Ideas have consequences; bad ideas bring unnecessary misery.
It’s not enough that we kill ourselves, either slowly or quickly, by embracing folly. We then insist that the world believe the same lies and it makes things far worse for everyone else. The truth of God has been revealed; Our Creator has not been silent. However, the world has determined to close off the truth before asking, and so cannot hear the answers.
I noted in yesterday’s post that Westerners have long embraced the lies to which Job’s friends were clinging. There and in previous other posts I have noted that life here on this plane of existence is not precious and good. There are good things in our human existence, but when I tell people, “Life is good” I’m not referring to that. I’m referring to Life in the Spirit. This world is fallen, broken beyond repair and scheduled for demolition. It was all “very good” as Genesis says at the end of Seven Days of Creation, but regardless how you want to envision instrumentality, cause and blame, it’s not good now. What God made is good; what we have now is not and we bear the burden of guilt.
So things here below often do not make sense and they hurt. That’s our reality and it will not change. The best we can do is claim the blessings of living according to our best understanding of God’s justice. We seek the path back into the Garden through the Flaming Sword of self-sacrifice. The Sword and the Cross are symbols for pretty much the same thing (parables are meant to be confusing on a superficial level because they address the spirit). Part of what the Sword and Cross destroy is our insistence on understanding everything. We have this insatiable craving to have at least some level of control on the intellectual level. We demand things make sense to our human logical definitions of reality. Things cannot be made that way because human talents are incapable of detecting the moral element within our universe. We can learn it exists and begin seeing the patterns, but we cannot detect it of our own accord. It has to come as a gift from God above.
The Sword and Cross are blessings, not curses. They are God’s loving provision for our need to die. So dying is not a bad thing, despite how much it might hurt. Dying is a blessing, a release from this prison. If you choose morally to embrace death before it comes literally, you are free to live without the fear of its power. That’s what I mean by “Life is good.” What’s good is seizing His Laws in a loving embrace and clinging to them with all my might. Nothing else is good in this world.
So we find a world of people rejecting the one good thing in this life and insisting this awful existence is precious itself, that it’s all we have. What a filthy lie! Upon this nasty deception we build a world of oppression that sucks what little good is possible from this life. Consider for a moment all the implications of making this world the ultimate good available to humanity, in effect rejecting the possibility of a moral fabric in the universe. This lie binds all humanity under the chains of deception so deep even most Christians are aghast when you tell them God’s very truth.
The issue with dying and injustice is that so many humans demand the authority to say when others should die. There is the sin: Seizing divine authority without proper accountability to God. It’s not as if God said no one could have the authority to take human life (Genesis 9), but He did emphatically circumscribe how that authority was delivered into human hands. By no means do have today more than a tiny minority of humanity even aware of the limits God prescribed for that authority, much less do we see any general observance of His limits. Not a single civil government today walks in His authority; all are evil from start to finish because they reject God’s revealed boundaries. Even when they kill someone deserving death, they do it for all the wrong reasons. Any shred of justice comes blindly and entirely by accident.
Virtually everyone today wielding some badge of government authority will stand before God on Judgment Day bearing a massive stain of sin the rest of humanity will not have to face. The mere existence of this false authority damns them. There may well be mitigation in His Justice for some, but few will stand before Him under His revealed Laws. Most will have to hear the cacophony of wailing human sorrow from unjust blood on their hands, crying out to God so loudly their attempts at defense will be drowned out. They neither see nor care what God says is justice in this world. It requires a special kind of idiocy to offer significant moral support to most government demands and actions. Christians condemn themselves, standing alongside these monsters before God, when they suggest anything our civil governments do is anywhere close to what God requires.
We tolerate what governments do because it’s not our real concern. God is ultimate Master of all things and bids us keep our eyes on Him and what He requires of us. This life is not precious; obeying His Law is precious. Our one concern is His Justice coming to life in our bodies and souls while they are yet bound under this awful existence. This is His glory for which we bother living.
Don’t cling to this life, Christian; don’t be deceived by the philosophies built by men in defiance of God’s revelation.
