“Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.”

(Matthew 6:32)

Jesus told his disciples: “God your Father knows what things you are needing.” (Matthew 6:8, NWT 1984) Does this mean that Christians do not have to worry about anything because God cares for them? No, this is not the case. The key to understanding Jesus’ words can be found in another statement that he made a white later: “Two sparrows sell for a coin of small value, do they not? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.” – Matthew 10:29.

So God also “knows” when birds “fall [dead] to the ground, and still “as many as 988 million birds die annually in window collisions” alone. (The Washington Post) Millions more are killed by cats and other predators, or dying from starvation or disease.

What can we learn from this? Granted, God knows when birds “fall to the ground” – but they do “fall to the ground.” God knows that they perish, but he does nothing about it. In the same way he cares for Christians: God ‘knows what things they are needing,’ but he does not give these to them.