On what do you want to rest your tomorrows? On your ability to make happen what you wish or on the power of an infinitely strong, infinitely good and loving heavenly Father? When we take the reigns of life into our own hands, we forget our ignorance, our misty frailty and our dependence, and we plan our day or week or next year as if we were the lords of earth and time. Such presumption is the practice of practical atheism. No matter what we profess, no matter how much we say we believe in God, we confess with our lives what we really believe. When we live our lives as if God were not there, we forget Him and our place in time.
One great commentator, Alec Motyer, said this: "The years go in a straight line from eternity to eternity, and on that line we receive another day: neither by necessity, nor by mechanical law, nor by right, nor by courtesy of nature, but only by the covenant mercies of God." We live by the covenant mercies of God. We live under the permission-giving of God, day by day. Many of us don't have trouble saying that God was obviously in control of the beginning of time. And we don't have any difficulty in imagining that God will be in control at the end of time. But everything in between is another question. Somehow it is as if God suspends His sovereign control and we act as if it all depends on us. We are practical atheists or, at best, we are deists who believe that God sets it all up, but then leaves it to us to manage it from here on out.
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Sovereign concurrence
What we are really talking about here is the Bible's deep and wonderful truth about God's providence that is called concurrence. This is essentially the truth that God controls everything, but He does so with our cooperation, so that we participate in making decisions, in being agents of action, moving concurrently with God, but in such a way that His sovereign control remains the primary power.
Many things happen by natural occurrence. A meteorologist can define a thunderstorm in terms of wind currents and energy changes in the atmosphere, and that is true enough. But Psalm 135:7 says: "He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses." It is God who makes the thunder and the lightning, even if it happens by secondary means.
A botanist can tell us how vegetation grows, and she is right. But Psalm 104:14 says: "You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth."
A physicist with information about the size and the shape and the weight and direction of a pair of dice, can explain why they will roll just the way they do, but it is true as well as Proverbs 16:33 says: "The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the Lord."