As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!”
But Lot said to them, “No, my lords, please! Your servant has found favor in your eyes, and you have shown great kindness to me in sparing my life. But I can’t flee to the mountains; this disaster will overtake me, and I’ll die. Look, here is a town near enough to run to, and it is small. Let me flee to it—it is very small, isn’t it? Then my life will be spared.”
He said to him, “Very well, I will grant this request too; I will not overthrow the town you speak of. But flee there quickly, because I cannot do anything until you reach it.” (That is why the town was called Zoar.)
By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
- Genesis 19:17-26
Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks backis fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
- Luke 9:62
“Born in Granada, Spain, the Jesuit philosopher Francisco Suarez wrote on many topics, but is best known for his writings on metaphysics. In the controversy over universal forms that dominated so much philosophy of the time, he argued that only particulars exist. Suarez also maintained that between Thomas Aquinas’s two types of divine knowledge-the knowledge of what is actual and the knowledge of what is possible-there exists ‘middle knowledge’ of what would have been the case had things been different. He believed that God has ‘middle knowledge’ of all our actions, without this meaning that God caused them to happen or that they are unavoidable”
- Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained
“They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’ little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Francisco Suárez (1584-1617) was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian. He contributed to the School of Salamanca. His works have been considered the turning point from the scholasticism of medieval philosophy to second or modern scholasticism.
But the thought that God deals in ‘middle knowledge’ is absurd in my thinking. But when people try to resolve God’s sovereignty with our free will, then God is probably the only one who can handle ‘middle knowledge.’
What if someone is among the elect and during their childhood, they reject God. But then in their early twenties they sense something is wrong in their lives. They hear a friend talk about how wonderful his life is since he accepted Jesus. He is lured close but again rejects God. But then when there are is grief and sorrow in his life, he turns to the God he had rejected more than once and accepts Him.
Is that God having ‘middle knowledge’ or is that God knowing this person is one of His and He will not give up?
For us, we often look back, at least I am guilty of it. Guilt might not be the right word. Often, I look back and see God at work getting me to where I am now. If we are giving God the glory when we were taking a crooked road getting to our present point, then that is not so bad.
But the coulda, woulda, shoulda moments in life get us into trouble. If I could have gone back… If I would have gone back… But I should have done…
If we look back to ponder what it would have been like if you had married someone else, or taken that other job, or some other major decision in your life… We are rejecting how God got us where we are. But if not thumbing our nose to God’s sovereignty, we are at the least wasting our time.
Let us glorify God in getting us to this point and trust God with our next step.
And maybe C.S. Lewis is right, for those who love Jesus, the worst of our suffering will be glorious. But the best pleasure in a sin will turn to sorrow for those who reject God.
As for the Scriptures, Lot’s wife looked back longingly, I am sure. She looked back to see what she lost rather than trusting in God with what she had. And Jesus tells a would-be follower that going back home to say Goodbye if like the farmer who turns around to see if the row he has just plowed is straight. Any farmer knows that the only way to make the row straight is to fix your eyes on a point ahead and never look to the left or right.
I guess the biggest error in looking back is that we take our eyes off Jesus.
If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.
Soli Deo Gloria. Only to God be the Glory.
Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley 
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