When the Founding Fathers mutually pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they did so “with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence.” In signing the Declaration of Independence, each of those men was committing treason against the British Empire, and divine providence was the only thing standing between them and the gallows.
Divine providence was also the only thing standing between Donald Trump and death Saturday evening. Had the would-be assassin’s bullet been a fraction of an inch to the right, we would be having a much different conversation right now. If the attempted murder of Donald Trump “is evidence of the reality of evil in the world,” as Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, said, Trump’s survival is evidence of divine providence.
Not everyone - not even all Christians - agrees on divine providence and what it means, but the belief of many Reformed Christians mirrors that of the Founders. God did not simply create the universe in six days and walk away; He’s involved in every aspect of His creation. The belief in and understanding of providence is taken simply and at face value from the Bible. As theologian Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote, “Christians have had an acute sense that this is our Father’s world and that the affairs of men and nations, in the final analysis, are in His hands.”
Renowned English preacher Charles Spurgeon took a more personalized view of providence by saying, “I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes.” Perhaps the simplest and most direct perspective I’ve heard comes from a friend at my own church who, in a discussion of providence some weeks ago, interjected, “What is providence? Everything that happens.”
Some people will say that Trump is alive today because he is lucky because he shifted in one direction and not the other because the gunman was a bad shot or something similar. None of these assessments are necessarily wrong, but they are superficial. For every theory on why Trump’s life was spared on July 13, there is one consistent and nagging question: Why?
Why did one thing happen and not another? If he did shift in one direction and not another, why? If the gunman failed to accurately correct for windage in taking his shot, why did he fail? The inescapable ‘why’ prevents us from arriving at any satisfactory conclusion. Some may call it fate, others kismet, but those are just terms used when people don’t have any better explanation, any temporal explanation, for events and their outcomes.
Some will scoff at the notion of divine providence, but it’s no more unlikely or simplistic than a bumper sticker reading ‘Stuff Happens’ or some less polite version. Like many Reformed Christian beliefs that are criticized by atheists or others who believe in something other than the Bible, divine providence is likely to be dismissed as the product of a weak mind, one that is unable or unwilling to search for some tangible explanation to events. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
One of the greatest minds in human history gives us some insight into the question of divine providence. During early explorations of quantum theory, some of the most robust discussions involved whether the universe is subject to chaos or to order. One man who leaned toward order was Albert Einstein. In defending his position, Einstein said, “God does not play dice.”
There’s no record of Einstein’s belief in a personal God; he often referred to himself as agnostic. But throughout his work in physics, Einstein knew there was something out there that held sway over the cosmos, resulting in the kind of order seen in, say, the predictability of a solar eclipse. He did not dogmatically dismiss God.
Not everything that is real and true is tangible and visible. Not every worldview is expansive enough to believe that which cannot be seen. That is a great pity, given that only five percent of our universe can be seen; the other 95% we have to take entirely on faith, whether it’s faith in God or in a scientist we have never met. Divine providence is part of that 95%.
Something directed that bullet to Donald Trump’s right ear instead of his skull and brain. It is the same thing on which our Founding Fathers relied in forging the nation in which we live, the same thing that led a rag-tag army of starving, ill-equipped colonists to defeat the world’s preeminent superpower in combat, the same thing that gave us the genius of the American Constitution. None of it was supposed to happen. But it did happen, and it happened for a reason.