Life Matters - December 27,2023
‘’If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” ~ C.S. Lewis
That nothing in this world can satisfy the emotional, spiritual, nor the physical aspects of mankind fully nor continuously is most certainly evidenced by the continual quest for complete satisfaction for all three parts of our makeup. It seems there is something in all of us that still desires to return to the emotional, spiritual, and physical perfection our first parents once experienced in the garden of Eden. A desire most certainly abused if we seek that perfection apart from a healed and renewed relationship with our Creator God whose authority over us we so naturally rebel against and reject ever since that life-altering sin. The test in the Garden of Eden involving a fruit tree was not just a question of some otherwise harmless fruit inexplicably forbidden. It was a battle of “whom will you serve.” (Joshua 24:15)
Are the feelings that drive us hither and yon trustworthy or is God and His word trustworthy? In today’s world, when God allows pain, sickness, wars, conflicts, and sorrow (God does not cause bad things to happen, He allows them, as, He ‘’cannot be tempted, neither tempteth He any man’’ – James 1;13) is our trauma about these things right or is God right? That question has historically, and even to the present day, been answered by many a sufferer of trauma, by many a suffering martyr, and by many a sorrowing sinner. All have found relief at “the foot of the cross” in the presence of our suffering Savior, in the cleansing power of His blood, in a restoration of relationship with Him, in the living hope of life after the temporal death of the body.
History leaves no question; 100% of all living creatures will eventually die. None of us are here to stay, and given the uncertainty of life and death in the short span we have here, to ignore the question of “What then?” must be the definition of spiritual insanity. Of an unsound mind. At the end of the day, soundness of mind is proven or unproven by how we relate to that question of all questions, “What then?”
As time leaves 2023 behind, and moves us (whether willingly or unwillingly) into the year 2024, our questing brain may well experience a tinge of trepidation, a concern, that all is not well across almost the entire spectrum of material life on this beleaguered globe we all live on. For now. There are wars and rumors of wars. There are earthquakes in diverse places. Knowledge is increasing at an unprecedented pace. Hmmm…That sounds, for all the world, like end-time Bible prophecy… The world is even “shaping up” to initiate the first ever one-world government, one-world currency, and one-world religion with all three controlled by “the love of money (which) is the root of all evil.’’ (1 Timothy 6:10)
A question that has been rooted in my brain for quite a few decades now has been, “ How can one man (the son of perdition-2 Thessalonians 2:3) rule the whole world?” That question is being answered (and 2024 will likely continue to answer) by the unprecedented advancements in digital technology in general and the advancing of artificial intelligence in particular, especially in this past year. In the quest for preeminence of ideas and ideologies on this spinning orb, the twentieth century gave us two world wars, the atomic bomb and a nuclear age, the cold war, the space race, Vietnam, the Gulf War as well as a U.S. President- John F. Kennedy and a U.S. civil rights leader- Martin Luther King Jr. being shot and killed in Nov. 1963 and April 1968 respectively.
The twentieth century also gave us the ‘’blessing,’’ (not) of digital technology, a “blessing” that this 21st century may well transform into a curse with greater repercussions than the atomic bomb. Materialist thinking, traveling at the speed of light, is being offered as if it were an “angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14) For the first time in this world’s often troubled history it appears possible for one man, (the son of perdition) coupled with a super-intelligent (artificial) robot and a world-wide-web communications system to form an unholy trinity ruling the world with the tyrannical power of finance without the checks and balances of other earthly powers.
Still there remains in the hearts and minds of mankind, a yearning for fulfillment that only the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, can fully and continuously satisfy. That relationship is, for time and eternity, our “return” to the “Garden of Eden.” We are made for another world.
Life Matters!