Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others. – Rainer Maria Rilke
One of the things that always rubbed me the wrong way about religion was the idea of destiny. It seems like many people of faith – whether it be Christianity or a different religion – have this preconception that God is in control of everything in their life. And to be honest, that just irritates me.
Why would God want to control everything? That would be boring. That would be in direct contradiction to another major conception in the Bible: free will. When people bring up the idea of having a destiny the first thing that comes to mind is all of the bad things that exist in this world.
How could it be someone’s destiny to be murdered? How could it be the destiny of a sweet little girl to have terminal cancer? And what about the recent events in Japan? And disease and famine and…you get the idea. That’s not destiny. No one was brought into this world just to suffer in that way. And what’s more is no just, righteous and loving God would ever make so many people’s destiny so painful. Would he?
Naturally I started researching passages related to free will and destiny. After consulting with a few friends I came to the conclusion that the Bible doesn’t preach destiny in the way that so many of us believe. The Bible teaches us that we make our own decisions, and as a result, we face the consequences of those decisions. Good or bad.
Adam and Eve are a perfect example of this. God presented them with a choice. They could be obedient and not eat from the tree of knowledge, or they could choose to disobey God and take a big ol’ bite. If God wanted to control our destiny, don’t you think he would have made it so they obeyed Him? In fact, I think the point of that story is that we do make our own choices. We choose to obey or disobey. We choose to do the right thing or do the wrong thing.
Revelations 20:13 says, “Each person was judged according to what he had done“. How could God judge us if He had already decided for us if we would be good or bad? We sin because we choose to. Bad things happen to us all because of the collective decisions of a population. So why do we blame God for them? Because He has the power to put an end to them? That’s not the way something like free will works. You can’t just get the good things, you have to accept what can go wrong.
There is no such thing as destiny. Just the aftershock of the decisions we are all making.
When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. – James 1:13-14
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