Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
“We cannot be responsible for circumstances beyond our control.” On our several airline flights and connections this summer, I was very aware that airlines take the attitude that they cannot be blamed for delays caused by weather, air traffic control, and whatever other circumstances and events they can plausibly regard as outside their ability to control. In such cases, you can sit in an airport for hours with no compensation whatsoever. Situations like these are guaranteed to cause one to violate what Jesus asks in the passage. “Circumstances beyond our control” almost always make us worry.
Which is why I invite you to consider this morning the doctrine of providence which lies behind what Jesus teaches here. Our Lord offers us reasons for not worrying based on simple observation of other creatures around us. Birds do not worry. The two little sparrows which shelter under the church office porch and poop all over the ramp don’t lose a moment’s sleep in anxiety about the fact that I’m going to get out there soon and nail a piece of two-by-four over their roosting place. Flowers do not worry. The overgrown plants out by our south driveway were not concerned at all by the fact that they were dug up this week in preparation for the placement of our new signs.
Flowers and birds don’t spend any time at all exercised by thoughts of circumstances beyond their control. It’s not just that they have no brains for such thoughts. Jesus is saying they do not need to worry. Someone else has their circumstances under control. God provides food for the birds and ensures that the flowers will blossom in their season. He is managing the welfare of His creatures in a direct and intimate way.
God’s direct care for His world is through the providential act of concurrence. We have already seen how divine providence involves the creation and conservation of everything in existence. Now we are saying that God does even more. When insects hatch and the birds feast, God is at work. When the rain falls and the sun shines and the flowers open up their blossoms, God is active. When earth spins on its axis and night and day change places, God is in it. Even when one of a million trillion tiny electrons jumps from one energy state to another, God is involved. And when you or I act, even by lifting a finger, God is acting too. God cooperates with His creatures in everything that happens. That is concurrence.
Of the three basic forms of God’s general providence, concurrence is perhaps the most difficult and most controversial concept for Christians. Most believers accept God’s creation of the universe. And when we think about it, we acknowledge that everything depends moment by moment on His conservation of what He has created. But the notion that God is at work 24/7 in every single event, cooperating in atomic particle quantum leaps and the movement of galaxies, is harder to swallow.
There are three possible views on God’s cooperation in the events of the world. The first opinion is that it is not necessary. This is a kind of deism, a belief that once God creates and conserves the world in existence, it doesn’t need any further guidance. God gave atoms and alligators the power to act on their own. Nothing more is needed.
Deism really took off in the modern age when machines became a part of life. Thinkers looked at creation and thought of steam engines and watch springs. They became fascinated with how much the solar system resembled a well-oiled mechanism that just keeps ticking. So they decided God’s role amounted to building the machine and winding the mechanism of the universe. But He left it then to run by itself. God has turned over His control of the world to the beings within it.
Yet if deism is true, then much of what Scripture says is literally false. Jesus’ talk about God feeding the birds and dressing the flowers is just pretty metaphor. If God allows the world to run only by its own powers, then telling Job that God makes the boundaries of the sea, gives orders to the morning, sends the snow, cuts channels for the rain as it runs to the sea, and hunts prey for the lion is just poetic fiction. Wherever in the Bible the operations of the natural world are ascribed to God, if the deists are right, we are reading mythology rather than fact.
The Bible’s picture of the world is a scheme of events in which God is constantly involved. So, on the other hand, the second view of God’s part in events goes to the opposite extreme. On this view, God is so involved that He is really the only power at work. It only appears that there are other powers at work in the universe. But every movement, every action, comes from God alone.
This second understanding of providence is occasionalism. Natural causes for events are not what makes them happen. They are only the occasions for what God does. So when a smoldering cigarette is carelessly tossed into dry pine needles, and flames erupt and consume a mountainside full of trees, it is not the cigarette which caused the blaze. The cigarette was only the occasion for an exercise of God’s power. On this view, God is the only cause of everything that happens.
The idea of occasionalism is admirable. It wants to give real substance to all those Scriptures which describe God as the cause of what happens in the world. It assures that God is in control by giving Him all the control. His action is the only action there is. Such a view seems to give full and proper honor to God, make Him truly sovereign over the world.
