Day 3413 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 16:16 NIV

Indeed, how much better to know where you’re going than a life lived assuming you’re already there?

For such is the half-existence in which we’ve come to this insistence upon the lone substance of our very consensus that our worth is worth so little as to reside inside this world so filled with all we cannot take with us when we go to wherever we’ve lived either hoping to be or denying might come. That is the way of life as lived here, the lost and losing understanding that’s found us standing in this place in which we think this place is the spot wherein our life is to be lived not only forever but then too for whatever we may come to want or agree we need while here.

And thus we look always to the world to help us understand who we’re to be, what we’re supposed to do, the very extremities of all life’s necessities as if a world so lost as one in love with the death of sin either could or should be allowed to lead us toward what could in any way be considered what’s best for us. For what do the spiritually blind know about seeing what’s best for a life when they’ve thus far lived only to let themselves down so unknowingly?

Because, like it or not, and they don’t, for who would because the fact of all this couldn’t be more humiliating as that to live a life looking only to gain what you cannot keep is as eternally pointless as our every decision thus far made to please only ourselves was morally thoughtless.

Indeed, we’ve become but replicas of the retardation of everything from righteousness to thus also responsibility. We’ve sought, alongside everyone else, a similar share in whatever is here, chasing the same outcomes of everyone else no matter how corrupted or corroded or catastrophic they may so clearly have been or are so definitely promised to become. We care not to look beyond the gleam of glitter and gold, for in this world, such are all that hold any worth that might combat the realization that our lives have no meaning so long as they’re lived in enmity with God.

How can they? How can our lives mean anything, accomplish anything, go anywhere when our every worry is housed and held here? How? How can anything we do, any word we say mean anything to anyone, ourselves included even, when at first our main priority is nothing more than some miserable share of profit and popularity? Do we not need to do, to want, to be what only the world has become or begun to crave if we’re to succeed in that venture toward the passing profits of those who still ignore the Prophets?

Do we not need be but a reflection of the rebellion if we’re to be proven so popular as to feel as if we might actually belong here?

And there begins my question for today: Why would we want to?

Because you see, Scripture tells us plainly in several places and in so many ways that the greatest achievements in life, of faith, in Him, are not transient or tangible. They’re not held inside something we can hold. They’re not venerated due to their widely agreed upon value as determined by a world that still so foolishly assumes that seeing is believing and thus believes only that things such price tags and decimal points can convey a matter’s worth. Indeed, the greatest achievements and expectations inside a life lived within the faith that found us faithless and refused to leave us there, for dead none the less, they’re not so trivial as to be so temporary as to fit within this world or the mindset so ruining it.

No, rather wisdom is worth more than gold, insight proves silver worthless, even rubies and other flickering figments of failing wealth are regarded as but refuse when compared to the hope of knowing Christ as our Lord and Savior and thus too hearing Him say that, yeah, He knows us and is happy to welcome us to that hope we simply shouldn’t have.

I mention that a lot in these posts, and for a very good reason. That reason is because, when you stop to think about it, we really should have no ability to even contemplate something so wonderful as Heaven. Such a hope should be entirely impossible. Why? Because we’ve lived like we don’t care that it’s there. We’ve lived looking for a life that’s seen as a passing replacement to that wealth and worth and health and home. Indeed, we’ve lived in such a way that’s, like everyone has always done, seen this world as our home and tried to fill it then with everything we want so that we’re not left missing out on anything before our time here is done.

And having given so many years and so many thoughts to everything that is the eternal antithesis of Heaven’s promise, we should have absolutely no ability to believe in anything beyond here. And yet because that any do either proves that there’s a level of insanity we’ve not all yet reached, or rather, there’s a level of wisdom that we’ve not yet reached.

And call me a hopeless romantic if you must, but I simply have to believe in the better of the two.

Because if all we can hope to be is nothing more than more spiritually deluded and morally diluted that we already are, well then there is absolutely nothing of hope anywhere ahead of us as we see clearly every single day the visceral and violent and virtually vitriolic nothingness of a society screaming toward a continued careening off the cliff of morality into utter contemptibility. This world is colder and more hateful and more divided and divisive and decisive upon indifference by the day.

Why worry so much about holding our hope here as done whenever we agree that hope is worth nothing more than a rock or a piece of paper or the jingle of some round pieces of manmade metal ringing in our pockets?

Can any of those things help us?

They can help us buy stuff. They can please and impress a world interested in such a temporary accounting of a life’s accountability to something, to someone, for something, for some time I guess. They can all afford the affluence of a life lived looking no further than such fortunes. And that’s cool, again, I guess. And what’s strange, an incredible weirdness as it were, as it is, is that I’m left to guess even now knowing that at one time I apparently knew such nonsense as I know I lived it before.

I talk about that all the time in these posts. How my past was lived looking for things I could have, wanting only what I could hold, holding dear only what was here, never then hoping in everything that isn’t. And it’s that whole isn’t that has become to me the biggest and brightest and very bestest hope and joy and purpose and passion and passing away of that old me so that this new one isn’t quite so hapless as to live so hopeless as to look for a life to be best lived in a land without hope but rather a heap of hopelessness.

