Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, May 26, 2023
One of the most satisfying and faith-increasing exercises in my own lifetime has involved giving focused attention to alleged biblical difficulties. That’s because the more I study them and see their resolutions, the more I back away from the text in utter amazement that the Bible can be so coherent and so consistent and so unified at the tiniest level of the fine details. Its symmetry, its complexity, and its harmony are astonishing.

Unbelievers often allege that the Bible is “full of contradictions.” I’ve noted in many places over the years, however, that most of the contradictions people suggest really do not qualify as contradictions but merely reflect the difference in perspective we get when several eyewitnesses describe the same event but give different details. In such cases, the accounts do not contradict one another; rather, each account may emphasize different aspects of the same event, such that we get a fuller picture when we see how the details can be harmonized. Variations in perspective are exactly what we should expect even in a divinely inspired text, for the Holy Spirit did not override the personalities and styles of the individual authors when they wrote. Instead, the Spirit worked through their concerns to give us an inerrant record of what happened even as each writer focuses on some details and not others.
The vast majority of supposed “contradictions” in Scripture are relatively easy to reconcile. However, for the sake of honesty, I must acknowledge that there are a handful of problems in Scripture that are exceedingly difficult. For instance, it’s hard at times to square 1 and 2 Chronicles with 1 and 2 Kings, particularly with respect to when certain kings reigned, how long they ruled, and when they took the throne. Some have done the yeoman’s work of figuring out how these accounts fit together, which requires detailed knowledge of how ancient Near Eastern peoples recorded dates, periods of co-regency when two kings ruled at the same time, and other such things. No universally accepted solution has yet been found for every problem, but the work continues, and there’s every reason to believe we will have better answers as we learn more about how ancient Near Eastern writers, including the authors of Kings and Chronicles, did their work.
I’m confident such problems will eventually be solved because we serve a God who speaks truthfully and consistently, and because archaeological discoveries continue to confirm the biblical account. As an example, for many years all we knew about Pontius Pilate came from the Bible and a few other extrabiblical documents, so some people questioned whether Pilate ever existed.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, April 8, 2023
His resurrection is seen not only as a vindication of or surety of Himself, but as a surety of our justification. Here justification does not refer to our vindication, but to the evidence that the atonement He made was accepted by the Father. By vindicating Christ in His resurrection, the Father declared His acceptance of Jesus’ work on our behalf. Our justification in this theological sense rests on the imputed righteousness of Christ, so the reality of that transaction is linked to Christ’s resurrection. 

How is the resurrection of Christ linked to the idea of justification in the New Testament? To answer this question, we must first explore the use and meaning of the term justification in the New Testament. Confusion about this has provoked some of the fiercest controversies in the history of the church. The Protestant Reformation itself was fought over the issue of justification. In all its complications, the unreconciled and unreconcilable difference in the debate came down to the question of whether our justification before God is grounded in the infusion of Christ’s righteousness into us, by which we become inherently righteous, or in the imputation, or reckoning, of Christ’s righteousness to us while we are still sinners. The difference between these views makes all the difference in our understanding of the Gospel and of how we are saved.
One of the problems that led to confusion was the meaning of the word justification. Our English word justification is derived from the Latin justificare. The literal meaning of the Latin is “to make righteous.” The Latin fathers of church history worked with the Latin text instead of the Greek text and were clearly influenced by it. By contrast, the Greek word for justification, dikaiosune, carries the meaning of “to count, reckon, or declare righteous.”
But this variance between the Latin and the Greek is not enough to explain the debates over justification. Within the Greek text itself, there seem to be some problems. For example, Paul declares in Romans 3:28, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” Then James, in his epistle, writes, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar” (James 2:21) and “You see then that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24).
On the surface, it appears that we have a clear contradiction between Paul and James. The problem is exacerbated when we realize that both use the same Greek word for justification and both use Abraham to prove their arguments.
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Twenty-five years ago I gave an address at a college in western Pennsylvania. After the service was completed, an elderly gentleman and his wife approached me and introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Johannes Vos. I was surprised to learn that Dr. Vos was the son of the celebrated biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos who had written a classical work on redemptive history titled Biblical Theology, which is still widely read in seminaries. During the course of my conversation with them, Dr. Vos related to me an experience he had as a young boy living in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father was teaching on the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary. This was in the decade of the 1920s, a time in which Princeton Theological Seminary was still in its heyday; it was the time we now refer to as “old Princeton.” Dr. Vos told me of an experience he had in the cold winter of 1921. He saw a man walking down the sidewalk, bundled in a heavy overcoat, wearing a fedora on his head, and around his neck was a heavy scarf. Suddenly, to this young boy’s horror and amazement, as the man walked past his home, he stopped, grasped his chest, slumped, and fell to the sidewalk. Young Johannes Vos stared at this man for a moment, then ran to call to his mother. He watched as the ambulance came and carried the man away. The man who had fallen had suffered a major heart attack, which indeed proved to be fatal. His name was Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield.
