to the good pleasure of His will.”(Ephesians 1:3-5)
For no one knows – even those who claim Christ as the personal savior—their final destination
I was predestined to my family, like many, I had no choice to my origin, faith, or stature. I am predestined to tomorrow, with alterable choices that help augment life to a better living, by faith, I believe it will change my path to the destiny which I desire, that which I have no knowledge of, to a timely predestined death, of which I have hopes of overcoming in Jesus Christ. We are predestined to heaven, with hopeful certainty, by faith in Jesus Christ; for no one knows—even those who claim Christ as their personal savior—their final destination; a posteriori fact to our priori short sightedness into the future. Greater evidence of our predestination is in Jesus’ ordination of children to higher placement in heaven, infants with no cognizant choice to salvation, “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked “who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” (Matthew 18:1 – 5). Those without a choice, whose breaths of life is justified outside our convoluted perception of knowledge or faith, children are destined by a higher regard in heaven than adults. Less concerned children are with complex knowledge about the kingdom of God, than adults striving for assurance to a destiny in Christ, who are called to a life of a balancing act of faith, at times contrary to popular ideology, to inherit the kingdom.
Lest we become boastful7 of our salvation, or slack with confidence, God’s contingency to the “fullness of time”8 determines our faith’s worthiness to heaven: “for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:8-10). Hence, our predestination is known to an omniscience God, who has preset the future outside of time. More readily believed by a child who is less occupied with tomorrow, destiny is more complex to those with deeper grasp of the now, perplexed by the possibilities we have no control over. Tossing aside all events and preset conditions that caused us to arrive at the now—our origin, environment, faith, religion, etc.—or other unknowns to the entity of God. We live with a multiplicity of understandings about ourselves: some by an exuberance and awe to knowledge and wisdom, others by a fatalist pessimism and existentialist rigor, and some by a lukewarm indifference to the purpose and unpredictability of life. It is difficult to believe that the choices of our will, that which is evidenced by our chosen actions, has been preset with a driver in which our faith in an entity of God is its center, unless we consider all choices to have been preset before they happen: “Truly, Truly, I say to you, before Abraham was I Am.” (John 8:58), was Jesus report to His disciples, reflective of His knowledge of their destinies and His omnipresence across the dimension of time, of which they only had limited visibility of the now. Otherwise, it is difficult to believe that we had a choice to all the preset conditions of our lives to which we were born into, against or for which, we are given limited choices, before the predestined end that awaits us all in death. Without complete knowledge of the beginning and the end, our choices are guesses at best, based on past knowledge that may be made obsolete by an unknown tomorrow, to which we have been predestined. By faith of salvation in Christ we accept our lives’ destiny, hoping that the unfolding of time does not reveal a different destination, concealed under a temporary illusion of our free-will choice, erring on perception, it had not been already known and predestined by God. Therefore, the learning of our fate would serve an incomprehensible blow to life for those with no assurance to salvation; for If I learned of my final damnation, why would I choose to live? Yet, how else might our faith be tested if not through the presumable unseen?
. . . our choices are guesses at best, based on knowledge that may be obsolete by an unknown tomorrow, to which we have been predestined.
The incorporation of the most critical uncertainty in our consciousness, that which destines us to life, finds resemblance to that of our relationship with God; where one seeks affirmation in the establishment of the seen, the other is a result of the magnitude of our faith, in which the existence of God is confined to our limited knowledge of the unseen destiny. Apart from divine hope, most bothersome is the concept of predestination to the “free will” of man. Its acceptance revolts a feeling of helplessness to the reality of the now as a final destination; that which is passed is done away with, that which is to come we do not know. With preeminence of death aside, most detestable to our willful palate is predestination, requiring a rigorous dissipation of life’s indifferences through a self-projected acquisition of things which vainly secure our grasp into the future, not the least of which is the imperfect and incomplete acquisition of works, in which we drive direction to a unified common understanding of the self, as a means to salvation. As a result, our “raison d’etre” changes from the absolute confidence of tomorrow to the historical guild of the now, shifting the strife from the unknown territory of the future, requiring a necessary act of faith, whose ethos are of a secondary hopeful significance, from a multitude of other dimensions and significances. Such a reliance on an imperfect knowledge of time orders our choices, giving precedence to things seen over those which we cannot see. We, in an act of empowered, collective, self-imposed ignorance, determine the exclusion of these things we cannot see: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” asked the rich young ruler to Jesus, “Sell all you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (Luke 18:19-23) was Jesus’ response when the ruler left him to attend to the more tangible riches he had, which he valued over the unseen “eternal life”. Hidden from us is knowledge of our destiny by the reality of the present, in which the adoption of an absolute act of faith forecasts a shadow of doubt on the premise that justifies a free gift of “salvation”, difficult to reconcile with our consciousness on account of the multiplicities we live by.
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, our acts of faith align to God’s will when we begin through the revelation of Christ to understand the grace by which God empowered meaning to our destinies; where we were once dead in time, we are resurrected with Jesus Christ outside of time, before we ever existed, when God made the world by His word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:1-5).
justifying the interim time of life to chance . . . the will to choice must overlook all things unanswerable.
Jesus Christ gave precedence to faith, to accept as our destiny to life, with greater openness to the possibilities outside our current limitation of this world, to the greater capacities of God and His power to accomplish above our expectations in this life, and by faith, in the resurrection which He predestined to us after, in heaven. Alleviated from our responsibility is the knowledge of our future destiny, or those of others, which had been given under Jesus’ full authority and pre-knowledge before the beginning of time. Hence, our learned and inspired understanding changes the purpose by which we live to the fellowship with our source of life found in Jesus Christ, away from the concerns about the things of this world, hopeful to reach God’s kingdom as our final destination. How else might we begin to interpret the purpose of life apart from that which had conceived us, or that which has destined us away? If not defined by its beginnings or its ends, the directional driven destiny does not exist, placing all its bets on the now, justifying the interim time of life to chance, in which the will to choice must overlook all things unanswerable.
Assuming the role of God in predicting destiny would be an act of hypocrisy done with futile estimations at best “For many
