Untimely death… is God ignorant?

Fri Aug 02, 2013

EDITOR: It angers me when I hear people saying that someone died an untimely death. Like when people say “if only Miss Trimmingham didn’t go to jump J’Ouvert or had left town when her mind had told her to, she would have still been alive today”. To me, when you say that, it is the same as saying that God is ignorant.{{more}}

A friend tried explaining untimely death, using this example: A man going from point A to point B comes to a fork in the road. Both paths will lead him to point B and after some pondering he takes the right-hand path and is subsequently murdered along that road. My friend’s premise is that if the man had taken the left-hand path, he would have lived and since the man only made up his mind when he got to the fork, he could just as easily have taken the left-hand path and lived for many more years – therefore his death was untimely.

According to 1 John 3:20: “God knows all things”. Since God knows everything, then He knows when someone is going to die (or do you believe that He is as surprised as the rest of us when a young person dies? Is He up there saying “Oh myself, I can’t believe that Tom is dead?” It follows then that since He knows what day someone is going to die, the date has been identified and set – as suggested in Ecclesiastes 3:1 “There is an appointed time for everything”. Consequently, when the person dies it is NOT untimely.

For a God who knew you before He formed you in the womb (Jeremiah 1:5) and who knows the number of hairs on your head (Matthew 10:30), exactly when and how you are going to die is of no surprise to Him. While we may all dream of reaching the three score and 10 years pinnacle, we have to face the fact that some of us are just not destined to get there.

Lisa