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I. GOD'S PLAN, AS IT AFFECTS SOCIETY.

1. It is comprehensive, sweeping from age to age, threading millenniums, building its structure from the dust of earth's earliest age to the emergence of the new heavens and earth at the close of time. But it is minute and particular.

2. He works through individuals. The story of man is for the most part told in the biographies of men. It is through human instruments that God executes His beneficent purposes, His righteous judgments. Through Columbus, He draws aside the veil from the coast-line of America. Through a Watt and a Stephenson, He endows men with the co-operation of steam; through a Galvani and an Edison, with the ministry of electricity. Through a De Lesseps, He unites the waters of the eastern and western seas, and brings the Orient and Occident together. Through a Napoleon He shatters the temporal power of the Pope; and by a Wilberforce strikes the fetters from the slave. Men do not know the purpose of God in what they are doing.

3. God's use of men does not interfere with their free action. This is clearly taught in more than one significant passage in Scripture — Joseph's brethren. Herod, Pilate, and the religious leaders of the Jews, were swept before a cyclone of passion and jealousy; and it was with wicked hands that they crucified and slew the Lord of glory: but they were accomplishing the determinate counsel of God.

II. GOD'S PLAN, AS IT AFFECTS INDIVIDUALS. We are all conscious of an element in life that we cannot account for. Other men have started life under better auspices, and with larger advantages than we, but somehow they have dropped behind in the race, and are nowhere to be seen. Our health has never been robust, but we have had more working days in our lives than those who were the athletes of our school. We have been in perpetual peril, travelling incessantly, and never involved in a single accident; whilst others were shattered in their first journey from their doorstep. Why have we escaped, where so many have fallen? Why have we climbed to positions of usefulness and influence, which so many more capable ones have missed? Why has our reputation been maintained, when better men than ourselves have lest their footing and fallen beyond recovery? There is not one of us who cannot see points in the past where we had almost gone, and our footsteps had well-nigh slipped: precipices along the brink of which we went at nightfall, horrified in the morning to see how near our footprints had been to the edge. Repeatedly we have been within a hair-breadth of taking some fatal step. How strangely we were plucked out of that companionship! How marvellonsly we were saved from that marriage, from that investment, from embarking in that ship, travelling by that train, taking shares in that company! It is God who has girded us, though we did not know Him.

(F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

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KJV: I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:

WEB: I am Yahweh, and there is none else. Besides me, there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not known me;