Why is there such a thing as risk? Because there is such a thing as ignorance. If there were no ignorance there would be no risk.
Risk is possible because we don’t know how things will turn out.
This means that God can take no risks.1 He knows the outcome of all his choices before they happen. This is what it means to be God over against all the gods of the nations (Isaiah 41:23; 42:8- 9; 44:6-8; 45:21; 46:8-11; 48:3). And since he knows the outcome of all his actions before they happen, he plans accordingly.
His omniscience rules out the very possibility of taking risks.2
But not so with us. We are not God; we are ignorant. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. God does not tell us in detail what he intends to do tomorrow or five years from now.
Evidently God intends for us to live and act in ignorance and in uncertainty about the outcome of our actions.
You don’t know if your heart will stop before you finish reading this page. You don’t know if some oncoming driver will swerve out of his lane and hit you head-on in the next week, or
if the food in the restaurant may have some deadly virus in it, or if a stroke may paralyze you before the week is out, or if some man with a rifle will shoot you at the shopping center. We are not God. We do not know about tomorrow.
Therefore risk is woven into the fabric of our finite lives. We cannot
avoid risk even if we want to. Ignorance and uncertainty about tomorrow is our native air. All of our plans for tomorrow’s activities can be shattered by a thousand unknowns whether we
stay at home under the covers or ride the freeways. One of my aims is to explode the myth of safety and to somehow deliver you from the enchantment of security. Because it’s a mirage. It doesn’t exist. Every direction you turn there are unknowns and things
beyond your control.
The tragic hypocrisy is that the enchantment of security lets us take risks every day for ourselves but paralyzes us from taking risks for others on the Calvary road of love. We are deluded and think that it may jeopardize a security that in fact does not even exist. The way I hope to explode the myth of safety and to disenchant you with the mirage of security is simply to go to the Bible and show that it is right to risk for the cause of Christ, and not to is to waste your life.
"Don't Waste Your Life" by John Piper
