Though these options give you some peace, you still feel distressed and discontented.

In a situation like this, Jeremiah Burroughs points out that when we consider God’s work in Providence, we can only see things in pieces. We cannot see or understand many things that God does.

Burroughs then compares it to the wheels in a watch. Each gear depends on another, and if one wheel were to stop, all of them would stop. If we consider God’s providence in allowing an illness, or any other hardship, in our lives as one wheel in a complex mechanism, there are likely a thousand other wheels of Providence connected to it.

In this life, we may only be able to imagine one or two attached wheels, but from God’s perspective, it is much more involved. We love to quote Romans 8:28, “For all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord.” The problem is, in our limited view, we limit that promise. We assume that because we love the Lord, the good he is doing must directly apply to us as individuals. However, countless people love the Lord, and most of the wheels connected to your hardship may have little to do with you or your family. As you interact with others, and they interact with more people, your suffering may also be used by God to strengthen the faith of someone else’s family or even the family of God corporately.

For example, this past weekend, our church’s adult Sunday School class was blessed and encouraged by considering the book of Job. Job was never given the reasons for his suffering, and he did not even know about chapter one like we do. All he is told in a series of rhetorical questions from God is that he is not God and to trust the Lord even when you do not understand. Though Job pleaded with God to immediately restore him and even questioned why God allowed him to experience this suffering in the first place, there were thousands of gears at play in Job’s suffering. Had God stopped the gear of Job’s suffering, then the wheel of encouragement thousands of years later, on another continent, in a small Sunday School in Southern California would have been left unturned.

As you pray for the Lord to remove the trial because you do not see how it could be doing you any good, remember he may not stop that wheel because doing so would stop the blessing of countless other believers. If he answers your prayer and ends your trial, he has already accomplished his purpose and set the needed wheels in motion. If he does not, he still has more wheels to spin.

When you find yourself discontented because of a hardship, remember this truth. Your hardship is not in vain. Trust the workings of the Lord and find contentment in that. Then, let these words from Jeremiah Burroughs sink in. “Let me, therefore, be quiet and content for though I am crossed in some one particular thing, God attains his end; his end may be furthered in a thousand things by this one thing I am crossed in.”

-D. Eaton