I was thunderstruck by this narrative that was told to me by the now elderly Johannes Vos. I felt like I was somehow linked to history by being able to hear a firsthand account through somebody telling me of the last moments of the legendary B.B. Warfield’s life. At the time of his death, Warfield had been on the faculty of Princeton and had distinguished himself as its most brilliant theologian during his tenure.
My first exposure to the writings of B.B. Warfield was somewhat serendipitous. As a young college student, I had the daily dilemma of trying to parlay my meager funds into enough money to sustain myself. I was trying to live on a five-dollar-a-week allowance, out of which had to come the payment of my meals and the nightly ritual of a long distance telephone call to my fiancée. Obviously, even in the 1950s, five dollars did not stretch far enough to provide all of these needs. Therefore, I had to find ways to become semi-entrepreneurial and scrounge up a few extra dollars, so that I could eat and enjoy the conversation with my bride to be. I took up barbering without a license, giving my fellow students haircuts for a dollar to help defray my expenses. But my great break came when one of my professors told me of a new publishing company that was doing business out of a man’s garage in Nutley, New Jersey. It was called the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. The publishing house was looking for student representatives on various campuses to help distribute its products, and my professor asked if I would be interested in such an enterprise. I leapt at the chance, not motivated by any desire to propagate Reformed theology, but merely out of a pure economic motive. Within a few days there arrived at my dormitory a large cardboard box that was so heavy I could hardly lift it. It included all of the then published works of the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. There was a note inside indicating to me that these books were samples that I would have at my disposal, that I might familiarize myself with the works that were published by the company. Included were several of the works of Cornelius Van Til, a couple of volumes that had been published into English by G.C. Berkouwer, along with the complete works of B.B. Warfield.
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Written by R. C. Sproul |
Monday, February 6, 2023
So the first point in response to the question, “Does prayer change things?” is simply this: Yes, indeed prayer changes things. If nothing else, it changes us. When we come into the presence of God in conversation with him, one of the immediate benefits of that conversation is what happens to us.

One of those perennial questions that all Calvinists face from time to time and that you hear quite frequently is: If God is sovereign, then why pray? If that is the case, would not prayer be a superfluous activity, at best an exercise in meditation or some form of inspiring soliloquy? I am sure we have all had to wrestle with this question at times. Moreover, I think that it is not unlike a similar question that Calvinists also hear frequently. That is, if God is sovereign and predestination is true, why should we be involved in evangelism?
Why Pray? Why Evangelize?
In seminary I had the privilege of being in one of Dr. John Gerstner’s classrooms when he was holding forth on the subject of predestination. After he had given his lecture, he began his Socratic method of discourse and started to ask us questions. That class was a seminar of about eighteen men, and we were in a semicircle. I was sitting on one end, and he started on the other end by asking that gentleman, “Now, sir, if predestination is true, why should we be involved in evangelism?”
The student looked up at Gerstner and said, “I don’t know.”
Gerstner went down the line to the next fellow, who said, “Beats me.”
The next student said, “I always wondered about that myself, Dr. Gerstner.”
Our professor kept going around the semicircle, knocking us off one by one, and I was sitting over there in the corner feeling like Socrates in one of Plato’s dialogues. Plato had raised the difficult question. He had heard from all the lesser stars. Now Socrates was to give the lofty answer to the impenetrable mysteries of the question that had been raised. I was frightened. Finally Dr. Gerstner came to me. “Well, Mr. Sproul, if predestination is true, why should we be involved in evangelism?”
I slid down in the chair and prefaced my answer with all kinds of apologies, saying to him, “Well, Dr. Gerstner, I know this isn’t what you’re looking for, and I know that you must be seeking for some profound, intellectual response which I am not prepared to give. But just in passing, one small point that I think we ought to notice here is that God does command us to be involved in evangelism.”
