When I and my sister were young children we use to regularly have babysitters when our parents went out in the evenings. Some of the babysitters were fun! Some weren’t. The fun ones were the ones that let us play wild games that normally our parents would never let us do in the house if they were home. I remember one of the fun babysitters in particular.
We came up with this incredibly fun game we played with silly putty in the upstairs hall. Now my parent’s bedroom was at the end of the hall and a bathroom at the other end. One of us would be in the middle and one at each end of the hall. We would have to throw the silly putty from one end of the hall to the other trying to keep the person in the middle from intercepting it. If they did the person who threw it had to go into the middle. It was wild because silly putty bounces so wildly!
We had a great time doing something in the house we knew we shouldn’t be doing. But we weren’t worried because we knew what time our parents were coming home. We could stop and clean up long before they returned. No harm done and a great time had by all. Until one Saturday morning: I will never forget. For we were awakened to the loud angry sound of our name; and when my eyes caught sight of my Fathers face it was frightfully full of wrath, that I thought spelled my doom.
It turns out, that unaware to us, the silly putty had hit and broken a precious clock on my father’s dresser. Our gig was over. Our deception was found out. It was a painfully unpleasant experience so I won’t go into the details. I will let your own imagination fill in the details of the judgment that befell us. (By the way we never saw that babysitter again!).
The moral of the story is that as long as we thought we knew what time my parents would return we thought we could get away with doing things we knew they didn’t approve of. We thought they would never find out. How wrong our human childish thoughts were! There were reasons for them not allowing us to do certain things in the house. After we learned that lesson we never tried to do that again. We played games that were just as fun but ones we knew would never cause possible damage or upset our parents if they found out.
God in His eternal wisdom has helped prevent us from falling into many hurtful sins by not telling us what time He is coming back to Judge us according to our works. If we thought we knew the time we would start playing sinful games we shouldn’t, thinking it would be all right because we will stop before Christ returns to judge the world. But also we know “our sin will find us out.” We can hide nothing from God. So we should never do anything that would displease Him.