Is God Sovereign?
Is God in Control?
Does God know?
If you think these things are true, it does not remove the possibility that you will die a violent death.
Be it a car accident, a fall, a mugging, or a murder.
A quote I saw recently: I would rather take a very small risk of dying while FULL living my life, than risk nothing and live like I am already dead.
Our western society is obsessed with safety, of staying alive. Go to a hardware store and you will see the most ridiculous safety stickers on the most benign of things. Yet we are more obese than ever, intake insane abouts of sugar daily, super size everything and beginning to have a lower expected life span than the previous generation. It would seem as we live, we are no longer alive.
- However, life is dangerous.
- And our lives need to be lived.
- And to avoid all dangers is to never live.
- Try to mitigate dangers too much and you begin to mitigate living.
- To be foolish is more dangerous than many dangers.
- Today, if a young person dies, we now hold someone alive to blame. Now someone may be to blame, yet a young person, a young adult is responsible for their own lives.
Older adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. However, it often takes living experiences, from our amygdala, the emotional part of the brain, before we learn the values of the prefrontal cortex, and start living from that.
It is a sad truth that many learn to live from their prefrontal cortex as a result of watching others live from their amygdala, as they held their friend’s beer.
So even if the decision making part of their brain is not fully developed, we can not hold others responsible for our poor decision making, and object lessons of peers dying are far more powerful than any safety video.
Young people die from foolishness and folly and faithfulness. Older people do too.
This has been true for ever.
It is amazing that I am alive, since my grandfather, at the age of 20 was left for dead twice. He was in Gallipoli (WWI) and the first part of what happened was foolishness on his part. Putting his head above the parapet and saying, “Where are the Turks?” He got shot in the head. Being examined, and considered too critical he was put on the dead pile. His friend, last name of Wagg, saw that he was still alive, took them off the pile and back into the field hospital.
This I believe, happened twice.
Ernie was stabilized, transferred to the hospital ship, did a full recovery. He returned to New Zealand, married, ran a sheep farm for some 40 years, and had five children. Having retired, he lived to about 85. All that time carrying a bullet in his head.
A young person may seem to die from foolishness from our perspective, but from Gods it was faithfulness. Or we may see faithfulness in a person’s death, while God sees folly.
Who wants to have a conversation around God’s sovereignty, control and foreknowledge?
Did God know Judas was going to betray Jesus as an act of sovereign will or foreknowledge?