For again, where is, or maybe what is the hope of something we hold? Where is it proven? When is it proven? When comes the payout? Does the hope we have as held here mature before we’ve lost it? And if it does, can anyone prove it?

See, this world is one in which everyone on the outside of hope not looking in demands a sign that will resolve the requirement of trust and humility and reliance upon the unseen before they’ll agree to believe. Again, down here at this rock bottom of a life we’ve all lived and so many live still, seeing is sadly believing.

But flip the script.

For those who ask for a sign that Christ is real, that God is there, that Heaven is a home so beautiful and miraculous that only a scant few make it through, do the same for me. Show me a sign that hope, as held here, is truly able to prove meaningful. Show me how our hoping in things of this world, within this temporary and emptying life in which we live within it, show me how that’s better than my belief. Please. Please, someone show me or tell me or otherwise inspire me to agree with you that hoping in something we can hold for the few years we have left is better than my position that says hope is best held upon the horizon.

I’ll wait.

But not long because it’s not possible. And it’s not possible because of this thing called wisdom. And now don’t get me wrong, I’m not spinning off into some self-absorbed patting on the back, believe me. I’ve little in me or in my life that’s worth boasting about. I’m more of the mind of Paul in that regard in that if I’m going to boast, it’s gonna be about Jesus and what He did to free us because I ain’t done nothing worth doing, because most of what I’ve done is what He died to overcome.

And yet there, to me, is, as the Bible says, the beginning of wisdom. It’s the fear of God, the respect for God, the reverence of God, the running, the racing, the reaching and teaching and touting and trying to help everyone everywhere understand why we’re here and that we won’t be much longer. But that we don’t have to live in fear of that fact anymore because in Christ He’s proven Himself of a love that this world simply cannot understand.

For understanding is an aspect, an outcome, an input of wisdom. And wisdom, as shown here, and elsewhere within the Word as well, it’s worth more than gold.

Why?

It can’t be taken. It won’t tarnish. Nobody can steal it from you, take it from you. Insight is said to be the same within this same verse. Faith falls into this same category of things which cannot be lost once found. What here can say that? What in this world can we find but never ever possibly lose? Why, we can’t even say that of love as it’s known in this land. For here people fall in and out as quick as opinions change or plans change or perspectives change. Indeed, it seems anymore that marriage, a gift designed by God, is only the leading cause of divorce.

And so here we can’t even hope in love, at least with any measure of any indisputable, indestructible certainty that it won’t fail or fall apart.

How much less then any of our other plans or dreams or things for which we race and waste as we wait for nothing but rather want for everything? How much can any of that be worth if it all can be wrong?

And sure, there are some, and I imagine a great many, who would take the stand against my faith and say that I could too be proven wrong someday. Okay, but to what end and at what cost? See, I’ve heard many times the whole cliché that says that “if I’m wrong about Christ then I’ve wasted my life, but rather if the world is wrong, they’ve instead wasted their forever.” And that’s a very true point, and one I mostly, almost agree with.

Save for that wasted part.

Because even if I am wrong about Jesus, about Scripture, about Heaven and the hope held therein, I’ve not wasted my life, not a single moment. Because the wisdom that’s finding me inside this faith is of such difference to the wasted and wasting and wasteful and worthless and wrong and just utterly wicked ways of this world that I’ll have wasted nothing in this life spent aiming for Christ even if He’s not there to aim for. Because this path calls me daily to try harder to be better than I was the day before.

And call me a judgmental jerk if you want, that’s fine, but this world isn’t doing the same. No, this world is only getting worse, and so you’ll never convince me that what I’m trying to do in my fighting to believe and to let the whole world see, to hope that all of Heaven sees that I am not who I was, you’ll never convince me that it’s wrong. Never.

Because this world, even as it grows colder and darker and more hateful and spiteful and vengeful and sinful, it can’t take my hope. It can’t steal my peace. They cannot take my joy in the thought of hearing Him say, “Well done.” For that is the promise of Matthew 6:20.

“But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

It’s the very same outlook shown and seen inside 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 3-5 specifically.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.”

“This inheritance is kept in Heaven for you.” A living hope “that can never perish, spoil or fade.” Sounds better than the outlook of this world which is fading away and destined to return to the dust from which it all came.

And so I’ll do just as Jesus teaches in that passage in Matthew shared above, as for to me, that just seems far wiser than wasting away hoping that I need to hurry up and having something here before I’m not here anymore. For, again to me, it’s better to know the hope of where you’re going than to live your life assuming you’re already there.

Because hope cannot be so small as to fit within this world within our time spent in it. I can’t buy that. But Heaven, yeah, Heaven I can hope in. And that is exactly what I’ll do, and I pray that everyone else does the same. Indeed, please my friends, taste and see that He is good. For when you do, you’ll not want anything less ever again.

And be that wisdom or just a blind hope in something better, well, maybe some days that line is meant to be so blurred. Maybe wisdom is hope, and perhaps hope is wisdom. Either way, the thought of Heaven is worth more than everything in this world, and I’ll ask God to daily lead me closer no matter what here I lose.

Because truth is I’ve nothing here to lose. And in Him, I’ve nothing that can be lost.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold