The Future Belongs to God

Why our need for certainty can lead us astray

One of the more awkward questions my financial adviser occasionally asks me (with a wry smile) is this: “How long are you planning to live for?” It would make life—and financial planning—so much easier if I could give a clear answer. Ten years? Twenty? Thirty?

But the truth is, I have no idea whether I have a day, a year, or twenty years ahead of me.

And that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. It is simply the reality of being human.

There’s an old piece of wisdom, often attributed to St Augustine:

“Pray as though everything depended on God;

live as though everything depended on you.”

Or as others have put it: live each day as if it were your last, but plan as if you have a lifetime ahead of you. We live, always, in that tension—between uncertainty and responsibility.

And yet, much popular religion tries to escape this tension altogether. It imagines the future as something already fixed—like a script waiting to be revealed, already written in detail if only we could decipher it.

So people search for predictions, signs, and hidden knowledge—not only in the world around them, but sometimes even in the Bible itself, reading it as though it were a coded message waiting to be unlocked.

I remember, years ago, coming across a Christian leaflet by a popular writer who suggested that every word—even every letter—of Scripture could be translated into a numerical code, forming a hidden pattern that “proved” its divine origin and revealed deeper meanings. It was as though the Bible itself were a puzzle waiting to be cracked.

At times, this can give rise to an image of God that is not unlike a kind of celestial puzzle-maker—setting hidden patterns and expecting us to decipher them. It brings to mind the unsettling figure of the Celestial Toymaker from an early Doctor Who series (1966): a god-like being who traps people in games, where everything is controlled and nothing is quite what it seems.

This is an idea that has captured the imagination in many forms—from popular novels to strands of religious teaching, including well-known interpretations of the Book of Revelation that attempt to map out the end of the world in detail, as seen in works like The Late Great Planet Earth or the Left Behind series.

It is not hard to see the attraction of such thinking. If everything were already mapped out, and we could learn how to read the pattern, then our vulnerability—our sense of exposure to the unknown—could give way to certainty. The future would no longer need to be trusted—it could be known.

Of course, some might ask: if God is sovereign, must not the future already be known—perhaps even fixed? But even if that were so, it does not follow that we are meant to decode it. Scripture is not presented as a hidden system of information about what will happen, but as a living word that shapes who we are becoming.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this longing can also create opportunities for those willing to offer certainty—for a price. But the deeper issue is not only those who exploit our vulnerability. It is our own readiness to seek certainty where trust is being asked of us. As Peter Enns has observed in his book The Sin of Certainty, the desire for certainty can easily become spiritually dangerous. Once we believe we are unquestionably right, it becomes all too easy to dismiss—or even harm—those who see things differently.

If we pause and reflect for a moment, Scripture was not given to satisfy our curiosity about the future, but to form our lives in the present.

And Jesus consistently refuses to satisfy that kind of curiosity. Instead, he points us somewhere quite different.

The longing behind the question

Every generation seems fascinated by the future.

Nostradamus, astrology, Tarot cards, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic prophecies—and now the endless stream of YouTube videos and online commentary that quietly feeds our curiosity—people invest enormous time and energy trying to decipher what is coming next. I occasionally feel the pull of that curiosity myself.

But the more I reflect on it, the more I begin to suspect that the question itself is pointing in the wrong direction. The longing to know the future is, very often, a longing to feel safe. If we knew what was coming, perhaps we could prepare ourselves. Perhaps we could avoid loss, or suffering, or uncertainty. Perhaps we could finally relax.

But certainty rarely produces peace. More often, it produces anxiety.

It is as though the quest for certainty quietly feeds the very anxiety it is trying to resolve.

When the question is real

It is important to say that not all concern about the future is misplaced. Sometimes the question arises from a right sense of responsibility, not mere curiosity. At times, we all face decisions about health, relationships, work, or conflict. We long, quite naturally, for guidance. We want to know what is wise, what is right, what will lead to life.

The Bible does not dismiss that longing. Again and again, people seek God’s guidance—through prayer, through listening, through wise counsel.

But there is also a warning.

There is a story in the Old Testament about King Saul, facing a battle and desperate to know what will happen. When God does not answer him, he turns, in his fear, to a medium (1 Samuel 28).

What begins as anxiety becomes something else: an attempt to force an answer.

And the result is not clarity, but deeper darkness.

The story is extremely unsettling. Even the medium is shocked by what happens. And when Samuel appears, instead of offering reassurance, he brings a truth that exposes the path Saul has chosen. It is a sobering picture of what can happen when the desire for guidance slips into the need for control.

The issue is not that Saul wanted to know what lay ahead. It is that he could not bear the “not knowing.”

You can see this especially in apocalyptic movements—groups fixated on the end times, date-setting preachers, or Christians endlessly trying to decode wars, disasters, and political events as secret signs that history is about to end.

Again and again, world events are interpreted as evidence that Armageddon is just around the corner. At times, people have even made serious decisions on the basis of such readings—convinced they can see where history is heading.

But this is not so far removed from Saul’s mistake. It is an attempt to grasp certainty in the face of uncertainty—to find out what God has not chosen to reveal.