But God never wanted that kind of honor. In the very beginning, Genesis 1 tells us that God expected his creation to be active, to be fruitful, to use the powers He gave it to move and reproduce. And from the beginning God held human beings responsible for the misuse of the activity and power He granted them. How could that be if God is the real cause of all we do?
Occasionalism also runs counter to common sense. We know that cigarettes and matches and lightning bolts cause forest fires. Water and sunlight cause flowers to grow. Too many desserts add inches to our waistlines, and viruses make our noses run. Why would you ever imagine that God is the real and only cause behind it all? As Robert Farrar Capon puts it in one of my favorite lines, the occasionalist world is “a Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts.”[1] Everything and everyone in the world is a puppet whose strings are pulled by a divine will hiding just behind the curtain.
Worst of all, occasionalism makes God absolutely and completely responsible for everything that happens. It doesn’t matter if it’s a forest fire, cancer or child abuse. If God is the only real cause there is, then God is the only real cause of all the evil in the world. And who wants to worship a God like that? Occasionalism must be wrong.
When we come to the third view, then, the idea of God’s concurrence, we are on solid, biblical middle ground for answering the question, “What is God doing in the world?” The deists say He’s doing nothing. The occasionalists say He’s doing everything. In concurrence we say that God is doing everything with His creatures. Everything that happens, happens because of a cooperation between God and what He has made.
So when the cigarette starts the forest fire, the cigarette is the real cause, but God adds His own power to the flame. When the rain falls and dry roots draw up water, God is also at work to nourish and revive the tree. And when you or I speak or move or even think, God is actively concurring and supplying an additional measure of power to those actions.
You are driving along on your way to church when you see brake lights flashing in front of you. A car is stalled in the road ahead. The driver is out of the car, but reaching in through the open window trying to steer as he pushes the vehicle off to the side. So being a good Christian – where you’re headed reminds you of this – you pull over and get out to help. “Get in the car and steer,” you say. “I’ll push.” And together you move the car out of traffic. That’s not a bad image of how God cooperates in everything that happens and in everything you or I do.
God’s concurrence operates by His general determination to apply His power in a way appropriate for the cause with which He concurs. So, as the force you apply to the stalled vehicle is directed by the driver behind the wheel, God allows His concurrent power to be guided by whatever or whoever He is working with. If it’s a flame, then He offers the power of burning. If it’s a growing plant, then He cooperates in the process of photosynthesis. And if it’s a human being with free-will, then He cooperates with that person’s actions as she determines them by her own choices.
Therefore, as I explained to the children, you can always give at least two true answers to the question “What caused it?” There is the natural cause and there is God, working together in any event. The language of old insurance policies which talk about “acts of God” had something right about it. However much science might teach us about the natural causes of the weather, it is always right and good to thank the Lord for sending the rain.
Yet as some of you may have already figured out, concurrence doesn’t quite get God off the hook of responsibility. If God cooperates in every event and action, then isn’t He still to blame for it all? If the driver whose car I’m pushing wants to run it up on somebody’s lawn, don’t I share the blame if I keep helping him? To put it bluntly, how can God participate, even if it’s only by concurring, in things like the 9/11 attack or the famine killing thousands in Africa? Shouldn’t He just refuse to help when natural events or human actions are headed in the wrong direction? Maybe the deists are right.
But let’s not go back to an uninvolved and distant God who merely watches what happens. A better answer is to say that God concurs with events and actions for one of two reasons: He either wants it to happen or He is willing to permit it to happen. That is especially clear in regard to what you and I do.
Because God wants us to make truly free choices, He offers His concurrence for all the possibilities we might choose. When you decide whether or not to stop and help that struggling motorist push his car, God will concur with whichever choice you make. If He refused to help with a bad choice, so that you couldn’t really make it, then you wouldn’t be free. God’s concurrence permits a bad choice even though He certainly does not intend for you to make a bad choice.
