ABOUT DEATH – PART 1
Has our Lord set up a plan for our lives?
Author: Sakkie Parsons
Translated from Afrikaans
Translator: Robin Barker
In short someone wrote to me and asked if our Lord has predetermined how long we are going to live.
I immediately say, yes indeed.
PSM 139:16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
I look at these things and want to gloriously cry out:
PSM 139:17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them!
PSM 139:18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you.
In the New Testament we are clearly and gloriously told how our Lord has already before creation, so to speak, set up a plan for His children’s lives.
EPH1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
EPH 1:4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love.
Immediately someone will ask:
“What about unnatural deaths, for example, like murder?”
Our Lord has determine how long my journey through this life to eternity will be but with my free will, which I have because I have been created in the image of God, I am able to alter God’s plan – but our Lord already knew this through His great omnipotence, before He even created us.
Someone who commits suicide alters God’s plan with the free will our Lord has given him/her.
Someone who dies from, as an example, a smoke related illness such as lung cancer, alters our Lord’s plan.
Someone who eats wrongly throughout their life and then dies through a related illness, alters our Lord’s plan.
Someone who is intoxicated and climbs behind his motor vehicles steering wheel and is in an accident with another person and if he/she causes their own death, or cripples someone, alters our Lord’s plan.
Someone who commits murder alters our Lord’s plan and I can continue like this on and on.
Three facts according to my understanding of the Word are fixed:
Firstly:
Our Lord has already, before the creation, through His omnipotence, prepared the complete and perfect life for you and me.
Secondly:
Any changes to His perfect plan are because of sin and human choice, precisely because of sin, and that of course includes your and my personal sinful choices.
Thirdly:
Someone may, to put it that way, fiddle with God’s plan for His children but in the end all those who remain/holding on to Jesus, there is that glorious knowledge:
JOHN 1:12 Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, he gave the right to become children of God—
JOHN 5:24 “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. “
For me a very clear understandable example in the Word of that which I have just explained to you, is the following.
We read:
JOHN 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
JOHN 3:17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.
Do you see?
Jesus walked to Golgotha for every person on this earth, or if you want, for everyone in this world. Because Jesus knew, through His Almighty knowledge, in advance, that the majority of people were not going to take advantage of His sacrifice but were going to alter His plan for their lives, Jesus says the following to us on His walk to Golgotha.
MAT 7:13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
MAT 7:14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
What path / gate is our Lord talking about here?
JESUS CHRIST is the only door/gate/way to the Father and to eternal life:
JOHN 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
If I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my Redeemer and Saviour, I am on a way road/path but not ‘THE WAY’ – the correct road/path.
The way (road/path) that I am then on, is a road/path to eternal destruction / hell.
MAT 7:13 “… For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.“
There is something else that I must share with you, when I speak about death and all that goes with it.
Namely, that there are, to put it that way, two kinds of death for people to step in, or is it out, of this life.
One kind of death for those who have accepted Jesus as their Redeemer and Saviour and another death for those who have not accepted Jesus as their Redeemer and Saviour but I will do this at another time, otherwise this writing will become too long.
For those of you who have read this writing and have already accepted Jesus as your Redeemer and Saviour and who encounters satan and other people who want to try and alter our Lord’s perfect plan for your life and in some cases, it seems to you as if he has accomplished it already, let me end this writing with these words from the Word which our Lord arranged to have written for us.
REV 3:11 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown.
JOHN 16:33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
Greetings,
Sakkie