© 2002 Nicole Ragetly
© 2002 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Many Urantians have misunderstood the Providence of God. There is, in fact, a divine providential plan for our planet. The Providence of God is expressed in the combined actions of celestial beings and divine spirits, who, in harmony with cosmic law, are continually working for the honor of God and the spiritual progress of his universe children.
For long ages the human race has struggled to reach its present status while Providence worked out its plan of progressive evolution.
Divine Providence is always in conformity with the perfect and invariant nature of the Supreme Lawgiver. An organic unity in the space-time universes seems to underlie the entire fabric of cosmic events.
This living presence of the evolving Supreme Being, this immanence of the Projected Incompleteness is inexplicably manifested by what appears to be a surprisingly fortuitous coordination of apparently unrelated universal events. This must be the function of Providence—the domain of the Supreme Being and the Conjoint Actor.
The Paradise Trinity established the universal order of PROGRESS, and the Providence of God is the domain of the Conjoint Actor and the evolving Supreme Being.
There exists throughout time and space, and with all reality of whatever nature, an inexorable and impersonal law which amounts to the function of a cosmic Providence.
The observation of powerful natural forces, such as storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, etc., greatly impressed primitive man. Unexplainable events in life were called the “acts of God and the mysterious dispensations of Providence.”
At that time the dominant idea of religion was the Egyptian concept of divine Providence. The teachings of Melchizedek took root in Egypt and were disseminated to Europe. They are a basic factor in the religions of the East and the West.
This concept was divine reward for righteousness and harsh punishment for sin. The frank pessimism of the ecclesiasts was a wise reaction to the over-optimistic beliefs in Providence.
The Christian religion, as a belief system on Urantia, arose from the blending of teachings, influences, beliefs, worship, and personal attitudes.
Providence does not mean that God has decided all things for us and in advance. God loves us too much to accomplish what would amount to a cosmic tyranny. Man has within himself a relative amount of choice, and divine love is not that short-sighted affection which could shake and spoil the children of men.
The gods have attributes, but the Trinity has functions. And like the Trinity, Providence is a function other than personal in the universe of universes, extending from the evolutionary levels of the Sevenfold, synthesizing in the power of the Almighty to the transcendental levels of ultimate deity.
God loves every creature as a child. And this love protects every creature throughout time and eternity. Providence functions with respect to the total and deals with the function of every creature, provided it is related to the total. Providential intervention concerning any being indicates the importance of that being’s function, having to do with the evolutionary growth of some total which may mean the total race, the total nation, the total planet or even a higher total. It is the importance of the creature’s function which occasions providential intervention and not the importance of the creature as a person.
However, the Father as a person can, at any time, interpose a brotherly hand in the flow of cosmic events in accordance with God’s will, in consonance with God’s wisdom, and motivated by God’s love.
But what man calls Providence is too often the product of his own imagination. Yet it emerges in the finite realm, an actualization of the energies of space, the movements of time, the thoughts of the intellect, the ideals of character, the desires of a spiritual nature, and the volitional acts of evolving personalities. The final integration takes place in the dual presence of the Supreme and the Ultimate.
Creatures can discover Providence if they attain the capacity to perceive the goal of the evolving universes, that is, the accomplishment of the Supreme within the limits of the present state of the incomplete universes.
The Father’s love operates directly in the heart of the individual. It is the personal man-God relationship. The impersonal presence of Deity (Supreme Almighty and Paradise Trinity), encompasses the whole and not the part.
The providence of the higher control of Supremacy becomes more and more apparent as the systems, constellations, universes, and superuniverses become anchored in light and life. The Supreme increasingly emerges as the significant correlator of all that manifests, while the Ultimate emerges as the transcendental unifier of all things.
On a planet of an advanced order, Providence has become a reality, and the circumstances of life are correlated. Man has begun to live according to the orientation of the universes. He follows the path of Supremacy until the culmination of the Universal Father.
To realize Providence in time man must attain perfection. But he can have a foretaste of it now if he reflects on the universal fact that all things—good or bad—work for the advancement of God-knowing mortals in their quest for the Father of all.
Providence becomes more and more discernible as men move from the material to the spiritual. The acquisition of spiritual clairvoyance enables the ascending personality to detect harmony in what was once chaos. The morontia mota represents a real advance in this direction.
Providence is in part the supercontrol of the unfinished Supreme manifested in the incomplete universes. It must therefore be:
When we pray for providential intervention, the answer to that prayer is often found in our changed attitudes toward existence. Providence is not impulsive, whimsical, or magical. It is the slow emergence of the Almighty Sovereign of the finite universes, whose progress can occasionally be detected by evolving creatures. Providence is the sure march of the personalities of time and the galaxies of space toward the goals of eternity, which are first the Supreme, then the Ultimate, and perhaps the Absolute. We believe that there is the same Providence in infinity, and it is the will, actions, and purpose of the Paradise Trinity to motivate the cosmic panorama from universe to universe.
Nicole Ragetly