Beeson Podcast, Episode #581 Dr. Doug Sweeney Dec. 28, 2021 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Kristen Padilla: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am Kristen Padilla, here with my co-host and Dean of Beeson, Dr. Doug Sweeney. Welcome to our final podcast episode of 2021. So, I must say happy, almost, new year! This is a time of the year in which many of us pause and reflect on God’s goodness and faithfulness this past year. So, we want to do the same. We are so grateful that despite another year of COVID-19 Beeson Divinity School has been able to continue offering in-person theological education. I can think of several highlights of 2021, but a few that come to mind are our new certificate of Wesleyan Studies, our chaplaincy emphasis, our BA to MDIV accelerated degree program with several Samford University schools, our first ever alumni conference which was held in November, and our new Center for Women in Ministry. As we discuss ways to close out the 2021 year on the Beeson Podcast, I told Doug that I wanted to play for you the opening convocation address he gave at the beginning of the fall 2021 semester, which he gave on August 31, called, “God Meant It For Good.” His convocation sermon was excellent and set the tone not only for our fall chapel series but also for the way in which we would continue to do life together at Beeson this semester and always, trusting in the providence of God. His sermon truly benefitted our Beeson community, it benefitted me personally, and it encouraged us to keep trusting the Lord. And so I’m so pleased we can share it with you today. But before we play the sermon, I want to ask Doug – I’m going to put him on the hot seat for just a little bit and ask him a couple of question; allowing him to provide some greater context to the message that he gave. So, Doug, your sermon was on the providence of God. And I wonder if you can share with us about the importance of the providence of God in your own life? >>Doug Sweeney: Yes, well, thanks Kristen for that wonderful introduction. It’s fun to be reversing roles for this podcast episode today. Thanks for your eagerness to play this sermon. You know? The older I get the more important the providence of God becomes to me. And the more of a providentialist I find myself becoming. Now, in my field of Church History there’s a kind of providentialism that we try to avoid. We try to avoid going back into the past in church history and picking sides and telling everybody belief in providence means belief that God was on my people’s side and he was against your people’s side. So, I don’t want to advocate that kind of providentialism, that can be kind of a sinful thing sometimes. But I do want to advocate and just talk from my own life about the ways in which the providence of God is important to me. The older I get the more I find myself thinking about each day and interpreting my life and interpreting my relationships with other people and making decisions in a kind of prayerful way in view of what it seems to me the Lord is doing in my life and my circumstances, and at Beeson Divinity School at any particular time. I’m trying more and more as I get older to learn what it means to hearken to the Lord’s voice and to walk in step with his Spirit, and to cultivate in my own life through devotions and scripture reading and prayer and Christian fellowship a mindset where I’m thinking all the time about what God is doing and how I can get in step with what God is doing and advance his kingdom purposes in the world that way. So, yeah, I chose this theme for the chapel series because I think it’s just a really important doctrine and we’re in really scary and difficult days. I think these reminders about God’s providential care are important. But it’s also really important to me personally in a lot of different ways. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, as I’ve already mentioned some highlights from the 2021 year at Beeson and then you’ve also mentioned that it was as well a hard year, still, with COVID-19. I wonder if you can talk about the importance of this doctrine and the ways in which you see it at work even here at Beeson? >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, I want us at Beeson to be thinking together about how to participate in God’s redemptive purposes in our world and in his kingdom and in the church and at our school. When times get tough and people get scared, we too often become a little bit too self absorbed; a little bit too worried about ourselves and our survival and our rights vis-a-vis the rights of other people. I think it’s a good opportunity in times like this when you’re working among believers at a divinity school to remind ourselves that God is still at work among us. And that he’s calling us to believe that in the midst of COVID-19 and in the midst of all the social turmoil of our day, in the midst of disagreements even among Christians in the life of the church – he is at work redemptively. He wants us to get in step with that. He wants us to participate in that. I think if we fail to remember God’s promises in scripture with regard to his providence it’s too easy to let our fear get the best of us and to make bad decisions and to treat others badly in the process. