Fate, the hand of God guiding us towards the destination He desires, or an unknown impersonal force pushing us towards an unknown goal by something that doesn’t really have feelings.

Hi, I’m Brandon Foster from Foster of Vlog. Today we’re going to look at one video to show the example of what I’m talking about, how our culture views fate.

Like most things, there are really two different sides. Primarily, you have the Christian side, especially the reform side, which views a very, uh, predestine type of fate where God pushes, pulls, and has a direct influence in what we do. His way is the way that goes, whatever he wants, wins. The other side is free will, where there is no God.

God does not really push or pull. Uh, if he does exist, he doesn’t really do much to change anything. Now there is a view in the middle, and this is kind of where I want to talk about, and this middle view kind of meshes both. . It’s kind of the predestine view of the reformed, but it’s also the kind of do what I want, but there’s something pushing and pulling, but it’s not a personal being.

This is what I want to focus on today. And to me, this is really one of those areas where I think that we actually do understand and we truly do. that there is a being that uh, or at least there’s something, maybe not necessarily a being, but there’s something that drives us. There’s something deep down here (heart) and here (mind) that we can tell is pushing us towards something.

Um, again, reformed Christians think that’s God. We believe that God is the pusher and puller of the world. He created it, he authored it. He spoke it into being with one word, and from then he has been continually molding the world. Um, this middle path is trying to keep that molding going, but they want to remove God.

But before we continue too much, let’s watch the clip that I want to show us and then we’ll continue our discussion.

“Kids, I’ve been telling you the story of how I met your mother, and while there’s many things to learn from this story, this may be the biggest. The great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do. They’ll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I’m not saying you can’t take action to affect the outcome of your life.

You have to take action, and you will, but never forget that on any day, you can step out the front door and your whole life can change forever. You see, the universe has a plan, kids, and that plan is always in motion. A butterfly flaps its wings and it starts to rain. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also kind of wonderful.

All these little parts of the machine constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you’re supposed to be, exactly when you’re supposed to be there, the right place at the right time.”

So as you can see from that clip, this show, for those who are not aware of the name, this show is called “How I Met Your Mother,” and it is about this character Ted. Now, Ted, throughout the whole show is dictating to his children the story of how he met their mother. Um, hence the title of the show, and a theme he talks about a lot throughout the whole show is this concept of destiny. He’s looking for the one, the one that Destiny has prepared. and he talks about the universe quite a bit. The universe has this plan. The universe did this. What is the universe trying to say to me? And when I first watched it as a, you know, a young adult, I more chuckled at the whole universe concept.

But now as I’ve gotten older, and especially this last run through, that scene struck me. and it struck me not because of the, you know, absurdity of the universe of looking towards a impersonal created, you know, object and thinking that it has a plan for you.

While that is absurd, it’s neither here nor there. What really got me was how close the writers for this show got In dictating or depicting a reformed view of life in Christianity, we believe, as I’ve said, that God is dictating what happens. God, may not control every aspect, but there are key events in every person’s life that, or at least in most people’s life, that God says will happen.

And no matter what we want, God is pushing us towards that. This show shows that that’s not just a reformed belief, that that belief is written, is etched inside of all of us. We all feel the pull towards that type of understanding. We truly believe that there is something out there that is guiding us towards God or towards an event. Um, and I think we all understand. We like to fight it. Um, but we all believe that. This is why our culture, and for most of human history, we have had certain things like tarot cards, we’ve had things like seances, you know, speaking to the dead, and they can tell us what we should do in our lives because somehow the dead have a view into the world that we can’t.

This is why we do Zodiac signs. You know, when you were born dictates who you will be and who you will get along with. And a person with one sign should be friends with another or shouldn’t be friends with others. And we crave this kind of box to put ourselves in. We want to be in the box because the box guides us. It’s the idea of walking either down a corridor with lights and walls, and we feel protected. Or it’s like walking through a deserted jungle, or what you feel is deserted, and you feel vulnerable. That is the difference. We crave the corridor. We still want to choose things, and that free will is still definitely a thing, but we crave that there is something guiding us toward the destination, that it is not just fully up to us, and that every decision is either do or die. We crave that thing to, you know, give us the pushes and the shoves toward what we want. This show shows that Ted, through this whole story, which starts when he’s in his middle twenties, ends when he’s in his middle-late thirties.

So for about 10 years, he is craving what he calls Destiny. And this is a pinnacle scene in that storyline. And I thought it’d be an interesting exercise to take what the writers had written, and tweak a couple of pieces and replace when they say universe or machine or anything abstract and turn it into a reformed thought.

So the universe would be God. And I thought it’d be very interesting to see how reformed this line actually is if we did that. So the rewriting goes like this.

“kids, I’ve been telling you the story of how I met your mother. And while there are many things to learn from this story, this may be the biggest, but the great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do. They’ll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I’m not saying you can’t take action to affect the outcomes of your life. You have to take action and you will, but never forget that on any day you can step out the door and your whole life can change forever. You see, God has a plan kids, and that plan is always in motion. A butterfly flaps its wings and it starts to rain. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also kind of wonderful. All these little parts of God’s plan constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you’re supposed to be, exactly when you’re supposed to, the right place at the right time.”

That sounds extremely reformed. and it’s so fascinating that a very liberal show in a very liberal country can be so conservative and so reformed. They were this close, an inch away from hitting reformed Christian theology. And I think this is one of the things that is fascinating about humanity and reality.

We are never that far from God. God is always right there, but that little gap is something that, one, we can’t breach on our own, and two, we will never want to breach. We want to parallel next to God without having Him. And that’s what makes us such an enemy of God. Scripture talks about, or Paul writes in scripture, that we are enemies of God.

Certain Christians want to please God, but they wanna do it on their own terms. The story of Abraham kind of gives that example. But what really makes us so antagonistic to God is we want to take everything he’s done, everything about him, and rewrite him out of the story.

And that is what is kind of crazy. We desire Something. A thread of destiny, of fate, to tie all of us together to tie everything in a tapestry of beauty. But we don’t want the weaver, we want the thread. We want beauty. We want connectivity. We want our destiny, but we don’t want the person weaving it. We want it to weave itself, and yet we complain when things aren’t personal. It’s a big thing Americans complain about. Well, we want it to be personally tailored to me it’s like, one, none of us are that special. Two, we have a personal being, God, who wants to have a personal relationship with you. He wants to be there with them, and yet we want to throw him out because we don’t like the idea of consequences.

This is something I’ll talk about a little bit more in my next video as we continue through this series, but we want the father without the judge. We want the action without the consequence. We want fate without responsibility. And that is what’s fascinating and very interesting about our society and society, I think in a hole across the entire globe, we are this close when we talk about God, our theology is this close at any given day, but we want to write God out of it.