A Ridiculous Certainty

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While we know few things in life for certain, we live as if we do. If we were really honest with ourselves, there is nothing about the physical world in which we live that is absolutely certain. I think about this sometimes as I drive across the longest curved truss bridge in the U.S., Tallassee’s Benjamin Fitzpatrick Bridge, which was dedicated in 1940. Other bridges like it, built in the same time period, have collapsed or been torn down, and the amount of traffic flowing across our bridge simply weakens it over time, but I take it for granted that each time I make the trip that it will offer safe transport. God is the only One who knows anything with certainty because He is God—sovereign and omnipotent and omnipresent and all the other qualities that we as humans are not. In Genesis, when speaking with Abram before cutting covenant with him, God tells Abram that he can “know for certain” that the nation that would issue from him would be enslaved, that the nation that enslaved his people would be judged, and that Abram himself would live to be an old man and then die in peace before the fourth generation of his people would return to the land promised by God (Gen. 15:13-16). I feel quite sure that others around Abram believed that he was acting foolishly, but Abram believed God anyway, and it was credited to him as righteousness (Rom. 5:22). We ridiculously trust in everything but God, who knows everything for certain. How ridiculous is that?

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