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, one of my favorite lines from your sermon is the following, “He loves you and your families with a love stronger than death. He is sovereign over history and even over your troubles, over COVID-19, over our nation’s culture wars, over your family and career. You can trust him with your life. His right hand is more powerful, reliable, and sure than its modern substitutes.” So, friends, if those few lines encouraged you already, then we hope that you will listen to his entire sermon. So, we want to go now to Hodges Chapel and listen to the opening convocation sermon that Dr. Doug Sweeney gave during Fall 2021 called, “God Meant It For Good.” >>Reader: Genesis 50:15-21 “When Joseph’s brother saw their father was dead they said, “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?” So, they sent word to Joseph saying, “Your father left these instructions before he died. This is what you are to do. This is what you are to say to Joseph. I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly. Now, please forgive the sins of the servants of God of your father.” When their message came to him, Joseph wept. His brothers then came and threw themselves down before him. We are your slaves they said. But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me but God intended it for good. To accomplish what is now being done the saving of many lives. So, then, don’t be afraid. I’ll provide for you and your children.” And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.” This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome back. And a special welcome to our new students, we get to see you two days in a row, it was a delight to be with you yesterday. As we told you yesterday, lots of us have been praying for you all summer and it sure is a delight to be back together worshipping the Lord together, hearing from his Word. It goes without saying, of course, but we really are grateful when President Taylor and Provost Hardin can be with us. It makes it real special in chapel. We’ll say more about this next week. But Dean Hopkins, Joe Hopkins, who has been leading our singing this morning, he’s the Dean of Samford School of the Arts. He’ll play a special role with us all year – shepherding our worship team and helping us with the musical dimension of our worship services. So, we’re grateful to you, Dr. Hopkins, as well for being here today. You know? Christian trust in God’s providence is on the wane today. Deep faith that God is sovereign over history, past and present, and even over our daily lives has fallen on hard times. Many of us in this room will remember what the Apostle Paul said in Romans 8. We know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. But in the midst of COVID-19, racial sin, the culture wars, hurricane season, countless international crises, and the everyday grind of our ever busy lives. We don’t often trust very fully in that promise. Time was when things were different. For the bulk of church history most Christians were convinced that the Lord God himself was the most important shaper of historical events and their everyday lives. They thought that God superintended everything that ever happened. Some doubted that God determined what shirt you’d wear, or what you’d eat for breakfast, or where you’d park your vehicle, but most people agree that he was sovereign over the most important things that ever happened. Neither natural, nor human, nor any kind of history made sense to older Christians without reference to God. If God ceased running the world, the wheels of history would halt, they thought. The universe would vanish. Not only the past, but the future rested firmly in his hands. Many non Christian cultures harbor different views of history, haunted by fate, eternal recurrence, even existential dread. Lacking transcendent purpose. Where the only way to fulfillment and joy and peace in daily life is through attitude change or the force of one’s will, or by managing expectations, or aligning one’s desires in a manner least likely to yield frustration with the world. But Christians especially say that history has an end that transcends this mundane world. It has meaning and direction that are laid out in scripture. It derives from the inter Trinitarian counsel of God. It commenced with creation, spiraled downward with the fall of the race into sin, and took shape from that point forward from God’s grand design to rehabilitate the lost. It centered on the Israelites, elected by God to shine a light upon the world, it culminated in Jesus, the Israelite Messiah who redeems the world from sin, and it will end we believe with the Savior’s second coming and his wedding to the church with whom he plans to live forever in illustrious New Jerusalem. These events were real and true to most Christians in the past. They drove the universe forward. Such belief is long gone, though, in much of the Western world. At least among our culture shapers in the secular universities, the entertainment industry, and most of the media. History is what we make of it, most assume today. So, build yourself a better future. Construct your own identity. Control your own narrative. You only live once, so do what makes you happy. Hold tightly to your dreams. Make your own way in the world. The only truly mortal sin is keeping others from doing the same. It’s not surprising then perhaps that we’ve lost our moral compass. When there’s no true north our behavior is diminished. Our every day choices and relationships with others now lack objective value and eternal significance. Our moral muscles have atrophied considerably. The famous poet, Emily Dickenson, addressed this problem back in the 19th century as trust in God’s providence began to disappear in Western intellectual life. “Those dying then,” Dickenson wrote of a bygone era, “knew where they went. They went to God’s right hand. That hand has been amputated now and God cannot be found. The abdication of belief makes the behavior small. Better an ignis fatuus,” it’s an old term for the faint glow from bogs and swamps, “Better an ignis fatuus than no ilum at all.” The waning belief in the providence of God, she thought, had massive implications for the way we live our lives. Nature abhors a vacuum. Have you heard that phrase before? Comes from the history of science, dates all the way back to Aristotle. But it’s used more