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ADAM SMITH REFERRED TO PROVIDENCE AS "THE INVISIBLE HAND OF GOD."
Because God is invisible to us, we often fail to recognize His active presence in human affairs. Because we cannot peer into the transcendent realm, many things appear to happen by chance or as mere contingencies. We also have a tendency to misread the hand of God in history. This was surely the case in the life of the patriarch Jacob. Jacob had a life-changing experience at Bethel when he had an unexpected encounter with God: Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran. So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. (Gen. 28:10-12) Jacob's midnight dream is the origin of the children's song "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder." The significance of the ladder was that it served as a link, a means of access, between heaven and earth. It is significant for us because we live in an age where God seems remote and unreachable. Modern humanity has an acute sense of the absence of God. There seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between the realm of nature and the realm of supernature, between the immanent and the transcendent. It is as if a chasm or an unscalable wall bars access to heaven. We use ladders to bridge the gap—scale the wall—between the earth and higher places.
Jacob's experience is the event later alluded to by Jesus when He declared to Nathaniel that he would see the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Jesus was the incarnation of Jacob's ladder, the One who in incarnation would make visible to us the invisible God.
When Jacob awoke from his dream he made an important observation. He said: "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it." And he was afraid and
said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!"
Then Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel; but the name of that city had been Luz previously. (Gen. 28:16-19) What a poignant scene: Jacob was suddenly aware that God had been present— but he had missed it. He exclaimed that the place was awesome, made so by the presence of God. This incident had to be formative to Jacob's personal understanding of God. From this point on, Jacob should have been able to trust in the promises of God because in the vision at Bethel God had said to him, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you" (Gen. 28:15).
God promised He would keep Jacob wherever he went. He promised to bring him back to the land and solemnly declared that He would not leave him. From that day forward Jacob had these promises to rely upon. He did not have a continuous vision of the presence of God; he had the promise but not the sight. If God was going to remain with Jacob He would do it in an invisible manner. Jacob would not be able to see the presence of God.
If we fast-forward the story of Jacob's life we will see that his confidence in the promise of God obviously faded. Jacob began to trust more in what he saw than in what he could not see; he began to trust in outward appearances. This is nowhere clearer than when Jacob had to deal with the loss of his son Joseph and the consequences of that event.
Years later a severe famine struck the land of Egypt and all the neighboring nations, including Canaan, and Jacob instructed his sons to cross the border and go down to Egypt to seek provisions there. Egypt alone had resources sufficient to meet the crisis of the famine. When the sons of Jacob came to the royal court in Egypt they met with the prime minister—their brother Joseph whom they did not recognize. In the years since they had sold their brother he had changed. He
was dressed in the garb of a royal official and spoke to them through an interpreter. Joseph recognized his brothers and understood every word they were saying among themselves, but they did not recognize him. Joseph accused his brothers of being spies. They denied the charge and said: "Your servants are twelve brothers, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and in fact, the youngest is with our father today, and one is no more."
But Joseph said to them, "It is as I spoke to you, saying, 'You are spies!' In this manner you shall be tested: By the life of Pharaoh, you shall not leave this place unless your youngest brother comes here. Send one of you, and let him bring your brother; and you shall be kept in prison, that your words may be tested to see whether there is any truth in you; or else, by the life of Pharaoh, surely you are spies!" So he put them all together in prison three days. (Gen. 42:13-17) Joseph knew the youngest brother who had been left at home was Benjamin. He longed to hear news of his father, Jacob, and he longed to see Benjamin again.
So he contrived this test for his brothers. Then, after three days, Joseph proposed a different plan: "Do this and live, for I fear God: If you are honest men, let one of your brothers be confined to your prison house; but you, go and carry grain for the famine of your houses. And bring your youngest brother to me; so your words will be verified, and you shall not die."
And they did so. (Gen. 42:18-20) This plan caused great consternation among the brothers. Suddenly their treachery of years earlier against Joseph came to their minds and assaulted their consciences. They said to one another: "We are truly guilty concerning our brother, for we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we would not hear; therefore this distress has come upon us."
