God's Providence in Common Grace
There was a time when reading a book about marriage by nonbelievers would have been an appalling idea to me. Or anxiety. Or depression. Or my relationship with my phone. Or parenting. Even a novel or a poem by someone who didn’t love God made me hesitate. What do they really have to say to me? People who probably hate God—what can they really teach me about life? Is it even worth my time? I used to scoff at the works of nonbelievers. I turned my nose up at them. What truth could they truly pass along to me that my Bible couldn’t already tell me?
Today I’m sitting at my desk with a book on relationships and one on mental health, both written by secular professionals, and I’m okay with that. (I even used a highlighter in them.)
I think we forget how abundant God’s grace is to his world. While God reserves his special grace for those he sets his love on, he gives a certain level of grace to the entire world. The sun and rain fall on sinners and saints alike (Matthew 5:45). He keeps the earth turning and the planets aligned. He holds back man from being as evil as he could. In the same way, he allows both believers and haters of God to know true things about his creation.
It’s true that God’s Word holds truth and only truth. It tells us everything we need to know about God, the gospel, and godliness. But that doesn’t make it an encyclopedia. God guided the hands of the writers of his Word and inspired them by his Holy Spirit, yet he never intended for them to write every true thing about his world. As Michael Horton wrote,
The scope of Scripture, then, is God’s commands and promises—law and gospel—centering on the unfolding plan of redemption in Jesus Christ. It is crucial to recognize this point, because we can easily turn the Bible into a “handbook for life,” an answer book or manual of supernatural information on anything that interests us. When we go to the Bible with our questions, demanding that it speak to whatever we find important or relevant, we force it to speak about things that it does not actually address. As Calvin observed, Moses was not an astronomer and the Penteuch is not a science textbook.
Scripture is meant to reveal the gospel in all its fullness to us. Psychology, mathematics, and science may proclaim an awesome and intelligent Creator, but they will never tell us what that Creator requires of us. Our consciences testify to the guilt we hold, but they never tell us just how guilty we are before our Holy God. The creation may proclaim a powerful Maker, but it will never tell us of his abundant grace outstretched on Calvary’s cross.
Because of this, at times nonbelievers will offer us guidance or advice that defies God’s commands. Without the gospel and counsel of Scripture, their view of the world is sometimes skewed or wrong. Their goal is healing and happiness at all costs now because there is nothing better to come. This is where we can turn to God’s Word and harmonize the two, discerning what’s wrong and enlightening it with Scripture.
We truly thrive and flourish as humans in God’s creation when we meld the two together. We can acknowledge that our physical and mental illnesses are from the fall, know that true relief will only come in eternal life through the gospel, and still grasp the relief God has offered us here on earth by his common grace.
Perhaps the perfect case would be a Christian who is educated and trained in psychiatry, medicine, or counselling. But that’s not always possible. So we can find comfort from Scripture for our depressed and anxious souls and still find rest for our spinning minds in the seat of a psychiatrist’s office and the prescriptions he may offer. We can look to the Bible to learn of the holy nature of marriage and how God calls us to live in light of it and still find good counsel from a secular marriage counselor.
To trust God we don’t need to turn our heads from modern medicine and research. Those places aren’t God-forsaken. Even if the people’s hearts are darkened towards him, he is still powerful and gracious enough to shine through them. His holiness doesn’t make him pull away and abandon the cause of secular professionals to give relief to humanity. In his utter goodness and grace he reaches down and grants them truth about his world. This is his common grace, available to everyone made in his image.
