The fate of the child of God and the fate of the fool

The fate of the child of God and the fate of the fool.

We all get what we get according to our choices. In this is a sort of fate, but not as the world sees that term. To the world fate is a word that refers to an inevitable end, no matter what one chooses. But this is only half the truth. What one chooses concerning the One who decrees all things as the Sovereign Lord of the universe will alter one's fate drastically, and what one gets from a good choice concerning Him is yet another fate that he has fallen into. The unbeliever, no matter how hard he strives to do so, will never be able to alter his destiny for eternity, nor will he be able to alter the unfulfilled life he will experience in time. Try anything he may, these are guaranteed. The believer will never be able to alter his fate for eternity either, yet he is afforded the freedom of more choices in time; choices to be spiritual or carnal. If he chooses the carnal life he will not alter his eternal destiny of life in heaven with God, but he will not see God's highest and best in time. He has chosen the fate of an unfulfilled life, but with a very happy ending. The believer who chooses the spiritual life has a happy life and a happy ending. That is his fate, and no one can prevent it, no if all seven billion people on the planet attempted it, not if all governments together planned it, not even if Satan and the kingdom of darkness will it.MAT 6:33 "But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you."

In his essay, "With the Grenadiers" Winston Churchill writes with his usual insight: "The longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance, and the harder it is to believe that this omnipotent factor in human affairs arises simply from the blind interplay of events. Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man's own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power. If anyone will look back over the course of even ten years' experience, he will see what tiny incidents, utterly unimportant in themselves, have in fact governed the whole of his fortunes and career." He then relates a time when he was an officer in World War I and was summoned by a general to leave the trenches in order to attend a meeting some distance away. He had to walk for miles through mud and wetness in order to rendezvous with a car that never showed. The meeting never took place, he wasted hours of time, had to walk back to his dug-out in the dark and rain. He had gotten lost, took more than an hour extra time to get back. He was soaked to the bone by sweat and rain, and so was fully and intensely annoyed. He returned to find out that his dug-out had been blown to smithereens by a whizz-bang (German 77mm shell named after the noise it made) that came in through the roof just about five minutes after he left. There was one man sitting inside and he lost his head, literally. Churchill no longer was annoyed. God had plans for Mr. Churchill.

Yet even in an early death, the positive believer is graced out to the maximum by God. There is simply nothing anyone can do to stop it. The positive believer hasn't the faintest clue as to what is going to happen in his life, but he knows that it will be beyond dreams since he understands that he has concluded one thing by faith - he must yield and submit to the will of God no matter what it will be. This yieldedness is the common thread in all the graced out believers in the Bible. They had faith and God did the rest; even teaching them humility, courage, tenacity, love, true joy, etc. God fulfilled it all. Due to their faith it became their unaltered destiny.

The carnal believer makes a tragic and most terrible decision to continue to present his members to the old sin nature. Plus it's an incredibly stupid decision since that nature is dead. He's submitting to an echo, a memory, a blood stain. It couldn't give life before it was dead, why should it now that the believer is under grace? Some believers have heard of grace and forgiveness and thought they found a green light from God to pursue the flesh still. What a dastardly error? The opposite is true. God has given him the green light to pursue a walk in righteousness because he is now righteous by God's imputation at salvation. ROM 6:12-14 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.

We are not to pursue the flesh for the reason that we will be judged if we do, but because it cannot give life. Certainly a life submitted to the flesh will be a life of Godly discipline, but avoidance of pain isn't the real motivation either. The believer is to understand who he is and who he is in relation to God, and that can be summed up in the phrase, "redeemed unto eternal life." That's a whole new fate that is in severe contrast to the old fate of the unbeliever.

As for the unbeliever, he is the one most to be pitied. He carries with him the hope that he will avoid the fate that he has. Often times he works very hard to avoid that fate, but as with the spiritual believer and the carnal believer these fates will not be altered by the agency of man. In more modern times, science, evolution, technology, and communication are the means in which man is trying to alter his fate. How frightfully sad that he doesn't see it already written nineteen hundred years ago, copied over and over, up to millions and millions of copies lying around, all over the surface of the planet, in the book of Revelation. There lies, in ink and paper, his fate like millions of leaflets dropped from the sky.

There is nothing new under the sun. Churchill in his essay goes on to write of the ancient Egyptians who tried to beat this fate. "Their reverence for a corpse [was] to a height never paralleled in history. Their supreme desire was to preserve the pitiful remains of earthly life in solitude and dignity forever. They quarried their tombs deep in the living rock. Shaft led to gallery, and gallery opened into shaft. To these devices of secrecy the embalmers added their wonderful art. Never was so great an effort made by human beings to achieve such a particular object. It procured exactly the opposite result. As it turned out, it was the only conceivable manner in which they could have achieved the opposite result. Four thousand years afterwards the bodies of their kings and princes are dragged from their hiding places to be exposed to vulgar and unsympathetic gaze in the halls of the museum. They just managed by infinite effort, sacrifice and skill to achieve the one thing above all others they wished to avoid."

The Egyptians went to lengths never before seen nor since in order to reverse their fate, and they only ended up making it even worse. Not only are these carefully preserved bodies not in heaven, but they are under glass in various museums throughout the world, being gawked at by millions of people every year, most not really even caring about their history or culture, but just to get the chance to see a mummy and then run off to grab a gyro and a coke. And this, all made possible because they worked so hard to beat their fate.

If you are a positive, spirit filled believer then God is writing the story of your fate right now. He doesn't tell you what is coming, for if He did, all the wonder of it would be gone and it would fringe on the boring. God simply promises you and since His promises are "yes and amen" that seals your fate. Not all of our stories as spiritual believers are the same, but the promises are. EPH 3:20-21 Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

This no doubt gives you great joy and a tinge of excitement.  

Ad supernae vocationis press* (Google translator can make one seem so smart. *Press on to the upward call)

Pastor Joe Sugrue

Grace and Truth Ministries