Isaiah 43-44

(January 2, 2015)

                No matter how long our lives are, and no matter what we accomplish with them, the day is coming that we will each die.  Everything that we accomplish will turn to dust (in time) with us.  Everyone we know and love will die.  Every political party, every social cause, every temporal goal – all of these are destined to be destroyed.  Whether you are a believer or an atheist, every person born on this Earth is born to die and all goals and motivations will die along with them.

                So that leads each of us to make our decision as to how to respond to this inevitability.  There are really only two choices available to us that make sense.  The first, for those who believe, is to dedicate our lives wholly and completely to something that will not die – namely our relationship with the Son and the Father.  The second, for those who do not believe, is amoral hedonism and the maximization of personal pleasure.

                What doesn’t make any logical sense is any attempt to intermingle those two positions.  I don’t need to spend much time discussing the atheist attached to the ‘social construct’ of morality because it is almost cliché (think of the amoral atheist dedicated to the political cause of Communism).  Instead, it seems far more valuable to spend my time considering the believer who seeks to dip his or her toes on the hedonistic side of the pool (in other words, all of us).

                There is absolutely no philosophical or conceptual worldview in which this makes sense.  It is almost like the inverse Pascal’s Wager – if we are right in what we believe we are damning ourselves and if we are wrong in what we believe we are losing precious time that could be spent really going off the deep end.  And yet, even though it makes no sense (and most of us realize it makes no sense), we still want to straddle the line between the world and the Lord.  And that makes us good for nothing.

                Of course, like so many things that don’t make sense when considered in one set of terms it clearly makes sense in another way.  The issue is not whether we believe or disbelieve – the issue is whether we will serve God or Satan (or, to put it another way, whether we will accept God or make ourselves gods). We are each choosing our God – we are choosing who we will serve.  If we are choosing ourselves as our god, we will be hedonistic even if we believe.  If we are choosing God, we will be moral even if we don’t believe.  Both sides of the belief aisle probably would dispute this characterization, but I think it is probably pretty accurate.

                Our challenge, then, as believers is to firmly place ourselves in congruence with our beliefs and the things we know to be true.  We need to not only know that God is God, but resolve within our hearts to accept God as our God.  When we do that, our desire to straddle the gulf between the world and the better world to come will diminish.