Future, Ignorance of the
Human inability to know the future highlights trust in God's sovereign plan and timing.
None, indeed, can open the "seven-sealed book," or look forward over the dim and shadowy field stretching out illimitably before him. The astronomer discourses on the rate at which a sunbeam travels, and explains how the flashing lightning may be dispersed, and its terrible swoop evaded. He even indicates those spheres where storms never gather, and thunders never roll; but he cannot solve the anxious problems of our future, nor help us by his great wisdom to avoid its manifold evils, because they come unforewarned. Nor will the lives of those gone before avail us, seeing no two lives are marked by the same vicissitudes, or checkered by the same light and shades, the same joy and sorrow. In the eloquent words of a foreign divine, "We can become familiar with a landscape; we know where to find the waterfall, and the shady lodge where the violets grow in spring and the sassafras gives forth its odors: but we can never become familiar with our life-landscape; we can never tell where we shall come upon the shady dell, or where the fountains will gush and the birds sing. That is with God." And his name be praised that it is so! for a definite prescience thereof would, in most instances, cloud the whole course of life, poison every stream of enjoyment, and render existence a curse of no ordinary magnitude.
— Edwin Davies