God's Hidden Girding of Nations and Individuals

"I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me." This verse reveals Jehovah's sovereign purposes operating through history unseen and unacknowledged.

God's plan encompasses society comprehensively—threading millennia from earth's earliest dust to the emergence of new heavens and earth. Yet this grand design works through individual instruments who rarely comprehend their role. Through Columbus, Yahweh drew aside the veil from America's coast-line. Through Watt and Stephenson, He endowed men with steam's cooperation; through Galvani and Edison, with electricity's ministry. De Lesseps united eastern and western seas, uniting Orient and Occident, whilst Napoleon shattered the Pope's temporal power and Wilberforce struck fetters from the enslaved. These men acted without knowing God's purpose in their deeds.

Yet God's employment of human agency never violates free will. Joseph's brothers, Herod, Pilate, and the Jewish leaders were swept before cyclones of passion and jealousy—their wicked hands crucified the Lord of glory. Yet they accomplished the determinate counsel of Elohim.

Individually, we sense life's inexplicable element. Others began under better auspices yet dropped behind. We, though never robust in health, have outlasted the athletes of our schooldays. We have traveled incessantly in perpetual peril, never involved in accident, whilst others were shattered on their first journey homeward. Why have we escaped where so many fell? Why have we climbed to influence whilst more capable ones missed their footing? There exists not one who cannot identify points where his footsteps had well-nigh slipped—saved by invisible Hands.