Day 4174 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Timothy 1:9 NIV

believes before the beginning

And thus too after for if there was something there in which to believe in before this thing we now know as time began then so too must it make sense for something to be there waiting for this thing called time to reach its end. And, well, if for nothing else but the simple sake of simplicity, why not believe that that which was before is the same as that which waits after? Seems to make things entirely elementary, which, not to knock us or anything, but such is in all honesty the kind of thing that we do best with.

That which is so simple it’s stupid.

And that because we’re so stupid that He had to make it all so very simple as to literally tell us how all of this, and all of us, both got our start, what to do with what’s so clearly now underway and even what is the way we’re supposed to go through this show that is this life down in this hole that is our soul that has been sold to he who seeks only to steal and kill and destroy, a work from which we must all be now saved by He who had to come to overcome our having become so very dumb as to give away that which was never ours to he who has never had anything of any real worth, meaning, purpose or promise to give us in return.

Yes, God gave us the Gospel through Christ’s having personally lived every letter thereof so as to help us see that we are loved but that so too that those who are loved are not to do as we have done but to rather turn now back toward the Son and live our lives as if He’s too alive and coming back to take us home to that hope that has been there for us to hope in since before time began and can in fact only be found in forever’s unending fullness once said time has ended.

Again, it’s simple.

And what’s at least fairly ironic is that we all like simple things. We appreciate those things which ask not too much of our time or intention or intuition even. We enjoy those things which can be done or said or understood at what is our comically-basic level of understanding. And I say basic again not to mock or poke fun but simply because such is what we’ve all come to become. We’re basic. We’re plain. We are utterly ordinary and entirely common.

Something we’ve chosen because it’s the easiest of all things to do as all it asks us to is only that which everyone else has chosen to do. And it simply couldn’t be easier, simpler, seemingly even safer than our doing, saying, thinking, believing that which another either has done or said or thought or bought or is themselves, at present, doing, saying, thinking and/or believing.

I went with and/or there because the simple honesty of everything we do and say and think is that all of the above are all only done because we believe them worth doing.

But I felt the ‘/or’ was needed because, well, so often anymore we do things without thinking and say things we don’t do and believe things that we don’t talk about and think about things we probably don’t really believe.

Again, all of this is entirely common and utterly normal.

Problem is that none of it makes any sense and that which makes not sense lives not life. No, anything that hasn’t a clear meaning or reason or purpose or goal, it cannot then give us anything to help us know what life is, why we have one, what to do with it, just how long we may or may not have it and what to expect in the event that one day it’s proven that what we have we have then no more.

That’s all too difficult for us to put together.

At least apparently.

And so we’ve all seemingly agreed to just not try. And now indeed such is the normal life. It’s one in which we’ve all lived, many live still, actually trying actively to dumb things down and make them so childishly simple that we needn’t weary ourselves with such things as worry or working or whether or not our works are worthy of avoiding that for which most here seem somehow increasingly unworried.

Indeed, every day anymore I am somehow amazed at just how much it seems that most folks just don’t care.

I truly never imagined that I would walk the world that we walk in now. Rather back when I was a kid who didn’t pay so much attention to time, as I was plenty happy just living a life, I lived that life in which I always managed to imagine the best. I was, like everyone I hope, far more able then to imagine that the world in which I lived would improve over time. That things here would get better as we too got better at doing things.

Yes, I believed that the best was ahead of us.

And I actually do still believe that.

I just now believe that the best which is ahead is not here. Rather I believe that this world’s best is now behind us. I believe that this world is getting worse. I believe that people are getting worse. I believe that all of this is simple to see. We are a failing society that is failing because we continue this way of life spent unanimously falling short, still, of the glory of God in what is our apparently agreed upon goal for us to live as if all we know in which to glory is the seeking of our own.

In simpler words we’ve become so selfish and thus deluded that we think it’s best to keep on doing only everything that makes us feel good or look good or believe we are good.

And all of that despite His Word saying here that He both had to save us and that from who and what He knew we’d become before the beginning of time!

Yes, God knew before He knit us together in the wombs of our mothers that we’d all become monsters. He knew that we’d all choose to become rock stars who do drugs and destroy hotel rooms. He knew we’d become politicians who sought their positions only for the power and profit rather than helping lead the people to a better future. He knew that we’d become lawyers who worked to award the guilty and punish the innocent. He knew that we’d become liars who would bend and break the truth whenever we needed it to be something other than His truth remains.

Indeed, He knew that we’d not remain what He created us to be and that, because of that, that He would have to someday call us unto a holy life.

