People are so smug! They actually think that they have everything under control. It’s part of our obsession with comfort (what Francis Sheaffer called peace and affluence) and our so called right to the American dream. Right from the beginning the influences of a fallen nature set the stage for the rest of our life. If you cry, you get food, shelter, and comfort. What makes you think we have changed all that much since someone was last changing our diaper? We still whine and moan until we either embrace the illusion or create one for ourselves, the delusion to bring us relative peace of mind. I remember many years ago seeing some bumper sticker or sign that said, ‘relax, it’s later than you think’. Now that time has become a reality for me because to be quite frank about it, it seems as if it were just yesterday! There is a propensity or bent toward sin but even with talking about sin our minds gravitate toward something most often that has nothing to do with which to have a meaningful and constructive conversation about the very thing that’s our greatest enemy and the most destructive force to our mind, body, and souls. Even Satan himself is not nearly the threat that sin is. Sin is a problem that God took on, He wasn’t threatened by Satan, he was already defeated. Christ died because of sin, not Satan. Sin was and is the very thing that separates us from God. So that brings me back to my point, our way of thinking. I don’t want to talk so much about the acts of transgression against a Holy and Righteous Judge, but rather I want to talk about its nature, the moral malaise. That moral inability to do the very thing we ought to be doing. The very thing that we really desire and long for is pointed in a different direction and we just keep walking away from it. Like I said, we are smug. When we were children we had active imaginations, a virtual playing ground to keep us engaged, active, and entertained. But none of it was real. When we were in school the future was in the future. That is to say, we didn’t have to live in the present because we were becomming. After graduation we assume the world to be waiting for us with open arms while all the while we are fully engaged in narcissim. In mythology Narcissus according to wikipedia.org “was a hunter from the territory of Thespiae in Boeotia who was renowned for his beauty. He was exceptionally proud, in that he disdained those who loved him. As divine punishment he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool, not realizing it was merely an image, and he wasted away to death, not being able to leave the beauty of his own reflection.” You get the picture. So we join the corporation and there’s nothing but blue skies ahead until many years from then just to find out how much of a lie that really was. But here is the kicker… you wanted to believe it so much you did. You reach retirement and all is well except that now the fantasy is wearing pretty thin like the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’. No wonder why we talk about grumpy old men as if that could never end up being us, after all we are too enlightened for that to happen?
Now we must rush off to the job, career, mission, or whatever as if we really knew what we are doing. We have it all figured out. A few more years of this and I will be there and we never live in the present. I mean the present is too boring and cynical, right? But that is where God lives, in the NOW, after all isn’t He the great I AM? Not I was, or not I will be but I AM. He is a trancendant God who is not confined by time. There is no beginning or end.
The answer my friend is not OUT THERE. It is IN HIM, right here, right now or it doesn’t exist at all. AW Tozer said, “If we are to bring back the spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is”. The perspective that we should have is that we are never alone, we never were.”Fate it seems is not without a sense of irony” (The Matrix).
