Saturdays with Calvin #18

And truly God claims omnipotence to himself, and would have us to acknowledge it - not the vain, indolent, slumbering omnipotence which sophists feign, but vigilant, efficacious, energetic, and ever active, not an omnipotence which may only act as a general principle of confused motion, as in ordering a stream to keep within the channel once prescribed to it, but one which is intent on individual and special movements. God is deemed omnipotent, not because he can act though he may cease to be idle, or because by general instinct he continues the order of nature previously appointed, but because, governing heaven and earth by his providence, he so overrules all things that nothing happens without his counsel. For when it is said in the psalms, "He hath done whatever he hath pleased" (Ps. 115:3), the thing meant is his sure and deliberate purpose. It were insipid to interpret the psalmist's words in philosophic fashion, to mean that God is the primary agent, because the beginning and cause of all motion. This rather is the solace of the faithful, in their adversity, that every thing which they endure is by ordination and command of God, that they are under his hand...

Those who attribute due praise to the omnipotence of God thereby derive a double benefit. He to whom heaven and earth belong, and whose nod all creatures must obey, is fully able to reward the homage which they pay to him, and they can rest secure in his protection of him in whose control everything that could do them harm is subject, by whose authority, Satan, with all his furies and engines, is curbed as with a bridle, and on whose will everything adverse to our safety depends. In this way, and in no other, can the immoderate and superstitious fears, excited by the dangers to which we are exposed, be calmed or subdued. I say superstitious fears. For such they are, as often as the dangers threatened by any created object inspire us with such terror, that we tremble as if they had in themselves a power to hurt us or could hurt at random or by chance; or as if we had not in God a sufficient protection against them...

Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed.

Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.16.3, John Calvin, translated by Henry Beveridge, Hendrickson, pp. 115-116.