Life Matters - August 23, 2023
The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist adjusts the sails. (Paraphrased from Tidbits). With the growing divide in America, the temptation becomes a lowering of the sails, to give up and to just “let her drive.” (Acts 27:15) After all, we get tired. Tired of fighting the winds of change. Tired of being buffeted by liberal “elites” and their dumbed-down worshipers who only have a fight because conservatives give them one. All we have to do is give up and become one of them. To be “as the waves of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed.” (John 1:6) No, wait, God has a warning for all who take that route. A route that is no route, has no charted course, has no purpose, no future deliverance and the ultimate goal becomes a blind eye to the future, lest feelings be disturbed and the now open eyes of angst reveal the destructive shoals and the enemy of souls, awaiting, prepared for all such careless wayfarers who will surely be driven to destruction unless repentance is wrought and the direction corrected. Otherwise, “Let not that man think,” God warns, through James, “that he shall receive anything of the Lord.” (James 1:7)
Whether speaking of trees or of ships, God is very clear in His allegorical teachings that only the fruit-bearing tree, only the guided ship, will escape an otherwise sure destruction. A destruction that we material-realm earth-dwellers find difficult to face and hard to fathom. God’s word gives us an eye for the future and upon repentance, the hope of deliverance upon arrival at the end of our temporal life. A hope that is not baseless wishful thinking, but a hope that resides and finds rest in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Who died for us that we might live. Eternal Life. He rose again for our justification. Seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Interceding for us. Desiring the right direction for us. Where Jesus saves!
God created us with a free will – He gave us, according to His unfathomable will, the ability, the freedom to choose right or wrong, good or bad, mediocre or best. And in giving us free will, the ability to choose, God has limited Himself. He is all-powerful but at the same time, for His own reasons, has given us free will ability to take our own way, or to choose His.
The atheist stares at the evil in the world and proclaims the Christian God to be either unmerciful or unable to stem the flow of hurt and destruction. Therefore, they say, it is all up to us. It is up to us to stem the flow of evil. But in the atheist worldview who or what determines right from wrong? Good from evil? Is it natural law? The laws of nature? It is God who wove natural law into His creation, into nature itself. Therefore any recourse to natural law is, by its very nature, an acknowledgment that God is, that He exists. And what if God does exist? What if righteous laws are a reflection of His goodness? What if He is almighty? What if we are accountable to Him?
It is these types of unlimited “what ifs” that challenge us to the core of who we are; do they not? Despite our macho front or feminine allure front, is there not a sense of insecurity, a sense of an unsure little boy, an unsure little girl, in each one of us? Is there not a cause? Is this not the cause of the growing divide in American society and politics? That on the one hand the unsure in us is reaching out for surety, for stability, and on the other hand are the perpetually unsure insisting that we can never be sure of anything? That there is no Truth?
God has this. He limited Himself when He created us, beginning with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the ability to choose His way or our own. To partake of the fruit of deciding right and wrong for ourselves or to trust Him to guide us.
God has woven natural law into the very order of things. Therefore secular humanism is not only a fight against God, it has become a fight against nature itself. Man the sails, ye faithful men! God’s call is in the wind. Life Matters!