Dr. Gerstner laughed and said, “Yes, Mr. Sproul. God does command us to be involved in evangelism. And of course, Mr. Sproul, what could be more insignificant than the fact that the Lord of glory, the Savior of your soul, the Lord God omnipotent, has commanded you to be involved in evangelism?” I got the point in a hurry! So it is with prayer. One reason to pray is that we are commanded to pray. But in addition to being commanded to pray we are also given the privilege of prayer. Prayer for the Christian is both a duty and an unspeakable privilege.
About ten years ago, I had an experience with another theologian—Dr. Nicole—regarding this question. At that time, whenever students at Gordon College asked me questions about prayer, I would say to them, “Well, the way I do it is this: I preach like a Calvinist, but I pray like an Arminian.” I said this in Dr. Nicole’s presence, and I looked at him to see what he would say. He looked at me in his warm fashion and said, “Brother Sproul, I think perhaps that God would be more pleased if you would preach like a Calvinist and pray like a Calvinist as well.” I did not forget that! And I thought I had better learn what it means to pray like a Calvinist.
When I began to pay attention to what Calvin had written on the question of prayer, I noticed something very unusual. As I turned to the Institutes, I found that Calvin prefaces his treatment of the doctrine of election and predestination (Book III, chapter 21) with a lengthy treatment of the nature and significance of prayer. I have always required that students in my courses on Calvin read Book III, chapter 20, of the Institutes before they even start the first chapter of Book I, so that they should be disarmed of the host of prejudices that surround the figure of John Calvin and that they might see the warmth of his heart and the passion that he had to converse in dialogue with his Creator and Lord.
Let me give a brief quotation from that chapter. Calvin writes, “But, someone will say, does God not know, even without being reminded, both in what respect we are troubled and what is expedient for us, so that it may seem in a sense superfluous that he should be stirred up by our prayers—as if he were drowsily blinking or even sleeping until he is aroused by our voice?
But they who thus reason do not observe to what end the Lord instructed his people to pray, for he ordained it not so much for his sake as for ours.”[1]
So the first point in response to the question, “Does prayer change things?” is simply this: Yes, indeed prayer changes things. If nothing else, it changes us. When we come into the presence of God in conversation with him, one of the immediate benefits of that conversation is what happens to us.
The essence of prayer is adoration, confession, and thanksgiving. What happens to a person who comes daily and regularly to the throne of grace with a broken and a contrite heart? Does God’s forgiveness change him? What happens to the heart that experiences gratitude and in the posture of prayer is able to recall what God has done for him? Does a grateful heart change a person? Certainly. People are changed through spending time with God.
Excerpt taken from Chapter 11: Prayer and God’s Sovereignty by R.C. Sproul, Our Sovereign God edited by James Montgomery Boice.
[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 852.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Islam has no cross and no resurrection, articles of the faith that are of the essence of Christianity and of ultimate importance to the plan of the God of the Bible. Mohammed made no atonement for our sins when he died. And when he died, he stayed dead. There are other crucial differences we could explore of how God is understood in orthodox Christianity and how He is understood in orthodox Islam. It is enough for now to say that Allah and Yahweh are not the same. One is the living God; the other is an idol.

A rose is a rose is a rose. This dictum reinforces the adage that a rose by any other name is still a rose. The idea is that the essence of the rose is not conditioned by what name is attached to it. It is its res, not its nomina, that determines what it is. In different languages, the same flower is known by different names, but it is still the same flower.
When we apply this idea to theology things get a bit more complicated. Indeed the rose adage has been transferred indiscriminately to religion in order to create a theological concept. The concept is: “God by any other name is still God.” Now certainly, it is true that the immutable essence of God is not changed by the alteration of His name. In English, we may say “God,” in German “Gott,” in Greek “Theos,” yet all these names or words are used to point to the same Deity.
Beyond this, however, things get murky. It is a quantum leap to go from saying that God by any other name is still God, to saying that all the great religions in the world believe in the same Being though they call Him different names.
This irrational leap is prodded by the popular analogy of the mountain. This analogy notes that their are many roads up the mountain. Some progress on a more direct route, while others wind about on more circuitous roads, but sooner or later they all arrive at the same place, at the top of the mountain.
Do all roads lead to God?
So, it is argued, there are many roads that lead to God. They may be different routes but they all end up in the same place—with God Himself. That is, the differing roads indicate no difference in the God who is found. God’s being, then, becomes the lowest (or highest) common denominator of all religions.
