What does it mean that God works in mysterious ways?
God working "in mysterious ways" is the everyday way of saying what Scripture says about His judgments being unsearchable and His ways past tracing out. The question behind the phrase is practical: if we cannot follow what God is doing, can we still trust that He is doing something good?
Higher, Not Merely Hidden
The mystery is not that God is confusing. It is that His mind runs on a different level from ours, and always has, from before human failure ever appeared.
F. A. HughesIn speaking of God's alternatives there is no suggestion that God was forced by existing circumstances to bring in His own thoughts. On the contrary, all that we refer to was in the mind of God before the failing ways of man were ever seen. And we see how true the word is: "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts." This must always be so, for man's thoughts centre around himself, whereas the thoughts of God are centred in Christ, the Son of His bosom.
That gap shows up most sharply in whom God picks. Writing about the man who stood approving as Stephen was stoned, one commentator points to the choice no one would have made:
William KellyIt is not the way man would have chosen the one who was to be the most self-denying, hard-working and effective workman the Lord ever raised up in the gospel... But how often it is so in the ways of sovereign grace! ... It is ordered this way so that no flesh should boast before God; but let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.
Working Behind the Scenes
Since sin entered, God has largely governed the world without showing His hand, and only faith reads the events rightly.
W. TrotterAll things are indeed ordered or controlled by divine power; human wickedness is checked, and the violence of man's passions restrained; all things are caused to work together for good to God's people... but all this is by a mysterious combination and oversight of events which natural men know nothing about. Faith recognises it, discerning the hand of God in many things, and confessing it in all; but the world at large sees and owns nothing except the actual course of events and the human agencies they are credited to.
The book of Esther is the clearest case: God's name never appears in it, yet the outcome is entirely His.
Ernst-August BremickerHe was not showing Himself, but at the same time He was acting behind the scenes, and neither Esther nor Mordecai may have had any idea what He was doing for them. They surely had many questions but perhaps no answers. Yet everything happened exactly according to His foreknowledge and purpose. Only at the end of the book does this become clear. At the beginning everything looked very different.
Why We Cannot Trace It
Commentators locate the difficulty in us, not in God — a limited mind cannot audit an unlimited one.
C. H. MackintoshIt is our privilege to justify God in all His ways, to bow our heads in worship in view of His unsearchable judgments, and to rest in the calm assurance that all God's ways are right. We do not understand them all; this would be impossible. The finite cannot grasp the infinite. This is where so many go wrong. They reason about the workings of God's government, not considering that those workings lie as far beyond the range of human reason as the Creator is beyond the creature.
Yet the darkness is not total. God has met the hardest question not with an explanation but with a Person:
Frederick W GrantThe existence of evil is the one real and only difficulty; but it exists, and God has answered the question it raises about Himself, not by a logical explanation of the difficulty... but by unveiling Himself in Christ. I see in the cross His holiness, I see His goodness, I see His love; and if the darkness is only passing and not yet past, I can walk through it without stumbling with a Father's hand holding mine closely.
Evil Turned Into Salvation
The pattern runs through Joseph, sold by his own brothers and later ruling Egypt.
F. B. HoleVerse 20 is a fine summing up of the whole story. They had committed a serious wrong, but God had overruled it for salvation. This at once directs our thoughts to the Lord Jesus Christ. The evil thought worked out against Joseph by his brothers was nothing compared with what the Jews did when they rejected and crucified their Messiah. God permitted it because He meant it for good, in the accomplishing of an eternal redemption.
Not Now, But Hereafter
The mystery has an expiry date. Writers hold together two things: we walk by faith while God is still hidden, and the whole account will be settled openly.
F. B. HoleAt present God is acting behind the scenes and we cannot see through the veil, but when He brings His judgments into the light of day, the mystery of it will vanish and be finished... the rightness of all His dealings through the ages will be seen.
Meanwhile the counsel is patience, not analysis:
C. H. MackintoshBut He is never in a hurry. He has His own wise ends in view, and He will reach them in His own time and way; and what may seem to us a dark, tangled, unexplainable maze of providence will yet give way to light, filling our souls with praise and worship.
Summary
- Higher — the mystery is distance, not disorder: God's thoughts are as far above ours as the heavens are above the earth, and they centre on Christ while ours centre on ourselves.
- Hidden — since sin entered, God governs by an unseen oversight of events; the world sees only causes and coincidences, faith sees His hand.
- Overruling — what people intend as harm He bends into salvation, as with Joseph's brothers and, far more, the cross.
- Answered — He does not hand us an explanation of evil; He unveils Himself in Christ, so we can walk through the remaining darkness holding a Father's hand.
- Hereafter — the veil comes down one day, the rightness of every dealing is seen, and the tangled maze ends in praise.