March 7, 6:00 p.m. 
Speaker: John Piper
Topic: Truth Triumphs Through Providence

Message Summary: 

The reality of God’s all-governing all-pervasive, purposeful sovereignty, which we call providence, is controversial. From now until the day when you see Jesus, there will always be people who are outraged by the suggestion that God is perfectly sovereign, even over suffering. 

If you love the Lord, your job when that happens is to patiently return good for evil, hand it over to God, and meet their needs. We approach this doctrine with grace and patience, not trying to win the battle, but recognizing that it is God who has the power to change hearts.

God's providence is His purposeful sovereignty. Sovereignty means that God has the power and the right to do anything He pleases. God’s providence implies purposefulness in this sovereignty. It means that God "sees to" everything purposefully.

God's providence is all-governing and all-pervasive. It governs all the moral and immoral acts of every soul. Neither Satan at his hellish worst, or human beings at their redeemed best ever act in any way contrary to the ultimate, all-embracing, all-wise plan and providence of God.

• The Gospel of Jesus Christ will successfully penetrate all the peoples of the world and gather into Christ all the ransomed elect (Matt 24:14).
• All these ransomed elect from all the peoples of the world, the bride of Christ, will be sanctified, glorified, and made perfectly beautiful for the eternal enjoyment of her divine husband (Rom 8:30). 
• This beauty of the bride will consist most essentially in the sinless echo of Christ’s excellencies, His preciousness, reverberating back to Him in the all-satisfying pleasures that His people find in Him forever. The joy of the bride will be the sign of the worth of creator—the bridegroom.

The nations will be reached, the elect will be gathered in and made beautiful for Christ, and that beauty will consist in our echoing back His excellencies in the enjoyment we have in Him.

None of that will happen without an omnipotent exercise of providence because there are massive threats to those promises. There is only one hope for those promises to come true and that is the providence of God.

Since He plans and performs all things, God not only overcomes the obstacles to His providence, He makes them serve His purposes. 

The greatest obstacle to the everlasting happiness of every culture and every people group on the planet is the wrath of God. Only one thing can remove this obstacle: the love of God, propitiating the wrath of God through the death of the Son of God, to vindicate the glory of God (Rom 3:25). God has overcome the greatest obstacle to His promises. 

We have a Lord who is sovereign over death and disease. He cleansed lepers with a touch. He made the blind see and the lame walk. He raised the dead. 

Satan strikes with sickness (Luke 13:16) but Satan is on a leash. He cannot act contrary to God’s decisive plan. What God permits is planned according to His good pleasure. It’s folded into His plan and design. We are not at the mercy of Satan, we are not at the mercy of whim, we are not at the mercy of empty fate. We are at the mercy of a merciful Father, and oh if we could trust Him, how it would transform our lives.

God is sovereign over your perseverance. And God was sovereign over your salvation. The truth of God, the promises of God, are going to triumph. 

The gospel of God will successfully penetrate all the peoples of the world and will gather into Christ all of God’s ransomed elect. All of these ransomed, the bride of Christ will be sanctified, glorified, and made perfectly beautiful for the eternal enjoyment of her husband, Jesus Christ. This beauty of the bride will be the sinless echo of Christ’s excellencies, His preciousness, reverberating back to Him in the all-satisfying experience of pleasure that she has in Him. 

The truths, these realities cannot fail because God’s providence is all-governing and all-pervasive. God will see to it that everything is under control to bring about these three glorious end-time consummation promises.