And Reuben answered them, saying, "Did I not speak to you, saying, 'Do not sin
against the boy'; and you would not listen? Therefore behold, his blood is now required of us." But they did not know that Joseph understood them, for he spoke to them through an interpreter. And he turned himself away from them and wept. Then he returned to them again, and talked with them. And he took Simeon from them and bound him before their eyes. (Gen. 42:21-24) Reuben, the eldest brother, assumed that the present calamity that befell his brothers and him was a result of their guilt. He was trying to read the invisible hand of Providence. He was correct in assuming that God was involved with their predicament. He was also correct in assuming that their present state was intimately connected to their past sinful action. What he did not recognize was that this "judgment" that was falling upon them was profoundly mixed with grace. Reuben saw the judgment but missed the grace. His apprehension of the purpose of God's providence was incomplete. The rest of the story had not yet been written, and Reuben had no clue to how things would work out or what God was doing in this moment.
Gradually Joseph's plan began to take shape. He planted incriminating evidence in the sacks the brothers had brought to carry grain back to Canaan: Then Joseph gave a command to fill their sacks with grain, to restore every man's money to his sack, and to give them provisions for the journey. Thus he did for them. So they loaded their donkeys with the grain and departed from there. But as one of them opened his sack to give his donkey feed at the encampment, he saw his money; and there it was, in the mouth of his sack. So he said to his brothers, "My money has been restored, and there it is, in my sack!" Then their hearts failed them and they were afraid, saying to one another, "What is this that God has done to us?" (Gen. 42:25-28) Now, instead of holding all the brothers hostage except one, Joseph reversed his tactic and sent all the brothers home except one. He kept Simeon back as a single hostage. When the brothers opened their grain sacks they found the money Joseph had had planted there. They were terrified, knowing that now they could not prove their innocence and that the Egyptian official would probably have Simeon killed.
Reading that they cried out, "What is this that God has done to us?" we again note that these men had some notion of Providence, but their assumptions were all wrong. They knew they had not stolen the money. But the incriminating evidence was there. Who had put it there? They did not know whose human hand had placed the contraband there, but they did understand by whose ultimate hand it had come to be placed there. They discerned the invisible hand of God in all this as much as they missed the purpose of it.
The brothers returned to Jacob and related to him all that had happened. Jacob's reaction was one of great fear and unbridled grief: Then it happened as they emptied their sacks, that surprisingly each man's bundle of money was in his sack; and when they and their father saw the bundles of money, they were afraid. And Jacob their father said to them, "You have bereaved me: Joseph is no more, Simeon is no more, and you want to take Benjamin. All these things are against me."
Then Reuben spoke to his father, saying, "Kill my two sons if I do not bring him back to you; put him in my hands, and I will bring him back to you."
But he said, "My son shall not go down with you, for his brother is dead, and he is left alone. If any calamity should befall him along the way in which you go, then you would bring down my gray hair with sorrow to the grave." (Gen. 42:35- 38) Jacob poured out his heart in grief, articulating the reason for his bereavement.
He said, "Joseph is no more, Simeon is no more. All these things are against me." But Jacob was jumping to erroneous conclusions. Were these conclusions reasonable? By all means. He had every reason to assume that Joseph was no more; he had empirical evidence to back up that inference. Perhaps he had saved the bloody robe his sons had brought home when they told him Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. And he obviously remembered his sons' earlier testimony: So they took Joseph's tunic, killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the tunic in the blood. Then they sent the tunic of many colors, and they brought it to their father
and said, "We have found this. Do you know whether it is your son's tunic or not?"
And he recognized it and said, "It is my son's tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces." Then Jacob tore his clothes, put sackcloth on his waist, and mourned for his son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters arose to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and he said, "For I shall go down into the grave to my son in mourning." Thus his father wept for him. (Gen. 37:31-35) Jacob had every reason to believe that Joseph was dead. He had the eyewitness testimony, not merely from strangers, but from his own sons. The brothers all corroborated the story of Joseph's death. In addition, he had the blood evidence on the coat. He did not have the advantage of modern techniques of serology or of DNA testing that would have shown that the blood on the coat was not Joseph's blood. In reality Jacob was a victim of a conspiracy. He was griefstricken when the brothers reported Joseph's death to him. He went into deep mourning, tearing his clothes to pieces and donning sackcloth. His sons and his daughters arose to comfort him. We assume that the attempts of comfort made by his daughters were genuine. We assume they were not part of the conspiracy and were also in mourning for their brother. But the comfort of the brothers was one of unmitigated hypocrisy. They knew very well that it was not Joseph's blood on the garment.
The conspiracy went on for years as the brothers continued to live a lie with their own father. They saw his grief. They watched his mourning. For years every reference to Joseph necessitated the continuation of the lie and the cover-up. The whole episode could be called Josephgate. At any rate, Jacob was convinced that Joseph was dead.
