“But Jesus did not come down to Earth, become fully human, die, and rise from the dead to pluck us out of a garden. The garden is gone! Our world is not what it appears to be. We live in a lifeless desert. You are spiritually dead, and only hallucinating a world full of satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment. Christ came because of our sinful deprivation.”
Isn’t it interesting that God seems to only get mention when tragedy and death occurs? For something as common and natural as death, (which has been taking place since the beginning with Cain and Able) it is only when encountering them that the world seems to acknowledge God. And it certainly isn’t an honorable or appropriate acknowledgement of God either, who himself defeated death and rendered it powerless over us spiritually. But the anger towards God regularly grows out of arrogance in our human flesh. That somehow, we are entitled to life. That death dishonors our material world and flesh. That we are stripped of something we built ourselves and deserve to keep. There’s a few comments to be made on those statements.
The first is that death was not bestowed upon us by God. It was chosen by us through the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden who acted as representatives of the human race. We disobeyed the command of God by eating from the forbidden tree. As an act of God’s Holy justice and mercy, we were kicked out of the garden. Justice, because we failed to obey and deserved punishment, and mercy because God allowed us to continue to live in our sinful state with hope of a future redemption through Christ instead of instant death at the first bite. Death was the consequence of man’s decision, and redemption was the result of God’s.
So then, as spiritually dead beings, being allowed (by the mercy and grace of God) to walk around alive in the physical, are we so foolish as to trust our own sinful will and condemn God for his correction and judgement as if he owes us the wishes of our darkened heart? We are deprived of all rights to live and we are completely at the mercy of God for our sinfulness. We left the garden a long time ago. It is through physical death and tragedy that we get a glimpse of our spiritual realty separated from God. Pain, sorrow, grief, guilt, shame, regret, isolation, loneliness or whatever feeling we may experience, will be our intensified spiritual reality for all of eternity if we continue following our fleshly desires and disregard God’s calling voice to receive him. Understanding our sinful deprivation is the only thing that puts into perspective how corrupting the desires of the flesh are. Sin is indeed the greatest hallucinogen.
Check out The Mask: Part 2 for more!
Softly Spoken Truth 