How long or often a man must consider what could…or “could have” happened pertaining to any circumstance, even in a sort of opposition to seeing what God has done and/or is doing, is not in his control. God knows.
We are both experience laden and experience burdened to whatever extent we are…even in this new life. And much of what we call the knowledge of experience has altogether come through natural reasoning(s) and natural observations. That’s just how it is.
There is a reason we are so often told in scripture to consider… or as Paul even wrote to “son” Timothy:
Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things.
Other translations may use “reflect upon”, for our first impulse, of things not yet known in our experience is to question them…perhaps even doubt…which is neither wrong nor evil…for God knows unless a thing is made known or familiar to us, it must remain a mystery till uncovered.
How many times we are told to think upon and meditate upon…even so often by the Christ Himself in the gospels. Notwithstanding this also knowing of Christ…that so much of what he does and is doing is unknown to us…so that He would even tell those brothers…”What I do now you do not understand…”
But such consideration is to lead to understanding as only the Lord may grant.
Our proclivity is to see very much in terms of this or that. Even assigning good and evil or right and wrong to outcomes of which we may not see the Lord “playing the long game” in all the possibility that is alone His…and how…what at any one moment may appear to us…as even either evil or good…may be toward a far deeper, or eternal work.
It is not that we are not to commend toward the good nor, as the Lord allows, rebuke for evil and/or sin. God knows in how many circumstances that is not even the question. For it is not sin for a man to not understand a thing, but stiff neckedness does not go long unaddressed.
When the black dog appeared out of the deep darkness this early morning not a foot or two from my vehicle travelling at 50 mph, but was not hit, immediately thankfulness to God sprang forth. But also with an inward cringe at what to me appeared “could have been” (and to me, plainly) easily quite another outcome.
But it didn’t happen. God had ordained to happen…what did happen…and was in no requirement…even by or through my own experience of what “could have”, constraining Him to any obligation. I only saw two possibilities…and was quite grateful for the outcome of the one…but in God there are infinite, even all possibility, of which I am neither able to consider nor compute.
So even though it provoked gratefulness…there was no less a sort of rebuke…that if lingered too long over what might have been (according to my knowing)…or was a matter that could (in other circumstance) constrain me to less than gratefulness, a cauton was ministered. Even that in “what might be”…could cause a missing of all God is already doing…and has done. And either delay, impede, or otherwsie encourage interruption of what is to always be…because it is as always, right and fitting.
Gratitude to God both in…and for…all things. Without need to consider “what might have been”.
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died”
nevertheless…
But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.
There is no thing that can be spoken against that provokes gratefulness to God…but may we, by His grace, have a care to not only think of those as “sometimes” things.
I believe an esteemed writer, not esteemed by me for his skill and crafting or fame (though both were considerable), but esteemed as a keen observer in Christ and of the things of the spirit, wrote in a vernacular that may be odious to some…but if granted to see to the heart of it might glean (even from the vernacular) a worthy understanding:
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
How God gets a man to believe, and not repeat by rote the following…is in His time alone…even through and past a man’s disposition to sometimes doubt it in experience:
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
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