From In Christ Alone by Sinclair Ferguson, on what Ferguson calls “Flavel’s Law”—Puritan John Flavel’s frequently quoted statement, “The providence of God is like Hebrew words—it can be read only backwards.”
…Flavel’s words have often comforted me and helped me to readjust my myopic spiritual perspective. They have reminded me to fix my mind and heart on God’s wise, gracious, and sovereign rule, and on the assurance that He works everything together for His children’s good, so that I do not inquire too proudly into why I cannot understand His sovereign purposes.
Of course, one occasionally meets Christians for whom the Lord’s purposes are “all sewn up.” They convey an attitude of knowing exactly what He is doing and why He is doing it. Such comprehensive wisdom is difficult to dislodge, but is is often the precocious wisdom of the immature Christian who has not yet learned that while “those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children,” there are also hidden and secret things that “belong to the Lord our God” (Deut. 29:29).
God’s ways and thoughts are not ours. We never have them “taped.” As William Cowper knew well, God “plants his footsteps in the sea.” We can no more read in detail God’s secret purposes for our individual lives than we can see footsteps in water or understand Hebrew if we try to read it from left to right. To imagine we can is to suffer from a form of spiritual dyslexia.
One great reason for this principle is to teach us to “Trust in the Lord with all [our] heart, and lean not on [our] own understanding’ (Prov. 3:5). So perverse are we that we would use our knowledge of God’s will to substitute for actual daily personal trust in the Lord Himself.