And, like Saul, it rarely leads to peace. It more often deepens fear.

Perhaps this is why Jesus refuses to give us the kind of knowledge we think we want—not because guidance is unimportant, but because trust is more fundamental than certainty.

Jesus’ surprising refusal

When people asked Jesus about the future, he almost always refused to give them what they wanted.

“About that day or hour no one knows…” (Matthew 24:36)

“It is not for you to know the times or seasons…” (Acts 1:7)

These are not evasive answers. They are deliberate. Instead of offering a timetable, Jesus repeatedly redirects attention to something much closer at hand:

How are you living now?

It is almost as if he is saying:

The future belongs to God. Your task is love.

A deeper shift

This is where the Gospel invites a profound change of perspective. Christian faith does not give us detailed information about the future. What it gives us is trust in the character of God.

That is a very different way of living.

Instead of asking, “What will happen?” we are invited to ask, “Who is God—and can I trust him?”

If God is trustworthy, then we do not need to know the future in order to live faithfully.

The kingdom is not a script

Part of the confusion, I think, comes from how we imagine the future itself. In much popular religion, the future is treated as something already written—like a script waiting to be uncovered. The task of faith, then, becomes decoding that script.

But Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God in a very different way.

“The kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:21)

Not simply coming later, but present now. Not a fixed sequence of events, but a living reality unfolding.

The future, in this sense, is not something we are trying to discover. It is something that is being formed—moment by moment—through love or its absence. We are not simply waiting for the kingdom to arrive as a finished reality. We are participating in its unfolding.

Which means that our choices matter.

Every act of mercy, truth, forgiveness, or courage contributes to the future.

Every act of fear, domination, or indifference distorts it.

The temptation to control

There is, however, a deeper layer to all this, an even older echo of this in the biblical story.

In Genesis, the first temptation is not simply about disobedience, but about grasping knowledge—reaching for something that promises to make us secure, to make us “like God.” It is the desire to know, to define, to take hold; the attempt to take upon ourselves the role of determining and securing reality.

And ever since, human beings have struggled with that same impulse.

Not simply to trust God with the future,

but to grasp it for ourselves.

Very early in the Gospels, Jesus faces a series of temptations in the wilderness uniquely tailored to his calling. They are often read as moral tests. But they can also be seen as something more fundamental: an invitation to take control of the future.

Turn stones into bread—secure your own survival.

Throw yourself from the temple—force certainty, remove all doubt.

Take power over the kingdoms of the world—guarantee success.

Each temptation offers the same thing: control—

Remove uncertainty. Secure the outcome. Take hold of history.

And Jesus refuses every one of them.

Instead, he entrusts himself to the Father.

The one person who could have controlled events chooses not to.

That refusal is not weakness. It is the very heart of his way.

Love happens now

Again and again, Jesus brings the focus back to the present.

Feed the hungry.

Welcome the stranger.

Forgive one another.

Care for the vulnerable.

None of these require knowledge of the future. They require attention to what is in front of us. Perhaps this is why Jesus speaks so directly about worry:

“Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will worry about itself.” (Matthew 6:34)

This is not naïve optimism. It is an invitation to live rooted in trust rather than prediction. Because the more we try to control the future, the more we lose the capacity to love well today.

The quiet freedom of not knowing

There is something deeply liberating about accepting that we do not know the future. It frees us from the exhausting task of trying to control what cannot be controlled. It allows us to focus on what is actually within our reach:

faithfulness rather than prediction

love rather than control

trust rather than anxiety

And perhaps this is where we discover something surprising.

We do not need to know the future in order to live well.

We only need to respond to what is given to us now.

A modern echo

There is a striking modern illustration of this dynamic in the television series Breaking Bad created by Vince Gilligan.

It tells the story of an ordinary man—a schoolteacher, devoted to his family—who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Faced with the prospect of leaving his wife and children financially insecure, he decides to use his skills in chemistry to produce and sell drugs, hoping to provide for them after his death.

At first, the motivation is understandable—even deeply sympathetic.

But the moment he steps into that world, something begins to shift. What starts as a desperate attempt to secure the future slowly draws him into the criminal world—a reality shaped by fear, control, violence, and compromise.

And as the story unfolds, you see not only the consequences of his actions, but the gradual erosion of his character. The man who set out to protect his family becomes someone very different from who he once was.

The tragedy is not simply what he does, but what he becomes.

It is a sobering picture.

The issue is not that he cared about the future. It is that he tried to secure it in a way that led him away from trust—and into control.

A final thought

We often ask, What is going to happen?

But perhaps the deeper question is this: What kind of world are we helping to bring into being?

The future is not simply something that will arrive. It is something, in part, entrusted to us.

And yet it is not ours to control. It belongs to God.

Some may ask what this means for the ultimate outcome of all things—whether all will finally be reconciled to God. That remains, for me, a matter of hope rather than definition. But the Gospel’s focus is not on settling that question, but on how we are living now—in trust, in love, and in relationship with God.

Which means we are free—not to predict tomorrow, but to live faithfully today.

And that, it turns out, is enough.

Jeremy Marks, 25th March 2026