Chants, George Milne, Lessons
for the Christian's Daily Walk, 1859. The race is not to the
swift, or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise,
or wealth to the brilliant, or favor to the learned, but time
and chance happen to them all, Ecclesiastes 9.11. Time and her
handmaid, what the world calls Chance, are clad in the vesture
of uncertainty. What the worldling calls Chance,
in reality, is nothing but God's divine providence. God's ways
bespeak His wisdom and His power. He is wise to adapt and mighty
to fulfill. Viewed with the eye of sense,
God's ways often assume an air of fickleness, by which it is
inferred that all things happen without rhyme or reason, with
no settled law pervading and no sovereign will directing their
occurrence. Thus man twists the attributes
of God and robs Him of His honor, as though some mock divinity
called Chance presided over us, and made caprice his rule of
action. Man's needs are various, and
require an ever-varying treatment, hence the varieties of Time and
Chance. Not one event occurs without
its meaning. All events are divinely fitted
by the Supreme Disposer's wisdom and sovereignty. Such treatment
is required for a fallen race. No one uniform law would suit
every purpose. Shivered to atoms by the fall,
all order is gone from man. Each broken fragment of his nature
reflects prismatic rays of frailty, their hue, their color, their
intensity forever varying, each calling for a divine providence
adapted to fit its need, and as the prism varies, so is the
divine treatment changed. The divine eye which counts the
feathers on the wings of insects, which numbers up the blades of
grass, which counts the drops of water in the ocean, and registers
each grain of sand upon the shore, is quick to see and swift to
direct. Hence are all the changes, accidents
and chances of man's experience. Hence the race is not to the
swift, or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise,
or wealth to the brilliant, or favour to the learned. Man may
propose, but all the disposing is of God. God's chance, divine
providence, is not the chance of men, all fickle and confused. God's chance is sure, fixed in
its principle, certain in its aim, acting, on rules of wisdom,
inscrutable to man, yet clear and well defined. Man fails,
and he knows not why. He calculates in vain. His plans
are crossed by divine counterplans, the underworkings of the divine
hand which made the worlds, of Him who sovereignly controls
all things of time and chance. The word chance should be forever
banished from the Christian's conversation. Luck or chance
is a base heathenism invention. God rules and overrules all things. —Charles Spurgeon