All Things for Good

It is Thomas Watson's unhurried exposition of one verse — Romans 8:28, that all things work together for good to those who love God. Watson divides it into the best things that work for the believer's good and the worst things that work for good, and it is the second half that readers remember: how affliction, temptation, desertion, and even the remainder of sin are pressed into service for those who love God.

Watson was a Puritan pastor in London who published this in 1663 under the title A Divine Cordial. The timing matters: the year before, the Act of Uniformity had ejected some two thousand ministers from their pulpits, Watson among them. A book arguing that all things work for good is a very different book when its author has just lost his living for conscience' sake.

This is Watson's boldest section. He argues that God so overrules affliction that it purifies, humbles, and weans the believer from the world; that temptation drives one to prayer and watchfulness; that God's felt withdrawal makes the soul prize his presence; and that even the believer's remaining sin, painful as it is, works humility and dependence. None of these are good in themselves — but to those who love God, all of them are made to serve.

Watson is careful with the text's condition: the promise is not to everyone, but to those who love God and are called according to his purpose. So the book spends real care on what it means to love God and on the marks of effectual calling — because the comfort of Romans 8:28 belongs only to those who can claim its terms, and Watson will not offer it more widely than the verse does.

It is especially for them, but not only. Watson writes to steady the believer before the trial as much as within it, so that the truth is settled in the mind before it is needed. Written by a man who had just suffered for his convictions, it carries the authority of one who is prescribing a cordial he has taken himself.

A cordial, in the older sense, is a medicine that revives and strengthens the heart. Watson called the book A Divine Cordial because that is what he meant it to be — a reviving draught for fainting Christians, drawn from the promise of Romans 8:28, to be taken when the heart is sinking under affliction.

Its whole argument rests on providence: that behind every event in a believer's life stands a God who is both sovereign and good, working all of it — pleasant and bitter alike — toward one end. Watson's confidence is not that circumstances are good, but that the God who governs them is, and that he never loses control of the worst that befalls his own.

At the beginning; it is short and moves in order. Watson first shows the best things working for good, then the worst, then examines the two characters named in the verse — those who love God and the called. Many readers find the section on how the worst things work for good the most striking, and return to it in seasons of trouble.