Nehemiah 9:6 - Providential Preservation

Nehemiah 9:6
You alone are the Lord.
You have made the heavens,
The heaven of heavens with all their host,
The earth and all that is on it,
The seas and all that is in them.
You give life to all of them
And the heavenly host bows down before You.

Message: Providential Preservation

Time: Nehemiah is the author and written from a first-person perspective. We meet him as an adult serving in the Persian royal court as the personal cupbearer to King Artaxerxes. It opens in the Persian city of Susa in the year 444 BC and concludes around 430 BC. Most of the book centers on events in Jerusalem. He was a layman not a priest and his life is a study on leadership. He gave God the credit for his successes.

What the Lord is Saying:

Sovereignty is the doctrine that God controls all that occurs in His creation. God works all things according to the counsel of His will. All things take place as He has planned, decreed, or ordained them. The way that God works all things is in the works of creation and providence (Westminster Shorter Catechism 8). He created the heavens and the earth. He created all things out of nothing. We are His creation.

In addition to His creation God provides. Nothing happens by chance. Often in life, we use the word providing to denote things that we like that we receive. We have no problem receiving good things in life, but the notion that God provides the uncomfortable situations, the difficulties, the trials of life seems absent from our thinking for why would suffering be at the hand of God? Yet, we can see multiple times how trials teach us about ourselves and also about our need to trust God.

Again going back to WSC 11 we see that God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions. Thus, the divine work of providence can be divided into divine preservation and divine governance.

To say that there is divine preservation is to record the idea that He sustains the existence of all created things. In essence, we need each other. Everything we see is His creation - nature, animals, land, sea. They all testify of who He is and yet they are all here to support one another. We need creation to live and sustain life. We need the food from creation to support one another and the animals. The sun lights our days. All of creation is dependent on one another and so God preserves it all for us, for His purposes.

Creation also cannot exist apart from God. Nehemiah 9:6 states - You have made the heavens, The heaven of heavens with all their host, The earth and all that is on it, The seas and all that is in them. You give life to all of them. God gives life to all of them. Evolution and atheism try so hard to show that their is no life-giver, no one that sustains life, but rather life evolves and remains on its own. Yet, to me, it seems that his creation order gives this impression. The continual regeneration of one form to another is seen, but the mystery remains often why one form ends and when it does. We praise God for new life, for beginnings, but we often don't for ends.

Psalm 145:15-16 records - The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in due time.
You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. We sit at the table and thank God for the food He has given, for the shelter he has provided, for the job he has given, for the clothes we have on our backs - we want to remain thankful to him. There is danger in thinking this providence comes about because of our hard work alone.

Promise: As Martin Luther states, whatever "is in heaven and upon the earth, is daily given preserved, and kept for us by God"; thus, "it is our duty to love, praise, and thank Him for it without ceasing."

Prayer: Lord, as I take the time to examine creation, it reminds me Lord that You are creator. Lord, I see again that You provide everything that I see. Forgive me for thinking often that I am in control of outcomes. What a danger I have in my life to see what I produce and want to give myself the glory. Keep my eyes looking to You. Thank you for the earth and all that is in it. You give life to all that we see. You are giver and taker, but always for your purpose. We need you to carry on life. I need to keep returning to You in all things because I get so easily distracted.


Note: I follow the readings from the Tabletalk Magazine devotional, though I am a little behind and working through 2017 devotionals. 2017 is a study of key biblical doctrines with March being about the sovereign providence of God and looking at how the Bible reveals His control over all things.