The Two Levels of Knowledge
The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his epic work The Critique of Pure Reason, argued that we seek knowledge at two distinct levels or in two distinct realms. He distinguished between the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm. The phenomenal realm refers to that level of reality we perceive with our
five senses, the realm we can see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. It is the realm of empirical experience, the realm investigated by the natural sciences.
The noumenal realm, Kant declared, is the realm of God, the self, and of metaphysical essences (things in themselves). He argued that neither naked reason nor empirical investigation can penetrate the noumenal realm. We cannot move from the phenomenal realm to the noumenal realm by rational or empirical investigation. Kant was agnostic about our ability to know anything about God, the self, or about essences. He believed our knowledge is limited to the realm of phenomena. For Kant the realm of Providence is the realm of speculation or of practical reason. We may have to live "as if" there were a God, for practical reasons, but we can have no real knowledge of God or of His providence.
Certainly Jacob was making his conclusions on the basis of phenomenal experience. Again these conclusions have to be seen as reasonable, given the evidence Jacob had to work with. He was walking by sight, not by faith. In this particular case the evidence drawn from the phenomena he had at his disposal was misleading. His conclusion was wrong. In reality Joseph was not "no more." Joseph was "some more." He was alive and well and reigning as the prime minister of Egypt.
Jacob was convinced that Simeon also was dead—and again he was wrong. This was the second time Jacob's sons had returned home to him with one of their brothers missing. He had every reason to suspect that the same fate that had befallen Joseph had now befallen Simeon. Yet, humanly speaking, Simeon had never been safer in his life than he was at that moment. He was in the custody of his brother Joseph. Indeed, it was a protective custody. Simeon had nothing to fear from Joseph. But neither Jacob nor Simeon was aware of that reality.
So Jacob came to his ultimate conclusion. In light of the disappearance of Joseph and now Simeon, Jacob declared, "All these things are against me."
All Things Work Together for Good
Jacob's lament sounds very much like the cry we have all made at some point in our lives. We remember the pitiful little ditty: "Nobody loves me; everybody
hates me; I'm going to go eat worms." Jacob was ready for a diet of worms. He was convinced that everything was working against him, but nothing could have been further from the truth! The reality was that everything was working for him. God in His providence was working all things together for good for Jacob and his descendants. But all the outward signs pointed to the very opposite.
One of the axiomatic slogans of the Christian faith is the Latin phrase deus pro nobis, which means "God for us." In the New Testament the apostle Paul exclaimed: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:31). That God is for us is the cardinal point of the doctrine of providence. God was for Jacob. He had promised that to Jacob years before the brothers returned to him from Egypt without Simeon. But Jacob could not see how this could be. The very moment when he was most sure that all things, including God, were working against him, all things by the hand of God were actually working for him. God had sent Joseph into Egypt for a purpose. That purpose would be worked out on every page of redemptive history.
After Jacob's lament, Judah, the third eldest son, later persuaded him to allow the brothers to return to Egypt to get grain and try to recover Simeon. Judah pledged his own life as a safeguard for Benjamin, saying, "Send the lad with me, and we will arise and go, that we may live and not die, both we and you and also our little ones. I myself will be surety for him; from my hand you shall require him.
If I do not bring him back to you and set him before you, then let me bear the blame forever" (Gen. 43:8-9).
Jacob was finally persuaded by Judah's entreaty and pledge. He relented in resignation and said, "Take double money in your hand, and take back in your hand the money that was returned in the mouth of your sacks; perhaps it was an oversight. Take your brother also, and arise, go back to the man. And may God Almighty give you mercy before the man, that he may release your other brother and Benjamin. If I am bereaved, I am bereaved!" (Gen. 43:12-14) Jacob was ready to take one more step of faith. He acknowledged the possibility that it could end in disaster. He risked the further loss of his beloved Benjamin.
This time he did not regret his decision. The brothers went back to Egypt,
secured the grain, obtained the release of Simeon, and discovered the identity of Joseph. When they returned home with both Simeon and Benjamin and news of the well-being of Joseph we are told that "the spirit of Jacob their father revived" (Gen. 45:27). Then Jacob declared: "It is enough. Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die" (Gen. 45:28).
In the final analysis, the providence of God was enough for Jacob. It should also be enough for us. Jacob lived to see something of the hidden hand of God. He did not see all of the purpose of providence unfold before his eyes, but he saw enough.