As a Christian my identity is not in myself, but in Christ. I am ashamed to say that I do not always live up to the standards of the ten commandments because, well, I’m human. And humans are messy, destructive, ruinous creatures. As much as we want to admit that we are not, we are. Our current culture wants to tell us that we were born with a distinctly divine and good nature, but I see this as far from the truth.
Some may consider my beliefs cult-like. What I think people need to understand about Christians is that we strive to be like Christ: the perfect human to ever live or that ever shall live. We strive to better ourselves and become more kind, just, giving, slow to anger, and simply love people for their faults and their strengths. We wish to love the person not the bad things that they have done or will do. We want to set aside those things and get to the heart of the issue. Do you believe that you can get to heaven?
I believe I will someday. I have dreamt of the day that my Savior comes back to deliver his people into heaven. Sort of like the popular song, I Can Only Imagine, where the writer of the song describes what he imagines he may do in the presence of God on Judgement Day. Oh yeah, I believe in a Judgement Day. All our bad deeds will be laid out into play like a video in front of us. The question is, does each individual actually believe in their hearts that Jesus took that filthy video and replaced your name in the credits with His? He took the blame for it on the cross. Shallow analogy I know and understand, but I think it helps paint an over simplified version of what that will be like.
Don’t take my word for it either. Who am I? I’m a no one. Just months after I die, people will forget about me and go back to living their lives. My legacy is pointless. John Green said it best in The Fault in Our Stars (Basic white girl quote, I know).
“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
Most humans do indeed ignore the point of human oblivion. I love this quote by John Green very dearly because it so accurately illustrates Genesis 3:19:
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
It’s funny how a lot of themes that are so-called “deep” and “altruistic” come directly from scripture itself. In this case, John Green has simply reused a watered down version of the rich and bountiful Word of God. Ecclesiastes (one of my favorite books of the Bible) talks of this notion as well.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
To some this may seem like an incredibly depressing and sad look at life. You may even be thinking to yourself, “Well if God is keeping a tally of our good and bad, and everything is pointless, then what’s the point?” What is the point? Why do we keep living? These are no small or unimportant questions. An oversimplified answer to these questions: The point is to receive the promise of grace that God has given to us so that we may live and continue to praise and serve Him with new and perfect bodies now and in the life to come. Our current shells that we call our bodies are not perfect, and God cannot have imperfection within His presence. He has promised us new and perfect bodies when we die and go to heaven.
Can you imagine? Never becoming tired when you run, no more getting sick, no more pulled muscles, no more crying or hurt or pain, no more sleeping to invigorate, no more mental health issues, no more. God intends the best for us. But not now. In order to receive these gifts we have to pay a price, which is death. It is the one way gate that we must go through in order for our bodies to be remade into the perfect beings that God intended us to be. That’s the other thing. IT’S NOT ABOUT US.
We as Christians tend to think that the Bible is a book that God wrote for us to help guide us and tell us what to do and how to live. This is true in a sense but it is not the whole picture of what the Bible is. The Bible is a book about God for humans, not a book about humans for humans. It’s a book written by man inspired by God.
Pick it up and read it some time. I promise if you read it cover to cover you won’t be disappointed.
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