William Cowper wrote 'God Moves in a Mysterious Way' in 1774 from the darkest place a human being can inhabit - the edge of self-destruction, looking back at what had turned him away from it. The tradition, reported by his biographer, is that Cowper had called a cab to take him to the Thames, intending to drown himself, but that a thick fog so disoriented the driver that after hours of wandering through London streets they ended up back at Cowper's door. Whether the story is literally accurate or shaped in the retelling, the hymn itself bears the marks of someone who has looked into the abyss and found, inexplicably, that they were not alone in it.
Cowper's mental illness - what we would now call severe depression with psychotic features, including the recurring delusion that he was eternally damned - was a lifelong burden. He had attempted suicide multiple times before the experience that may have prompted this hymn, and he would attempt it again afterward. His faith was genuine but not comfortable: he believed in God without believing in his own salvation, a torment that colors every line of his hymns with a quality of hard-won rather than easy conviction.
The hymn's primary scriptural anchor is Romans 11:33: 'Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!' Paul's doxology at the end of his sustained argument about divine election and human history insists that God's ways are genuinely beyond human comprehension - not merely complex but categorically different in kind from human reasoning. The Greek word Paul uses, 'anexichniastos' (untraceable, beyond tracking), captures exactly what Cowper's line 'his ways are past finding out' expresses.
The second stanza's images are precise and powerful: 'He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.' The first image draws on Job 9:8's description of God as one who 'treads on the waves of the sea,' and on Psalm 77:19's meditation: 'Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen.' The invisibility of God's path is not evidence of absence but of a presence too large to leave ordinary tracks.
The third stanza makes the epistemological claim at the heart of the hymn: 'Blind unbelief is sure to err, and scan his work in vain. God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.' This is the theodicy argument stripped to its essential logic: the human mind cannot judge divine action because it lacks the perspective from which that action is fully intelligible. Only God can interpret God - and the promise is that he will, that eventually 'he will make it plain.' This is not a claim that suffering makes sense now but that it will, from the vantage point of eternity.
The fourth stanza - 'Behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face' - offers the most pastoral consolation in the hymn. The 'frowning providence' - the dark, painful, apparently hostile event - conceals rather than cancels the divine smile. This draws on the pattern of Joseph's story in Genesis 50:20: 'You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.' What appears from within the event to be abandonment reveals itself from outside it as care.
Cowper never fully escaped his mental darkness. He died in 1800 still believing himself damned, the darkness of his illness more powerful than his theology at the last. Yet the hymn he wrote in 1774 has comforted millions of believers navigating their own inexplicable sufferings - a testimony to the power of truth articulated in extremity. It is aperhaps the greatest short theodicy in the English language, and one of the most honest hymns ever written.