often by people like us to suggest there’s always something that will fill the empty space left when objects of beliefs of explanations are displaced. So, nature abhors a vacuum. And for the sake of this address, I want us to see that our world and our lives are soaked in media that offer modern substitutes for what Emily Dickenson called, “God’s Right Hand.” Or, the providence of God. These substitutes, stories, values, attraction inspire us not to live for God, not to find meaning in objective goodness and truth, but to wonder whether we’re making the most out of life and getting our fair share. They encourage us to be selfish by presenting us a world that is teeming with human suffering. The survival of the fittest, an incessant power struggle, pitting us against them. We’re told to make sure that we realize our dreams. That we live the way we want. That we keep other people and societal expectations from obstructing our fulfillment. We’re quick to play the victim. We whine about our problems. We’ve grown self absorbed. We find it difficult to trust a God who does not think mainly about us and our struggles. We can cast a blind eye at the suffering of others in faraway places. We’ve been doing that for years. But when tragedy hits home or strikes those in our tribe our faith falls to pieces. And this is right where the bible’s story of Joseph hits home. Can you remember its details? Jacob loved his boy Joseph more than all his other sons. He was born to Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachael, in old age. Jacob made Joseph a special coat or robe of many colors. And Joseph acted like a spoiled brat, lording it over his brothers. He had dreams that suggested he would one day rule is family. And he shared those dreams with his father and his brothers. His brothers came to hate him. They even tried to kill him. But his oldest brother, Rueben, talked them out of that plan. He encouraged them instead to throw Joseph into a pit, leaving his destiny to chance, or what they thought would be chance. But unbeknownst to Reuben the other brothers sold Joseph to a caravan of Ishmaelites on their way to Egypt. Who in turn sold Joseph to a man named Potiphar, the Captain of the Guard of Egypt’s Pharaoh or King. The brothers lied and told their father that Joseph had been killed by an animal. The Lord was with Joseph. Joseph thrived in Potiphar’s house until Potiphar made him the overseer of everything he had. Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him. But Joseph resisted and so she lied and told Potiphar that Joseph had tried to rape her. Potiphar threw Joseph into prison in a rage. But again, the Lord protected him. The keeper of the prison put Joseph in charge of all the other inmates. The Pharaoh’s cup bearer and baker were in prison with Joseph. And both had dreams which Joseph managed to interpret. Two years later, the Pharaoh himself had a couple of strange dreams that none of his wise men or magicians was able to interpret. The cup bearer, now restored to favor with the Pharaoh, remembered Joseph’s gift and so Joseph was soon summoned to Pharaoh’s royal court. He interpreted the King’s dreams and saved the nation of Egypt from disaster in the process. He foresaw a major drought. The Pharaoh made Joseph his right hand man and soon people from all around were coming to him to buy grain so they could endure what Joseph knew would be a seven year drought. Joseph’s father, Jacob, sent his other sons to Egypt to buy grain there. All but Benjamin, that is. Joseph’s only full brother. Benjamin was the other son of Jacob’s wife, Rachael. Joseph recognized his brothers when they came to buy grain, but his brothers didn’t recognize him. Joseph gave them a hard time, suggesting that they were spies seeking to harm the Egyptians. He put one of them, Simeon, in custody in Egypt, sent the rest home with grain, but insisted that they bring their brother, Benjamin, to Egypt if they ever wanted to see their brother Simeon again. This scared their father, Jacob, who worried that he might now lose three of his sons: Joseph, Simeon, and Benjamin. Eventually, under duress, Jacob agreed to the plan. The brothers returned to Egypt to retrieve their brother Simeon and buy more grain for Israel. Joseph threw a feast for them and then sent them home. But also tricked them, as a test of their loyalty to Benjamin. The brothers passed Joseph’s test and by this point in the story Joseph can no longer bear to hide his identity from them. He reveals himself to his brothers and they become dismayed as they realize that Joseph now has the power to make or break them. And Joseph then assures them of the providence of God. “Do not be distressed,” he told his brothers, “for selling me here. For God sent me before you to preserve life, to preserve a remnant for you on the earth and keep alive for you many survivors.” The Pharaoh let Joseph move his whole family to Egypt. Jacob’s people settled in Goshen, where Joseph reunited with his long lost father. Jacob lived for another 17 years in the land of Egypt. He blessed his sons as he died and commanded them to bury him with Abraham and Isaac in the cave at Machpelah back in the Promise Land. Joseph mourned his father’s death, had him embalmed in accordance with the custom then in Egypt and moved him with great fanfare to the tomb at Machpelah. He and his brothers returned to Egypt and again his brothers grew scared, thinking that now that Jacob had died Joseph really might harm them for the evil they had done to him so many years ago. And here at last we arrive at the scripture text set before us today. Joseph’s brothers repent, Joseph weeps together with them, and he offers words of blessing that have gone down in history. “Do not fear,” he told his brothers, “Am I in the place of God? As for you, you met evil against me