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God has been very vocal to me my whole life. I married because he told me to. Doing so allowed me to save Jacquelyn’s life many times when she tried to kill herself. That marriage allowed me to serve God by serving her, my then-wife. It was the hardest experience in my life but I am so grateful for it even though it broke me. God knew how to put me back together and he did.
God has a time frame for me to get married and have children. I have learned what destiny really means. In the church, the term “destiny” is looked down on by many because many confuse destiny with determinism. Determinism means that we don’t have free will and the fulfillment of our lives is completely based on our genetics, our environment, and the random events that happen to us during our lives. But just search for destiny on the church’s website and you will find and you will find that it doesn’t mean something that would remove our agency and personal accountability. It is more of a personal plan of salvation.
Is life random? If one thinks it is, they do not understand justice and mercy. If our lives are random, then one person’s life would be too easy and they would automatically become an heir to the highest glory, no real faith needed. Let’s call that person John for reference’s sake. Another person would have a life that would be too hard even to just grow and develop. Let’s call that person Peter for reference’s sake.
Because John’s life was so easy, it wouldn’t prepare him to live a godly life in the highest order of glory. He would not necessarily be able to continue to live a celestial life and would not rely on the atonement of Jesus Christ to overcome his weaknesses. He would have needed those hardships or spiritual weights in life to build spiritual muscles because he wasn’t given such trials. Is that merciful to automatically grant him great glory but he would be unable to completely live that high standard because his experiences didn’t prepare him well enough to do so?
Because Peter’s life was so hard, it would be impossible for him to obtain the celestial glory despite what he was able to do if life was easy enough to fairly test him but not too hard to damn him. Life would automatically fail him because it was too hard, even impossible for him. Is that justice? Would making some almost automatically win and some almost automatically lose be true justice?
Is life really random then? God is a just and merciful god. He would cease to be God if he wasn’t so. That means life is not random one bit. What we go through has personal individual meaning to each one of us and helps determine what we can become based on our choices. Every moment in this life has been woven like a tapestry perfectly to give us exactly what we need, not too hard and not too easy so we can by our choices achieve the glory we choose to inherit in this life. The story that is told and is woven into our own personal tapestry during this life and tells the story of who we become in this life and what we will obtain in the eternities. This life is a foundation of who we will become afterward. That doesn’t mean that if we didn’t have a chance to accept the truth and lived a bad life that we wouldn’t be able to repent in the next life. Our lives are programming what we can become in the eternities. We always have a choice which means we can always choose to repent and reprogram who we became in life and what we become. It is harder to do so the deeper our programming is. A godly man can choose evil and an evil man can choose divinity but it is just harder to change that much to stem the overwhelming tide set in this life.
Justice and mercy are parts of the same object. They are in a sense just different sides of the same coin. Neither robs us of our perfecting agency. Nor do they rob us of what we need. Our lives are exactly what we need to set a foundation for becoming the best person that we can become, the person we choose to become, no excuses.