Meditation on the Text of the Week

He Who Knows the Future Controls the Present

For I am God, and there is no other;
I am God and there is no-one like Me,
Declaring the end from the beginning
And from ancient times things which have not yet taken place
Saying, 'My purpose shall stand,
And I will do all that pleases Me.'
Isaiah 46:9,10

Every culture, every religion, every belief system seeks to foretell the future, to predict, and to prophesy. There is something intrinsic to the nature of mankind that he needs to know the future so that he can adjust and guide his actions in the present. It is only as we know what is going to happen that we are able to make decisions in the present.

There are whole philosophical systems built upon future expectations. Utilitarianism is the most widespread and influential today. In it, one's actions and decisions are to be judged and guided by the effect or outcome that will be produced. Our understanding of the future must shape our present actions, according to utilitarians.

The Scripture, in our Text of the Week declares two things about this apparently inevitable preoccupation with the future. Firstly, that prediction of the future is an essential attribute of deity. In fact, so essential and so intrinsic, that when the Living God compares Himself to the fake idols of Isaiah's day, He declares His power to declare the future accurately and truthfully makes Him uniquely God; it marks Him alone as being God.

Secondly, the Scriptures declare that God alone can declare the future, because His purposes totally determine the future. He neither answers to, nor respects, nor is conditioned by anyone or anything. He does entirely what pleases Him. In this sense, a further essential attribute of God is that He is absolutely free to do whatever pleases Him. If His purposes did not totally and universally determine the future, the future could not be declared with any certainty. He, then, would not be God, but a mere idol.

In our temporarily post Christian world, Athens has declared the God of the Scriptures to be dead and non-existent. It has declared it loudly and for a long time. Since volume and repetition are often confused with truth, this Athenian declaration is now widely believed. But, Athens cannot escape being human. It is still required by its citizens to foretell the future, to predict, and to prophesy. Man cannot function without have a belief about what is going to happen.

So, the Delphic Oracles of ancient Greece have been revivified in our day. Everywhere men and institutions are busy predicting the future and they are idolized and lionized for attempting to do so. Futurology has become an academic discipline. Other ages would have called it augury. This is understandable: since foretelling is an attribute of deity, the predictors and the prophets are regarded in popular Athenian culture as being gurus and semi-divine, commanding fear and reverence.

But let's get this right. The logic of the Scripture is unassailable: he would would predict the future must also command the future—and command it comprehensively and totally—otherwise the prophesy is no more than a pathetic joke. Since no-one in Athens—yes no-one—claims to command the future comprehensively and totally, nor to represent anyone who does, their predictions are vanities. There predictions of the future are mere guesses, more or less wild.

Astute Athenians, such as Warren Buffett, have understood this, and have profited immensely from laughing at the seers and gurus who attempt to predict what is going to happen in financial markets or economies in the next week, month, or year. As Buffett himself says, Why bother reading or watching comedies when one can read the forecasts from the Wall Street investment banks?

Since Unbelieving Athens has no religious or philosophical basis for predicting the future, those from within its halls who attempt do so inevitably turn out to be charlatans. Nonetheless, or possibly precisely because Athens has no ground upon which one can stand and prophesy, its pseudo-prophets are prized all the more.

This is why increasingly Athens is becoming both credulous and superstitious. The more loud, insistent, and persistent any particular prediction about the future, the more believable it becomes. For mankind cannot exist or function without a belief about the future. The sheer need to believe in something tends to make false prophets credible and believable.

Athens ultimately and “officially” believes in nothing. Therefore, it will fall for anything. It has and does.

Those in Jerusalem are neither credulous nor superstitious. They are confident in the future because they know Who commands the future. They know He alone commands the future, because He does and will do whatever pleases Him.