Ecclesiastes 3:11; Romans 11:33; Matthew 28:18; Psalm 46:8-10
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
J. H. MERLE d’AUBIGNÉ (1794-1872): In all the movements of nations, there is a living principle which emanates from God. God is present on the vast stage on which the generations of men successively appear…Strange! This interposition of God in human affairs, which even Pagans had recognized, men reared amid the grand ideas of Christianity treat as superstition.
JOHN BROWN (of Haddington, 1722-1787): To read of events, without observing God in them, is to read as atheists.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES (1899-1981): The Christian sees God in the events of history. There is a vision possible to the eye of faith that no-one else has.
ALEXANDER CARSON (1776-1844): In reading history, people in general look no farther than the motives, designs, and tendencies of human action. Some are contented with the knowledge of facts, without attempting to discover their source or trace the connection of events.
J. H. MERLE d’AUBIGNÉ: It is too vast for our human minds to trace the Divine purposes in passing events; we can see but in part, and even that little which we do notice is seldom the cause, but merely the effect. We view the great and momentous fruit come to harvest, but see not the seed. We do not discern the connection between the smallest, seemingly insignificant event that may, in God’s infinite wisdom, in the space of two hundred years hence, bring forth a mighty fruit as a consequence. Nor can we know His perfect timings, nor His instruments, nor His methods in advance…Only in looking back upon the vast, and infinitely complex ocean of passing events, and only at those rare times when God is pleased to lift a small corner of the veil, may we glimpse a trace of His hidden hand, governing and guiding the affairs of men.
THE EDITOR: Let’s try to trace out a small historical example. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austrian throne, was in Sarajevo to give a speech, when a bomb was thrown at his car. His driver saw the bomb coming and quickly sped away. After the speech, the Archduke unexpectedly decided to visit those hospitalized from the attack; “the king’s heart is in hand of the Lord; he turneth it whithersoever He will,” Proverbs 21:1. But his driver wasn’t informed, although that little omission wasn’t discovered until he made a wrong turn. As the driver reversed the car, it stalled. Standing on that street was a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb who had been involved in the earlier bomb attack. Scarcely believing the second “chance” he had been given, Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke dead. But nothing happens by chance on this earth.
JOHN GILL (1697-1771): “He removeth kings, and setteth up kings,” Daniel 2:21; He is King of kings, and Lord of lords; by Him they reign, and continue on their thrones, as long as He pleases; and then He removes them by death or otherwise, and places others in their stead; and this He does in the ordinary course of Providence.
THE EDITOR: That seemingly insignificant omission set in motion an unstoppable chain of events. When Austro-Hungary, emboldened by Germany, attacked Serbia, Russia sent troops to aid Serbia; then Germany, fearing the French alliance with Russia, invaded neutral Belgium to attack France; lastly, with treaty obligations to Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany. And sixteen million people died in the First World War.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): “Come, behold the works of the Lord.” Whenever we read history it should be with this verse sounding in our ears. “What desolations He hath made in the earth.” The destroyers He destroys, the desolators He desolates.
THE EDITOR: To take the Russians out of the war, the Germans smuggled the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin into Russia, which led to the Russian Revolution, its civil war, and Stalin’s Soviet Union, eventually resulting in 20 million more dead. In 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles ended the First World War, four dynastic empires had collapsed: Austro-Hungary, Germany, Czarist Russia, and Ottoman Turkey; out of that carnage, new European nations were established: Finland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; and Turkey’s former territories were divided into Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
JOHN GILL: “He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again,” Job 12:23. And this has since been verified in other large and populous kingdoms brought to destruction, particularly in the four monarchies, Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman, and will be in the antichristian states and nations of the world.
J. C. RYLE (1816-1900): The rise and fall of worldly empires are events of comparatively small importance in the sight of God.
THE EDITOR: That Treaty of Versailles also caused the German resentment that led to Adolf Hitler and the Second World War, and another 50 million dead. Was not the belt buckle motto worn by German soldiers during two World Wars, a devilish irony? “Gott Mit Uns”—God with us. And what a mocking Satanic irony was contained in that lie over the gate to Auschwitz concentration camp!—“Arbeit macht frei”—work sets you free. But only Jesus Christ can can set souls free. That gate led to the crematorium fires, as man’s attempts to save himself by his own works will always lead to hell fire, Romans 9:31-33; Ephesians 2:8,9. And why number the Jews with tattoos? Wasn’t it to ensure that all of them were destroyed? But in 1948, God used the horror of that holocaust—that human “heart of darkness” married to industrial mass production—to establish Jews back into the land of Canaan as a nation. For God, Who knows the end from the beginning, causes all things to advance His purposes on the earth. “If He cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder Him?” Job 11:10.
H. A. IRONSIDE (1876-1951): There is something exceedingly solemn in considering history from God’s viewpoint.
C. H. SPURGEON: God is glorious in the history of Israel.
THE EDITOR: And God has prophecies yet to fulfill concerning the Jews. “Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: if those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever,” Jeremiah 31:35,36.
HUDSON TAYLOR (1832-1905): He has spoken in His Word. He means just what He says and will do all that He has promised.
J. H. MERLE d’AUBIGNÉ: Who is Jesus Christ, if He be not God in history?
C. H. SPURGEON: The times are safe in our Redeemer’s management.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: Christianity has not come into the world to put an end to war, nor to reform the world. It has come to save us from the destruction that is coming to the world. The Bible asserts a judgement—an end of history. God in Christ will judge the whole world in righteousness, sending those who have turned their backs upon Him, and refused His offer of salvation in Christ, to everlasting perdition, and ushering the saints into the glory of a “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,” 2 Peter 3:13.