The road analogy is buttressed by the democratic truism that all religions are equal under the law. The fallacy in this axiom is thinking that just because all religions enjoy equal tolerance under the civil law, they therefore are all equally valid. That might be true if there were no God, but then it would be better to say that with respect to their ultimate affirmation they are all equally invalid.
To argue that all religions ultimately believe in the same God is the quintessential nonsense statement. Even a cursory examination of the content of different religions reveals this. The nature of the Canaanite deity Baal differs sharply from the nature of the biblical God. They are not remotely the same. This sharp distinction is also seen when comparing the God of Israel with the gods and goddesses of Roman, Greek, or Norse mythology.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
When the church is paganized there is no need for walls or gates in the city of God. Then the church doesn’t need to worry about singing the Lord’s song—it can sing the songs of the pagan culture because there is no longer a strange and foreign land.

In exile the people of Israel faced the question: “How do you sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land?” The question is similar to that faced by contemporary American Christians. Ours is a spiritual exile as we confront a culture and government increasingly hostile to Christianity.
We look to Nehemiah for clues to guide our own pilgrimage in difficult times. Nehemiah was grief-stricken by the news of the condition of Jerusalem. The walls were broken down and its gates burned with fire. His first emotion over the sad loss of his heritage was grief. It was not bitterness or anger. Nehemiah wept and mourned as Jesus would later weep over the same city.
In his grief, Nehemiah moved to the next step, prayer and fasting. His prayer was first of all a prayer of adoration for the majestic awe of God and for His faithfulness to His people: “O great and awesome God, You who keep Your covenant and mercy with those who love You and observe Your commandments.”
Even in exile, Nehemiah praised God for His covenant faithfulness. Then the focus of his prayer turned to repentance, pleading with God to forgive the sins of his own people, acknowledging that they had brought exile upon themselves.
Nehemiah was a cup-bearer to the king. He served in a pagan government as a believer in God. His vocation was that of a servant. He was humble and respectful to the king, but proper fear of his king did not stop him from acting to save his people. He prayed to God and made a request of the king, asking for permission to go to Jerusalem to rebuild it. He also asked for letters that he might present to lesser governors for safe conduct and even a grant for building materials.
Not all the pagan governors were sanguine toward Nehemiah and his plans. Indeed, some were fiercely resistant to them. When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard of it, they were deeply disturbed that a man had come to seek the well-being of the children of Israel (Neh. 2:10). But there is nothing unusual about this as it is a common pagan reaction to the mission of the church in any age.
When Nehemiah set about the task of rebuilding his enemies laughed at him and despised him. Nehemiah, though, did not let his critics determine his agenda. He was polite but firm in his response to them.
When Nehemiah’s pagan enemies received word that he had rebuilt the walls (but the doors were not yet hung on the gates), they invited him to meet with them in a special “audience.” Nehemiah had no time for this sort of thing, knowing the plans of the enemy were evil. He replied to Sanballat and his cronies, “Why should the work cease while I leave it and go down to you?” Sanballat then sent an open letter accusing Nehemiah of a seditious attempt to become a king and other false charges. Nehemiah sent back a message denying the allegations, noting that the charges were but a thinly veiled form of intimidation.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Thursday, November 3, 2022
It is in the gospel and nowhere else that God has given His power unto salvation. If we want reformation, we have to start with ourselves. We have to start bringing the gospel itself out of darkness, so that the motto of every reformation becomes post tenebras lux—“after darkness, light.” Luther declared that every generation must declare freshly the gospel of the New Testament. He also said that anytime the gospel is clearly and boldly proclaimed, it will bring about conflict.

I’m always puzzled when I see church billboards announcing a coming revival. They give the times and the dates when the church will be engaged in revival. But I wonder, how can anybody possibly schedule a revival? True revivals are provoked by the sovereign work of God through the stirring of His Holy Spirit in the hearts of people. They happen when the Holy Spirit comes into the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37) and exerts His power to bring new life, a revivification of the spiritual life of the people of God.
This kind of thing cannot be manipulated by any human program. Historically, no one scheduled the Protestant Reformation. The Welsh revival was not on anyone’s agenda, nor was the American Great Awakening penciled into someone’s date book. These epic events in church history resulted from the sovereign work of God, who brought His power to bear on churches that had become virtually moribund.
