Some people are very organised, making lists and planning ahead in great detail. Others seem to coast along, taking life as it comes. Perhaps the two types balance each other out!
We have all experienced times when things don’t go according to plan. Sometimes things turn out better than expected, sometimes they go horribly wrong. Either way, we can’t always control what happens in our lives.
Jesus could look ahead, knowing what was going to happen in his life. It didn’t look good. He told his disciples, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day”.
Suffering, rejection, being killed… imagine looking ahead and knowing that these things were going to happen to you. No wonder his closest friends didn’t want to hear about it.
Jesus knew he would die
Jesus looked even further ahead than his death. He knew that he would be raised to life on the third day. That would not make his death and the cruelty he experienced during his trial any less painful, but he was willing to go through it for a purpose. Although he knew he was going to die, he had absolute confidence that God would raise him from the grave.
As 1 Corinthians 15 vv 21 & 22 tell us,
..since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead.
During the time Jesus was on earth, he raised a few people from the dead, but they didn’t live forever. He was simply giving a foretaste of much better things to come. He said,
…for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth – those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.
John 5 vv 28-29
Our plans might not count for much, but God’s plans for us are totally reliable.
I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever.
Ecclesiastes 3 v 14
Although the name “Google” only goes back a couple of decades (the google.com domain was registered in 1997), it was apparently chosen by the company’s founders based on the word “googol”, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which dates from 1940. Even I didn’t start school till long after that.
The “googol” connection is of course the enormously large number of links that have to be listed and organised to perform fast and effective searches on the World Wide Web. But it still takes humans to write the stuff search engines look for, and to understand its meaning. I use Bible software to do text searches, but it’s still down to me to read the passages, think about what they mean, and try to put them into practice.
That’s very interesting, Iain – I must admit, I thought somebody had just dreamed up the word “Google” because they liked the sound!