but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. So, do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones.” Joseph lived out his days in his new Egyptian home before dying at the age of 110. He was buried in Egypt, but before he passed away he assured his fellow Israelites that God would late take them to the land that he had promised to their fathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He made his brothers swear that when that time came to pass their descendants would take Joseph’s bones and bury them in Canaan. Moses would fulfill that request centuries later, during the Exodus from Egypt. And the Israelites would bury Joseph’s bones in the land of Shechem. Do you believe this story? Do you believe in what it says about the providence of God? I’m here to tell you that today we serve the very same God. The God of Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, and that this one true God is the Lord of all of history, even of your history. He’s the Alpha and the Omega. The Beginning and the End. He sees all of history at once. He holds the world in his hands and is guiding world history toward an end that he ordains and surveys from eternity. When the going gets tough and you are tempted to forget or even doubt God’s providence, remember the faith of Joseph and remember that such faith is found all over the Bible. The author of the Book of Lamentations had such faith. Though the Lord had inflicted him “under the rod of his wrath,” he wrote ... filling his life with sorrow, he believed that God’s steadfast love would prevail. “Your mercies never fail,” the author of Lamentations wrote, “they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness,” he cries to the Lord. Simon Peter recommends much the same kind of faith in 2 Peter 3. When faced with critics who taunt, “Where is Jesus’ second coming? Will he really make things right?” Peter exhorts us not to let the naysayers win the day. “Don’t assume that God has abandoned you,” he tells us in that passage, “remember that the Lord made and rules the whole world, and trust that he’s guiding it in the just the way he says. And do not overlook this one fact,” Peter adds, “that with the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as are one day. The Lord is not slow to keep his promises as some count slowness, but is patient with you. Not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance.” I know that God’s promises are sometimes hard to believe. Modern scientists have chastened some of our understandings of history. Globalization has expanded our perspective on the world, making it clear that world’s history is not mainly about us. That the world is full of others for whom the Lord has died. But let’s avoid throwing the baby of God’s providential care out with the bath water of ancient superstition and ethnocentricism. God still reigns. He rules history for our good. He’s not a cosmic candy man, concerned primarily with helping you get what you want. And things happen that he hates. So, believing in his providence does not mean believing that what happens is always right. He gives us freedom to oppose him, to go our own way, and the world is full of sin and outright enmity with God, which yields enormous pain and suffering. Some of which affects people sitting here today. As the Bible makes clear, God disciplines his children. On this side of Eden he redeems us through trials. Easter comes through the cross. But redemption is drawing night, my brothers and sisters in Christ. The Lord has won the victory over sin, death, and the devil. And if we’ll give ourselves to him, he’ll show us how to live and will shower us with love, joy, and peace in believing. Let me finish by exhorting us to live more deeply into the providence of God. He loves you and your families with a love stronger than death. He’s sovereign over history and even over your troubles. Over COVID-19, over our nation’s culture wars, over your family and career. You can trust him with your life. His right hand is more powerful, reliable, and sure than its modern substitutes. When the going gets tough and your faith begins to flag, please remember Joseph’s trust in the providence of God. Joseph knew his share of troubles, but refused to blame God and resort to self pity. He trusted in the Lord. And as a result, took part in God’s history of redemption in a major league way. The Israelites were saved. The lineage of David, through which God would eventually bring the Savior into the world was protected from the famine. Joseph’s trust was celebrated in the 105th Psalm. In Stephen’s speech in Acts 7. In the roll call of the faithful, in the 11th chapter of Hebrews. My goodness, you say, or at least I hope you’re saying ... Does God really run the world? Save us from our sins? And inspire us to trust him through such every day faith? Yes, he does, my friends. And he wants to keep doing so today. History is not about you. At least not on the main. But it is about what God does through people like you. It’s about what God does as we put our trust in him. In chapel this fall, we’ll encourage one another to believe these things. And to act like we do as we examine some of the tokens of God’s faithfulness in scripture. We’ll help each other to count our present trials’ joy by reminding one another of the providence of God in our everyday lives. By delving into texts that inspire us with the sovereignty of God over history and instruct us to encourage one another with the tokens of his providential care. We will strengthen one another to live more faithfully, hopefully, and lovingly today. My brothers and sisters at Beeson, let us live every moment as if it really were from God. As we do, God will use the good and bad of our daily lives as part of his cosmic saving history of redemption. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.