“In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.” Ephesians 1:11 Have you ever wondered how your life might have panned out if you had made different choices in your past? What if I’d been born in a different city or what would my life have been like if I went to a different school and met different people in my youth or how would things have turned out if I had not taken that first job? There is a term to describe the results of sensitive dependence on initial conditions; it’s called the butterfly effect. This effect implies that small changes in initial conditions could have a massive effect on the future conditions of a changing system.
There once was a young Levite couple who had a child at a time when the Hebrews were being suppressed in Egypt. The king had issued a decree calling for the death of every newborn Hebrew male as a way of controlling the Jewish population. When this couple’s child was born it was a male. However, instead of killing him, they hid him in the reads of the Nile River.
The child’s sister watched from afar as the baby was eventually discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter who took him in and raised him as her own. And so, Moses, one of the greatest Hebrew leaders of all time, was saved from certain death. Moses was to grow up and deliver the Jews from slavery, bring us the 10 Commandments and preserve the tribe of Judah, from which Jesus the Savior of the world was born. The butterfly effect? I think not.
At his call to ministry, Jeremiah the prophet heard the Lord say to him: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” In the Psalms, we read, “Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
The Lord God Almighty knows all there is to know about space and time – he created it. Therefore, he knows your present, your past and your future. Every aspect of your life is wrapped up in his will for you. The only thing that could disturb God’s plan for you is if you choose to deliberately dishonor him by rejecting Christ as Lord.
If we acknowledge the Lord in all our ways (as Moses’ parents did) then he will direct our paths. Therefore, you, as a follower of the eternal God, are not subject to the butterfly effect. The outcome of your choices has nothing to do with fate but everything to do with faith if you continue to acknowledge God and walk rightly before him.
You see, God’s plan for your life is not an effect; God’s plan for your life is God’s explicitly designed purpose for you. He works out everything according to his purpose and according to the counsel of his will.