The Website home of Karl Bullock

I have understood for years now that most people will never realize (at least this side of eternity) just how deep God's love is for us, and how involved He really is in our lives. In both Matthew 10 and Luke 12, Jesus told us "the very hairs of your head are all numbered" by God. The inference here is that God knows everything about us, even down to the molecule level. Nothing - NOTHING - escapes His notice. God is never surprised. The one word you'll never hear from Him is "oops" (or any variation)!

But there's even a deeper level. If God is not surprised, that means He knew everything we would think, do, and go through here in this life. Once sin had entered creation, He knew we would all fail, and he knows the extent of each failure in each of our lives.

I hear people all the time asking "why would God let me go through this?", or the even less subtle version "How could a loving God allow such suffering?", and all the variations in between. The short answer is it's not God's fault. We all have chosen to violate His laws - "For ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God".

So, here's something to chew on: God knew Adam and Eve (and everyone after them) would make wrong choices that would lead to suffering and death. In fact, He knew that once sin had entered the world, most of His creation would choose not to accept His offer for redemption. Yet He chose to create us anyway.

Implicit in this knowledge would be that the world he would create would have the best balance He could offer that would give us the free will to accept or reject Him, and at the same time result in the largest number of His creation that would accept Him. After all, love has to be a choice, not to be forced, or it could not be love. In fact, the Apostle John declared in 1 John 4:8 that "God IS love".

Taking all this in, we're faced with this fact: Since God knew every sin and transgression we would commit, and the consequences thereof, He made allowances in those circumstances to give us another chance in each instance. Many times He mitigates the consequences, often through others who, through actions in their own lives, keep us from completely falling off the cliff. God does, in various ways, intervene in history to soften our landing, or offer another choice, or to prevent us from completely destroying ourselves. We many times call these things "fortunate", or worse, "luck", "coincidence", or any number of other false synonyms.

So, the next time you're counting yourself lucky, fortunate, or contemplate a coincidence that prevented further tragedy, stop for a moment and marvel at the involvement of a God who has our best interests at heart.

One more thing: Just because something bad happens, that doesn't necessarily mean you're being punished. It may just be that this particular "bad" thing was either a substitute for a worse thing, or maybe even prevented a different tragedy from happening in the first place. Remember these things. When we get to eternity, we might want to see just how bad things would have been had God not mitigated the circumstances sin caused in the first place!