God is not a God of party tricks. He is not a magician or a clown. He is not a pyrotechnician or a palm reader. He is the sovereign, wise, holy God who works all things according to the counsel of His will, for His good pleasure. He is the God of providence.

While that should be obvious from Scripture, the history of Charismatic teaching would suggest otherwise. The movement has boasted a repertoire of everything from glittery “glory” clouds to leg-lengthening parlor tricks. In the hands of charismatics, the biblical gifts of prophecy, healing, and languages (tongues) have been downgraded to intuition, sleights of hand, and gibberish. They are hardly the signs of a true apostle (2 Corinthians 12:12), and bear a stronger resemblance to the ruses of a con artist.

The Charismatic movement fervently professes the kind of bona fide miracles that Scripture recounts, but the reality is, they have not been able to deliver. The evidence of their “supernatural” power—uncontrollable laughter, crying, shouting, animal noises, convulsions, collapsing, rolling on the floor, etc.—are about as compelling as a daytime TV infomercial. Simply put, they do not measure up to the biblical standard. So why hold on to them?

To charismatics, the idea that signs and wonders were confined to particular periods of time according to God’s purpose, as the biblical record testifies, is unacceptable. The same goes for the cessationist argument that the miraculous gifts were uniquely designed for the apostolic age—it is deeply unsatisfying to those who thirst for the sensational.

The thrill of the miraculous, the allure of power, the promise of amazement, the appeal of emotional experience—all of these surpass God’s ordinary workings in the eyes of charismatics, and pull people into the movement in droves. Even continuationists under the reformed banner are guilty of the same mindset, asserting that if God does not work through miraculous gifts today, He does not work at all. For them, God is wherever the fireworks are.

What, then, do we make of God’s mysterious work of providence? To large swathes of the professing church who are fixated on nature-defying phenomena, it begins to look a little dull. But is providence a second-rate work?

The Puritan John Flavel didn’t think so. He wrote that providence “is the great support and solace of the saints in all the distresses that befall them. . . . It were not worth while to live in a world . . . devoid of God and providence.”^[1]John Flavel, Divine Conduct: Or, the Mystery of Providence, in The Works of John Flavel (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1968), 4:342–343. To Flavel, reflecting on the providence of God was “a little heaven.”^[2]Ibid., 349.

Stephen Charnock agreed. Like Flavel, he affirmed God’s intimate involvement with every detail of history: “All God’s providences are but his touch of the strings of this great instrument of the world.”^[3]Stephen Charnock, A Treatise of Divine Providence, in The Works of Stephen Charnock (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2010), 1:20.

Like Christians throughout history, they celebrated the reality that God works “all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11, NKJV). Their faith did not hang on the continual presence of signs and wonders—it rested on God’s ordinary, yet awe-inspiring governance of creation.

That is exactly what Phil Johnson picks up in this crucial sermon from the Strange Fire conference. The Charismatic obsession with dazzling experiences has debased the normal ways in which God accomplishes His extraordinary works. It has undermined the great doctrine of providence and encouraged a view of God more akin to a showman than a holy, wise, and sovereign King.

Those who will honor the Lord must avoid a hankering for signs and wonders, and must cherish by faith the marvelous work of God in His world.

Providence is remarkable.

Watch Phil Johnson's message "Providence Is Remarkable":

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