By now I realize that we are a long way from our text and from the gentle call of Jesus to observe the birds and the flowers and let go of your worry. I won’t blame you if you feel like I’ve only made obscure and complicated what seemed so simple. Perhaps if nothing else, I’ve made you appreciate the plain words of Jesus even more.
My goal, however, has been to establish a background by which you can see that God’s providence is the work of grace. God does not run the universe by a bunch of abstract, indifferent laws and principles and then add grace into the mix as an afterthought. No, God always works by grace, 24/7. He is always coming to the gracious aid of everything and everyone He has made, allowing His creatures to be what they are and to act out their natures whatever they are. God has not made a universe of dead machines which crank along without His care. Nor is He running a puppet show like some mad dictator bending all the world directly to His will.
God created a world full of creatures which He now cares for and respects by cooperating with them in all they do. And God gives that concurrence, that cooperation, whether or not it is deserved, whether or not His creatures mean to do His will or to work against Him. As Jesus said in Matthew 5, God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Concurrence is grace, grace always at work.
Christopher Reeve celebrated his fiftieth birthday this past week. The man who played Superman has lived paralyzed from the neck down since a riding accident years ago. Yet this was an exciting birthday because Reeve has recently recovered some movement. He can lift his left index finger and move his legs a bit. He has also recovered some feeling. He told Barbara Walters how important it is to him to be able feel something when those he loves touch him.
Reeve has every opportunity now to be thankful for what you and I take for granted, the tiny actions we engage in all the time. Being able to lift a finger is a gift, the work of God’s grace cooperating with us. Yet to every appearance, Reeve has missed his opportunity to recognize the real source of his recovery. On his televised birthday bash on Wednesday, his wife led a toast to “the progress of science and the will and passion of humanity.” He’s written a book entitled, “Nothing Is Impossible,” leaving out the rest of that quotation from Luke, the words “with God.” Reeve hopes for cloning technology to bring him complete healing and feels that Christian believers who oppose the use of human embryos in such research are his opponents.
Yet God is gracious with Reeve, giving him friends and family who love him, satisfying work despite his disability, and now even some healing. Despite his ingratitude and lack of faith, God cooperates with Reeve’s nerves and legs and finger, all to one gracious purpose, the same purpose for which He cooperates daily with you and me and all creation. His goal for Christopher Reeves and for us all is that we and all creation will learn to cooperate with Him.
That is why God sent Jesus Christ into the world. The ultimate act of God’s concurrence and cooperation with His creatures was to become one of us. In Jesus Christ, the cooperation between God and creation was perfected. In Jesus not only did God grant His concurrence with all that the man willed, but the man concurred with all God willed. He concurred so completely with His Father that when asked to give His life on the Cross He went there willingly. Because we have resisted cooperation with God, He cooperated in our place, with the greatest sacrifice.
So find ourselves beholding the best act of God’s grace and now see that it is also a kind of concurrence, a cooperation. God’s graciously cooperated with His creatures to the extent of letting them kill His Son. Then He was raised from the dead, so that we could see how God really was at work in Him, so that we might believe in Jesus and learn in Him to let our own lives cooperate with God.
God then is always at work, 24/7, working with the same purpose He has always had, grace offered to you and me in Jesus Christ. It is because of that grace that Jesus can assure His disciples that they need not worry about food or clothing. Grace will provide all of that and more. The only thing to strive after is what Jesus asks for in verse 31, to “seek his kingdom.” That means to do His will, to actively and intentionally cooperate with what God is doing, in gratitude for the way in which He concurs and cooperates in every aspect of our lives.
God created you and because of love has given you a gift no flower or bird has. He gave you the choice of whether to cooperate with Him or not. He is always cooperating with you, always acting in grace aiding you to do what you choose. What you choose, however, is up to you. Will you choose your own way and force Him merely to permit what you do? Or will you choose His way and work with Him in all that’s good?
In John 5:17 Jesus said, “My Father is always at his work… and I, too, am working.” The 24/7 work of God in Christ is to offer you without ceasing the gift of grace, the gift of His love. I urge you today to cooperate with His work, accept His grace, and enjoy the peace and love that He offers to all His creation.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj