To all creatures and all things, from the greatest to the least.

The phrase rules out the common half-measure where God attends to large matters and leaves small ones to run themselves. There is no size below which his government stops.

Aren't two sparrows sold for a penny? But not one of them falls to the ground without your Father knowing.

He even knows how many hairs are on your head.

Matthew 10:29-30

Confession 5.1

Because the same providence orders things to come about through the nature of second causes - some necessarily, some freely, some contingently.

A second cause is anything that acts within the world: weather, chemistry, a person deciding. The confession says God does not bypass these but works through them, so a genuinely free choice and a genuinely settled outcome are describing the same event at two different levels.

But even though God had a plan, you handed him over and had him killed by people who don't follow God's law. Still, this was all part of what God had decided would happen.

Acts 2:23

Confession 5.2

No. He usually works through means, and is free to work without them, above them, and against them as he pleases.

This is where the confession makes room for miracles without making them the normal case. Medicine, food and hard work are how God ordinarily provides, and expecting him to bypass them routinely misreads how he has chosen to act.

Confession 5.3

Yes, including the fall itself - and the confession stops to add, in a parenthesis, that this is not by a bare permission.

The parenthesis is there because bare permission was the available way out, and the confession refuses it: God does not merely stand back and allow such acts, he bounds them, orders them and governs them to his own holy ends. What it will not concede is the next step. The sinfulness of those acts proceeds only from the creature and not from God, who is neither the author nor the approver of sin.

You meant to hurt me, but God turned it around for good. He used it to save a lot of lives, just like you see happening now.

Genesis 50:20

Confession 5.4

Because the sinfulness comes only from the creature. The confession says God, being most holy and righteous, is not and cannot be the author or approver of sin.

The distinction is between the act and the sinfulness of the act. God ordains that the thing happens, and bounds and governs it for his own purposes; what makes it wrong is the creature's own. The confession simply asserts that the two do not collapse into each other. It does not claim to explain how, and the honest thing is to say so.

Confession 5.4

To let them discover the strength of the corruption still in them, to humble them, and to make them depend on him more closely.

The reasons given are all about self-knowledge. You do not find out what is actually in you while nothing is testing it, and the confession treats that discovery as a kindness rather than an abandonment.

When the ambassadors from Babylon came to ask about the miraculous sign, God let Hezekiah handle it on his own, to test what was really in his heart.

2 Chronicles 32:31

Confession 5.5

He withholds the grace that might have enlightened them, sometimes withdraws the gifts they had, exposes them to things their corruption turns into occasions of sin, and gives them over - so that they harden themselves under the very means that soften other people.

The paragraph is about hardening as a judicial act, done by God as a righteous judge, for sin already committed. Watch where it puts the hardening: God withholds, withdraws and hands over, and the men do the hardening themselves. The same preaching that breaks one person settles another.

So what does this mean? Israel didn't get what it was looking for, but the chosen ones did. The rest were made stubborn.

As Scripture says, 'God gave them a spirit of dullness - eyes that can't see and ears that can't hear - to this very day.'

Romans 11:7-8

Confession 5.6

It takes care of the church in a special manner, and orders all things to its good.

The chapter ends by narrowing from the government of everything to one particular concern. All things does not mean all things are pleasant; it means nothing is outside the arrangement being made.

Confession 5.7