So far in my
musings about the meaning and purpose of life, I have tried to show that there
is a God who exists and that he is greater than all that we can imagine, and he
created and owns everything and doesn’t need our advice and counsel to figure out
how to run the world. The second thing we looked at is the Bible’s teaching
that God’s purpose for all he does is for his glory. We were created by him in
his image in order to reflect his glory and majesty, and when we get
side-tracked from that we lose our focus and find ourselves without meaning and
purpose.
Within ourselves
we know that something is not right with the world, or even with ourselves for
that matter. We have a sense of the kind of love that should pervade human
society, and yet that love is woefully missing. There are some glimmers of it,
but there are an awful lot of dark places. This is true on a global scale, and
it is true within our own circle of family and friends. Things often seem
pleasant and people seem happy, but there is a lot of friction, discontent,
abuse, and anger around. We know this is true and we know it should be better
than it is.
In addition to
interpersonal and international frictions, it seems as though nature is messed
up. In many ways nature is beautiful, but even there we see death, violence and
a sort of unsettledness both in the living world and in non-living aspects of
the world such as weather and geological instability. How are we to explain
this? Atheists and naturalists have their ways, but to me these are not
satisfactory.
The Bible’s
explanation is that God gave one specific negative command. Human beings, in
the person of the first man, Adam, disobeyed God’s command and rebelled against
the creator and owner. As a result, he brought the curse of death upon the
whole human race and upon creation itself. The Bible says that the whole
creation groans (Romans 8:22). We as people groan because we are plagued with
sickness and decaying bodies. We groan because making our living is not easy.
Nature resists our attempts to grow food and to build a decent life for
ourselves. We find rust and decay affecting virtually everything we make, and
it takes work to keep things in good repair and working order.
When God cursed
us, he told us that disobedience would cause death. And that is what we see all
around us. As time went on God gave us
more and more commandments in order to show us his character and to allow us to
see just how far from his path we have wandered. Through the ten commandments
and other moral instructions given in the Bible, God shows us where the line
is, and we can see clearly how far we’ve fallen, and how impossible it is to
live the way God designed us to live. Sometimes we look at commandments as
overbearing and authoritarian, but God is the one who designed us along with
the rest of the world. He is the one who knows how these bodies, minds and
spirits work best. His commands are to provide a way of living that works best.
Ultimately, we find that we can’t live by those standards even if we try. We
don’t have it within us to comply. That too is part of the consequences of our
fallen nature. We don’t really want to live like God wants us to. We don’t want
God to be telling us what to do. We want our independence.
God tells us in
Romans 1:18 and following that the crux of the problem is that even though we
know God is there and that he is powerful, we naturally do not give him the
glory that he is due and we are not thankful to him for all that he has
provided. We just assume we have a right to everything. We end up worshipping
and serving created things, such as ourselves, or the stuff we can own, more
than we worship God. This leads to sins of every kind that Paul lists for us in
this passage. The chapter ends with these sobering words, “who, knowing the
righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of
death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.”
This is where
many people jump ship. They say, “I just can’t believe that being disobedient
to my parents, or living in sexually immoral ways, or being selfish is worthy
of the death penalty.” The neat thing about living in America is that we are
free to believe anything we want, and no one else can dictate our conscience to
us. We can live in the ways described here and believe that we are just fine.
We’re allowed to do that. The thing we
need to ask ourselves is whether all of this is OK with the God who is actually
there. God is either like he is described in the Bible or he is not. At some
point each of us has to come to grips with the possibility, and I would say
reality, that God actually does have standards, and that he actually does care
how we live, and that he actually does impose the death penalty on those who
fall short of his standards.
Having said that,
though, we need to resist the temptation to think that it is those other people
who have the death penalty on them while we walk free. You see, the argument
Paul is trying to make in the book of Romans is that every single person is
guilty. In fact, in the next verse after citing the death penalty, he makes
this statement. “Therefore, you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who
judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who
judge practice the same things” Romans 2:1. I used to think this verse was not
true of me. I would look at people who were doing terrible things and judge
them and congratulate myself for not being like that. But this verse tells me
quite clearly that I do the same things. Jesus, for example, tells us that to
be angry is like murder in God’s eyes. Lusting after a woman is like committing
adultery. The standard is very high, and I have fallen short. The death penalty
looms.
Thus, we end
today’s musings with the conundrum that God’s standards are so high and so
strict, that we find everyone in the world is guilty before their creator and
are under the just condemnation of God. Who then can be saved?