But we have to understand the difference between revival and reformation. Revival, as the word suggests, means a renewing of life. When evangelism is a priority in the church, such outreach will often bring about revival. However, these revivals of spiritual life do not always result in reformation. Reformation indicates changing forms of church and society. Revivals grow into reformations when the impact of the gospel begins to change the structures of the culture. Revival can produce a multitude of new Christians, but these new Christians have to grow into maturity before they begin to make a significant impact on the surrounding culture.
Reformation can involve a change for the better. We must not be so naïve as to think that all change is necessarily good. Sometimes when we feel that we are in the doldrums or that progress has been stultified, we cry out for change, forgetting for the moment that change may be regressive rather than progressive. If I drink a vial of poison, it will change me, but not for the better. Nevertheless, change is often good.
In our day, we have seen the rise of what has been called the “New Calvinism,” which tends to focus primarily on the so-called five points of Calvinism. This movement within the church has attracted a great deal of attention, even in the secular media.
Yet it would be wise to not identify Calvinism exhaustively with those five points. Rather, the five points function as a pathway or a bridge to the entire structure of Reformed theology. Charles Spurgeon himself argued that Calvinism is merely a nickname for biblical theology. He and many other titans of the past understood that the essence of Reformed theology cannot be reduced to five particular points that arose centuries ago in Holland in response to controversy with the Arminians, who objected to five specific points of the system of doctrine found in historic Calvinism. For the purposes of this article, it might be helpful to look at both what Reformed theology is and is not.
Reformed theology is not a chaotic set of disconnected ideas.
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Written by R. C. Sproul |
Monday, September 26, 2022
Because we are convinced that God’s Word is trustworthy and that that conviction is a reasonable conviction, we can trust God’s Word even for those things that we cannot see. John Calvin also argued the point that true faith is not believing against evidence. Rather, true faith involves trusting in the evidence that God has amply provided in and through His Word. That faith is not without what Calvin called evidences; rather, it is a faith that surrenders to or acquiesces to the evidences.

In this postmodern culture we have witnessed a fascinating revival of ancient Gnosticism. The Gnostics of antiquity were called by that name because they asserted that they had a superior type of knowledge that surpassed the insights found even in the apostles of the New Testament. They maintained that the insights of the apostles were limited by the natural limitations suffered by human beings tied to rationality. True knowledge, according to these heretics, was found not through reason or sense perception, but through a highly developed mystical intuition. In like manner, in this postmodern world we’ve seen a wide spread rejection of rationality. This rejection of rationality has infiltrated the church with a vengeance. We see frequent attempts to remove the Christian faith from all considerations of rationality. It is being argued today that biblical revelation is only intelligible by intuition or by a particularly sensitive poetic imagination. This carries with it the idea that biblical revelation is unintelligible through reason.
For good cause, the church in recent centuries has had to reject rationalism in its many faceted forms. There is no monolithic philosophy of rationalism; rather, rationalism wears various faces. On the one hand, we think of rationalism as distinct from empiricism with respect to how we come to know what we know. Second, Enlightenment rationalism contrasts reason not with sense perception but with revelation, arguing that revelation is unreasonable and the only truth that can be known is that which can be known by natural reason. The third and most complex form of rationalism is Hegelian rationalism, which defines reason with a capital R, and reality is the unfolding in space and time of ultimate reason. None of these philosophies represents historic Christianity. Christianity is not based on rationalism. However, the rejection of rationalism in the modern church often carries with it the rejection of rationality. This rejection is itself irrational. When we reject humanism, we don’t reject being human. If we reject existentialism, we don’t reject existence. So, if we reject an “ism” attached to reason, it does not mean that we are to reject reason itself.
We must be on our guard and vigilant at every moment against the intrusion of irrationality coming from existential philosophy, neo-orthodox theology, and the resurgence of mysticism set forth in neo-Gnosticism.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, September 23, 2022
The struggle within the church now is between the Augustinian view and various forms of semi-Pelagianism, which seeks a middle ground between the views of Pelagius and Augustine. Semi-Pelagianism teaches that grace is necessary to achieve righteousness, but that this grace is not imparted to the sinner unilaterally or sovereignly as is maintained by Reformed theology. Rather, the semi-Pelagian argues that the individual makes the initial step of faith before that saving grace is given. Thus, God imparts the grace of faith in conjunction with the sinner’s work in seeking God. It seems a little mixing of grace and works doesn’t worry the semi-Pelagian. 

“Grant what Thou commandest, and command what Thou dost desire.” This passage from the pen of Saint Augustine of Hippo was the teaching of the great theologian that provoked one of the most important controversies in the history of the church, and one that was roused to fury in the early years of the fifth century.
