Daily Reflections Feb 15, 2018

Deuteronomy 30: 15 - 20; Luke 9: 22 - 25.

“I have chosen life my Lord and Thou has promised me Life in Abundance. As the world has rejected Christ, so also, I reject the world. I carry my cross for Thy sake and I stumble as I follow Thee. Give me the strength O Lord, to overcome the temptation of vanity and to forfeit the materialism of this world. For this life is just a breath and I, a reed shaking in the wind. Bless me with Thy fortitude and Thy Wisdom, for what can this world offer me when Thou has promised Eternal Life?”

God created the Heavens and the earth so that His creation would persist and thrive according to His will. For who plants a seed and does not wait for the tree to yield flowers and fruit? If so, sinful as we are, we expected to derive pleasure out of the work that we do, how much more should the Lord not expect to derive joy out of His creation? Moreover, the Lord was even kind to give mankind the gift of free will so that we can choose our fate. Then to perfect the conditions of our life, He established guidelines, rules and laws through His Formidable Commandments, Ordinances and Decrees. We must believe that their nature is formidable because the Lord is eternally wise to understand and visualise how His creation can stray away. And so, it happened. First His angels denied Him and tore themselves away from His everlasting grace, breaking away from their ranks where they were expected to serve. In doing that, they fell from grace, lost their magnificent countenance and became deranged with all forms of negative characteristic and evil desires. But instead of repenting for their folly, they plunged themselves further into sin by establishing their own domain to reign over whatever they could steal from the creation that belonged to God. Now the animals, the birds, the fish, the bugs and the microscopic species are secondary to mankind because they possess no moral rationalisation. These creatures sustain their life based on base emotions such as anger, fear, hunger, physical petting and the sexual craving. The Lord in His wisdom provided these creatures with a seasonal instinct to control their tendencies to multiply and he allowed them the freedom to move whilst controlling their movements with territorial and hierarchical instincts within their own species. The trees and the vegetation were given even lesser freedoms, for they have no freedom to change their locations once rooted in the soil. They can only grow their branches and roots towards the source of their nourishment as they depend on bugs, birds, wind and rain for pollination. They too have base instincts and they can communicate only through sensory vibrations. But the Lord had a special love for mankind and he made us supreme over the rest of creation so that through our moral rationalization we would obey His word. God did this, while overseeing everything that was created and put under our control. He made us special in His own image and likeness, establishing our bodies as a Temple of His Holy Spirit so that He could live within us and inspire us with Holiness. The Lord created the earthly environment as a medium for us to thrive and even put His angels to serve us in a way that retains the freedom of our will and induces us to work in a fruitful way. The devil understood all this; he decided to exploit our freedom and put our will against the will of God. The devil destroys our relationship with God by working out and injecting all forms of evil schemes like greed and vanity into our life while God inspires mankind to develop into a highly civilized species that is capable of using all of creation’s natural resources to serve His will. The study of God’s creation we call science and the devil perverts the human mind to think that science is supreme and the source of all wisdom. This pervert and devilish scheme have perpetrated all nodes of life putting materialism as a means of severing mankind from His creator; his God.

Hence, in the book of Deuteronomy 30: 15 - 20, the Lord in His immense wisdom and knowledge about creation has decided that mankind must use his gift of free-will to choose between what is ‘Holy’ and the materialism that has been perverted by the devil. God evidently describes His narrow path leading us through the narrow gate as the path that leads to prosperity and life and the wide easy highway that leads to sin, destruction, and death. It is our choice to make and God has exposed all the intricacies of life helping us to understand everything to the very last detail so that we may make an educated choice. In this way, God extends a pure form of justice to us and prevents any form of ambiguity that the devil continues to use to deceive us.

Yes, God has put the ball in our court and made us choose. God must maintain the greatness of His Holy and Magnificent Name and must not allow the devil to use our weaknesses to tarnish anything that is Holy and Divine. God recognises and understands our weaknesses. God understands how the devil has used materialism and vanity to lure us to what we most desire; Happiness. But the joy and happiness that materialism and vanity give us are all short-lived and the satisfaction evaporates in a few moments after our indulgence in it. Take the example of purchasing and owning a luxury car. A car is a genuine necessity to travel long distances quickly and comfortably. But when we enhance the design of the car to excel in its comfort and use technology to increase its speed, so that the ride becomes more about the thrill-of-speed, the privilege of ownership tentatively providing the owner with a status symbol, then the necessity has been thwarted and perverted with vanity. Once we indulge in too much vanity we lose our sense of compassion towards the downtrodden and in our effort to pamper our body and our senses, we stand a chance of losing our basic understanding of what is necessary and what is real Joy. Because in vanity, the object loses its value after the privilege is exploited.

Knowing this, God laid out His divine plan and sent us a Messiah through Jesus Christ His Son, who liberated us from the slavery of sin and opened up the avenue of ‘mercy’ through which each and every one of us can be saved as long as we emulate His Son Jesus Christ who is the Way and the Truth that leads us to Life. Jesus took all our sins upon Himself, suffered immense pain and died an excruciating death to make that possible for us.He became the sin that was crucified. But, through Jesus’ innocence and Holiness, the sin was converted into mercy and the image of the cross purified and converted from shame into a symbol of Salvation and Hope. That is the greatness of God.But Jesus does not expect us to die. Instead, in the Gospel of Luke 9: 22 - 25, Jesus instructs us to carry our own cross every day and follow Him, to crucify our own sinfulness on a spiritual cross so that we may be made anew as He himself was resurrected. Once we make that sacrifice for Jesus Christ’s sake, we are made a new; we start a new life and our new-found holiness will guide us to the narrow path to find that narrow gate. But for that to happen, we must forsake our hollow pride and the hunt for vanity, greatness and worldly materialistic happiness. Because when we do that, all that we have is the humility and the need for a pure and holy life. But if we resist God’s call, we persist in that evil and vain hunt that can never give us true happiness. In that baseless pursuit, we lose ourselves in sin and our sin renders us selfish, proud and conceited. As these evil qualities grow in a person and his family, disaster becomes eminent. What then is the profit of enjoying all the worldly pleasures of life for a little while and then destroying our soul in hell for eternity? Our soul experiences the life in the flesh for a miniscule moment as compared to the time it will spend in eternity after the earthly death of the body and its return to the spiritual realm. Thus, we must be humble in the heart to give heed to the words of God and Jesus Christ. There is no shame in following Jesus Christ in word and deed because when we live our lives in loyalty and obedience to Him, He will vouch for us before the Glorious Throne of God when our soul stands for Judgement. Let us immerse ourselves in doing what is holy so that we may experience God’s light in this world. Let us allow Christ to save us and lead us to Eternal Life.

- By Bro Maryo