---
title: 'Robert MacKenzie on the Loom of God’s Providence'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2023-04-15
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2023-robert-mackenzie-on-the-loom-of-gods-providence
---

# Robert MacKenzie on the Loom of God’s Providence

“On the loom of his providence over man \[God\] is working out the same design of the Good. Once more he stretched the warp, this time of human history. Stretched them over fifty or a hundred centuries, and then filled his shuttles with threads - purple threads of law, scarlet of sacrifice, grey of prophecy, silver of psalm, white of type and typical lives, until in the fulness of time he unrolled it, and behold the Desire of all Nations, the Man Christ Jesus, the Revealer of God’s love, the Redeemer of Man, and over him sounded voices from heaven: ‘My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,’ ‘Peace on earth, good will to men.’

At last he set the warp of your own individual life along the days or the years allotted to you and filled his shuttles and is weaving. He is still at the loom and on go his shuttles day and night. White threads of youthful joy, scarlet of suffering, grey of sorrow, purple of duties, black of temptation, grey of sorrow, threads of grace thrust in and out at each clanking of the loom.

And what he is doing we know not now, but we shall know when he has emptied his shuttles and woven all the warp together into his foreseen design. And when he is done with you he will remove you from that loom, an behold you are a man redeemed, a perfect man, according to the stature of a man in Christ Jesus. Looking on that final outcome of the loom of providence David said, It was good for me that I was afflicted. Jeremiah said, It was good for me to bear the yoke in my youth. James said, It was to my joy that I fell into divers temptations. Paul said, My light afflictions worked out a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. At last when God was done it appeared to them as yet it will appear to us that ‘all things work together for good to them that love God.’” — [Robert MacKenzie](/authors/robert-mackenzie), *The Loom of Providence* (1904), pp. 15-16