The provocation of this prayer stimulated a British monk by the name of Pelagius to react strenuously against its contents. When Pelagius came to Rome sometime in the first decade of the fifth century, he was appalled by the moral laxity he observed among professing Christians and even among the clergy. He attributed much of this malaise to the implications of the teaching of Saint Augustine, namely that righteousness could only be achieved by Christians with the special help of divine grace.
With respect to Augustine’s prayer, “Oh God, grant what Thou commandest, and command what Thou dost desire,” Pelagius had no problems with the second part. He believed that God’s highest attribute was indeed His righteousness, and from that righteousness He had the perfect right Himself to obligate His creatures to obey Him according to His law. It was the first part of the prayer that exercised Pelagius, in which Augustine asked God to grant what He commands. Pelagius reacted by saying that whatever God commands implies the ability of the one who receives the command to obey it. Man should not have to ask for grace in order to be obedient.
Now, this discussion broadened into further debates concerning the nature of Adam’s fall, the extent of corruption in our humanity that we describe under the rubric “original sin,” and the doctrine of baptism.
It was the position of Pelagius that Adam’s sin affected Adam and only Adam. That is to say, as a result of Adam’s transgression there was no change wrought in the constituent nature of the human race. Man was born in a state of righteousness, and as one created in the image of God, he was created immutably so. Even though it was possible for him to sin, it was not possible for him to lose his basic human nature, which was capable always and everywhere to be obedient. Pelagius went on to say that it is, even after the sin of Adam, possible for every human being to live a life of perfect righteousness and that, indeed, some have achieved such status.
Pelagius was not opposed to grace, only to the idea that grace was necessary for obedience. He maintained that grace facilitates obedience but is not a necessary prerequisite for obedience.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Sunday, August 28, 2022
The decisions we make today will have consequences tomorrow. This is why I ask my friends and acquaintances to, at the very least, get informed about the possible perils of the days ahead. To be uninformed is to be unprepared. My concern is that most people will be like me in that they will take no cautionary action until they move through the stages of awareness-concern-alarm. Please do not assume that history is linear and uniform. Nothing disproves that assumption like history itself.

I’m too busy enjoying summer to think about winer, the grasshopper told the the ant. —The Grasshopper and the Ant, by Aseop
My father’s favorite Bible verse was Jesus’ admonition in the Sermon on the Mount, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink” (Matt. 6:25, NKJV). He never tired of quoting this text to me when I was a boy. Yet my father did take thought for the future. He bought life insurance, fire insurance, health insurance, etc. He also had a savings account. He preached a philosophy of delayed gratification. With my weekly allowance, he insisted that I first take 10 percent of it and give it back to God. Then he required that I take a second 10 percent and put it in savings. Then he said I could spend the remaining 80 percent on my special needs and wants.
Was his philosophy contrary to his favorite Bible verse? By no means. He understood that what Jesus was teaching was not a prohibition against prudence but a message against the anxiety that robs us of our trust in the good providence of God. The providence of God, among other things, has to do with His provision for our needs. “Provision” literally means “to see beforehand.” As God’s creatures, we not only are to trust in His providence, we are to reflect His character by being provident ourselves rather than profligate. The Apostle Paul teaches that the father who fails to provide for his household is worse than an infidel (1 Tim. 5:8). Scripture repeatedly enjoins us to be prudent stewards of the gifts we receive from God.
When God revealed to Joseph that the land would experience seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, he spent the seven years of plenty preparing Egypt for the coming famine. As a superb administrator, he prepared storehouses in which grain was preserved for times of emergency. By his actions, not only were the Egyptians able to survive the famine, but Joseph was able to provide his own family with a refuge from the calamity, which, in the providence of God, ensured the survival of His chosen people.
Joseph did not take a simplistic linear or uniformitarian view of history. He understood that history is subject to intrusions of the catastrophic. Like Noah before him, he believed that things would not remain the same but that drastic changes were coming—and he prepared for those changes.
In October, weather forecasters noted the formation of a tropical storm far off in the Atlantic. It was given the name Mitch. No one was too concerned until Mitch picked up force and became a huge hurricane bearing down on the Caribbean. Soon people were boarding up their homes and business establishments, and making preparations for evacuation. Many people in Honduras, Nicaragua, and throughout Central America learned the folly of linear thinking the hard way beneath the wrath of Mitch.
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