Supernaturally Naturally

by Skip Heitzig | November 22, 2024

I love the providence of God. It is one of my favorite ways that He works. Some believers want miracles, but I like His providence even better. I love the fact that "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28, NASB).

Providence is one of the themes of the Book of Ruth. It's a beautiful story of romance: Boaz, the great landowner, marries Ruth, the poor Moabitess, whose husband has died. But more than that, it's a story of providence. Providence can be defined as God working supernaturally naturally. He supernaturally allows natural events to be woven together for His glory and our good.

The word providence comes from a combination of two Latin words that mean to see something beforehand. Part of God's omniscience—knowing everything—is that He knows what's going to happen in the future. And so, He can predict things and then arrange for those things to happen through natural circumstances.

Don't confuse this with miraculous events. We use the term miracle lightly, like every time a baby is born or when we see a sunset. But those are not miraculous. A miracle is when God interrupts natural law with a supernatural event, like turning water into wine.

God from time to time uses the miraculous. But most often, He uses the providential. He weaves things together just so. It just so happened that one day at a potluck, I saw a girl named Lenya, who became my wife. It just so happened that the day one pastoral opportunity fell through for me, another opened in Albuquerque.

As you look back on your life, I bet you can say, "I met that person, then that happened, and if that wouldn't have happened, then this wouldn't have happened," and so on. Right? You can look back and see the hand of God, but you don't see it at the time.

One of the decisive moments in all of history happened in Ruth 1:7-18 with three women—a widow and her two widowed daughters-in-law, who talked as they walked along a dirt road. One decided to go back home, and the other, Ruth, said to her mother-in-law, "Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God" (Ruth 1:16).

There were some significant things happening around at the world at that time: the golden age of Greece, the Zhao Dynasty in China, and the Mayan dynasty in Central and South America. All of these are significant. But this is more monumental than all of those.

Why? Because in Bethlehem, Ruth married a man named Boaz, and their son Obed had a son named Jesse, and Jesse became the father of David the king—the ancestor of the Lord Jesus Christ.

All of that to say this—there's a beautiful scripture in Zechariah 4 that says, "Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin" (v. 10, NLT). Those choices that you make—one that leads to another, that leads to another—small though they may seem, can lead to great and monumental things.

So be practical in life and make plans. But also, be flexible. You don't know what God is doing behind the scenes, and you don't understand the full scope of His providence. A friend told me, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken." Bend with it a little bit. Watch to see what the Lord does "supernaturally naturally" in your life.

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