Predicting the Future | Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.

Can you predict a future event?

Let's begin by considering a hypothetical situation. Suppose you happen to be walking on a road that you have never been on before, and you happen to meet a person you have never met before, and the person is holding a rock you have never seen before between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and there is nothing below or above the rock. Then he asks you this question, "If I simply open my fingers and I let go of the rock in my right hand then will the rock fall down towards the ground or will it travel up towards the sky?"

Under normal circumstances, how would you answer this question?

If you answered "down" then you would be correct because under normal circumstances the rock should fall down to the ground.

In this situation you would have correctly predicted a future event in a situation you have never been in before. And it was easy.

This is the way God sees the future. There is no mystery about what is going to happen in the future because God created everything and He already knows everything that is going to happen before it happens. He knows what will happen tomorrow, and next year, and ten-million years from now.

For example, in the above hypothetical situation, God would not only know that the rock would fall to the ground, but God would also know exactly how long it would take before the rock hit the ground, and whether or not the rock would roll when it hit the ground, and the exact spot where the rock would come to rest on the ground. And God would not be forcing any of these things to happen even though He would know the exact outcome before it happened. The same concept applies to our lives. For example, when we first wake up in the morning we may decide to immediately get out of bed or we may decide to sleep a little longer before we get out of bed. Before we make our decision God already knows what we are going to do. But He does not force either decision on us -- the choice is still ours to make even though God already knows what we are going to do. If we decide to sleep a little longer and then we are late getting to work, then we cannot blame God because we are late for work. God did not force us to sleep a little longer -- that was a choice that we made and if we get in trouble for arriving late for work then it is our own fault and it is not God's fault. Blaming God because we slept late would be like the stranger in our first example wanting to blame you because the rock fell to the ground just because you knew ahead of time that the rock was going to fall to the ground if the stranger let go of the rock.

God loves us and God gave us the freedom to make decisions. In the Holy Bible God has told us what the consequences will be for some of the decisions that we make. In human terminology this is called the law of cause and effect. If we build a house on the sand then we should not be surprised if the house collapses during bad weather. If we try to repair an old piece of clothing that has a hole in it and we sew a new piece of fabric over the hole then we should not be surprised when the new piece of fabric gradually shrinks and tears the old piece of clothing and makes the hole worse than it was before we tried to fix it.

In the Holy Bible God tells us about two possible futures for our eternal spirits after they depart from our current bodies. God tells us that each one of us gets to make the decision if our spirit will spend eternity with God in glory, or if our spirit will spend eternity in agony in the lake of fire that was created for the devil and his demons.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Son of God and who accepts Jesus as Savior will spend eternity in paradise with God, and with Jesus, and with the thief who died on the cross and who put his trust in Jesus.

Everyone who rejects Jesus as Savior will share the eternal fate of the devil and his demons. The devil and his demons know and believe that Jesus is the Son of God but they also know that Jesus' death only paid for the sins of mankind and that Jesus' death did not pay for their sins.

Respectfully,
Grandpappy.

Grandpappy's e-mail address is: RobertWayneAtkins@hotmail.com