This is an article on the DesiringGod.org website. It was an interview with John Piper. The link below has the full audio interview, as well as the transcript.
Audio Transcript
This summer, you, Pastor John, finished up a book on the providence of God, a six-hundred-page book coming out in a little over a year from now. We talked about it recently in episode 1371. Sometimes I say it’s a book about the sovereignty of God, which leads to a question from Massiel in the Dominican Republic.
“Hello, Pastor John! I was looking for definitions on the sovereignty of God and the providence of God, and couldn’t really find one that would make me understand the difference between the two terms. Could you please explain it, Pastor John? Are they synonyms? How would you define each glorious truth?”
Reality in High Definition
That’s an excellent question, and I will answer very specifically, in just a moment, the very question that was asked. But first, it really is important to say a few words about definitions, and specifically definitions about words that are not used in the Bible. Providence is not a word in the English Bible. In that sense, it is like the words Bible, biblical, Trinity, discipleship, evangelism, exposition, counseling, ethics, politics, charismatics.
“God’s sovereignty is his right and power to do all that he decides to do.”
None of those words is in the Bible, which shows that the reality that words point to is more important than the words themselves, even though the words are precious and indispensable — and in this case with the Bible, inspired and God-given. They are God’s inspired words, but they are pointing to reality. And that reality may be so woven into the Scriptures that it’s helpful to have a word that pulls the threads of reality together — a word that may not be in the Bible itself.
Now, what’s the implication of that for definitions that I’m being asked for? Well, since providence is not used in a specific biblical text, there’s no biblical governor on its definition, its meaning. We can’t say, “The Bible defines providence this way.” We could only say that if the Bible actually used the word providence.
Whenever you ask, “What does [blank] mean?” What does providence mean? What does justification mean? What does faith mean? Whenever you ask what anything means, there has to be a meaner — one who means — if the meaning is going to have any validity, so that you can say it means this and not that. So, if the meaner is not the Bible writers, then when I use the word providence, I must assign a meaning. I’m the meaner, and that’s what I do in the first chapter of my book on providence. I don’t assign it an arbitrary meaning, I hope. If you do that, nobody will understand you. You don’t have any shared meaning with people because you’ve chosen a meaning that’s just so far off the charts it doesn’t make any sense to anybody. So, I try to stay close to what other meaners have meant by the word in church history. But I do choose the meaning.
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