A life we should have always lived but one that, considering none call any to continue doing whatever they’re doing already, is thus a testament to the fact that holy we are not. No, Christ himself, who is the very Grace of God spoken of here and all throughout the rest of Scripture as well, He tells us plain that there are no who are good, none who then do what is good, none who then do that which is right but rather that we all are wrong, that we all are wicked, that we are all thus intended unto the wrath of God who created us not to be wicked or wrong but rather to be His.

Something our sins and our continued living and sinking within says daily we still don’t care to be.

Which is why He came to save us.

It’s because He knew us and too that He knew what all we’d do, say, think, believe, thus become.

Indeed, what we’ve become is the reason that grace exists. The very idea of grace implies “a benign attitude and a willingness to grant favors or make concessions.” It’s basically to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. It’s giving kindness to those who you’d like to show you kindness in return. It’s loving those that you’d appreciate loving you back. It’s being merciful unto those who need your mercy so that they too might learn mercy should ever they need extend it unto another.

It’s saving those who need saving within the assumption that they’d appreciate you saving them from that which held them in danger or was leading them toward disaster.

Problem is that, well, Proverbs 22:3:

“The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.”

And indeed, we’ve chosen to become so simple in lives we seek daily to make increasingly easier, proven in that we don’t even care do such things as drive or read or even walk anymore, that, well, so too do we continue to prove that we ourselves are only simple.

So much so that it’s now considered a badge of shame to be a prude. And I guess that makes sense in a world of such ever-increasing pride. For a prude is “a person who is excessively or priggishly attentive to propriety or decorum”, or more basically, a prude is “a person with a very sensitive attitude and narrowness towards custom and morality.” In our culture specifically, simply because we’ve become so dumb having willfully chosen to dumb down everything in life to meet our levels of immorality and immodesty and ignorance, a prude is someone “who is or claims to be easily shocked by matters relating to sex or nudity.”

And that one really makes the whole pride/prude dilemma incredibly easy to recognize in that in this world we celebrate pride with what have grown to become basically strip shows performed in city streets in which all manner of immodest and immoral behavior is put on public display for all, even children, to see. Literally just saw a clip of a baseball game in which the whole 7th inning stretch was filled with entertaining the crowd in the form of having three men without their shirts on stand on the field while the wife of one, blindfolded, went down the line feeling them up with the task of choosing the one she preferred the feel of.

And everyone laughed and cheered when she chose one of the two half-naked firemen as opposed to her equally half-naked but apparently less physically impressive husband.

All of this in front of families, children.

Saw another clip, baseball again, in which the pitcher pretended to hit the batter on purpose which then, as it does from time to time I take it, inspired the then embittered batter to charge the mound acting all angry only to get there and jump into the waiting arms of the pitcher as the both of them began then to basically make out on said mound. And they were both guys.

Again, in front of families with kids.

Because we don’t care anymore. Our appreciation of pride has left us with so little shame that nothing is considered unacceptable these days. Rather everything is just in need of someone affirming it. We just need to find the folks who will cheer it on so that we needn’t change. All because it’s considered now foolish to not do whatever we want to do. It’s considered foolish to not give in to the fallen and depraved desires of the flesh. It’s considered foolish, a literal failure at living the best life and enjoying all the best therein to be someone considered a prude.

We’re even called rude for not going along with all the world expects us to.

All things that He knew the world would do. All things that He knew we’d do too. All things that He sent His Son to die on that cross to atone for our loss of any realization or recollection are not things which should be done.

Because in this world we’ve all done things that, as the Bible reads, never even entered His mind as things we ought to do. Things such as, referring to that same verse/passage, sacrificing children in the fire to foreign gods. Kind of like our now subjecting children to the filth of what’s basic fornication during a baseball game. Or encouraging them to sit through drag shows in which their minds are suddenly opened to the immorality of man simply because of the colorful outfits. Or taking them to pride parades in which they’re shown some things that caused God to destroy cities and left the souls of those living it up within them dying forever in the place now reserved for those who so clearly continue to refuse to accept the fact that we are sinners who are then in need of a Savior.

A Savior who came before our time began and that because God knew we’d need one before all of time began. And He gives us this life in this world in which we see this stuff in order to help all of us see for ourselves the reason as for the existence of hell itself so that we can, as we hopefully grow in Him and He then in us, realize that this is not a life that we should be living nor then agreeing with others living either.

For there is no life to be found in living a life filled with sin.

For the wage of sin is death.

And yet the grace spoken of here as was given us in Christ Jesus before we ever even came to need it as badly as we all now do, that is the free gift of God given freely to all who choose to accept it.

Yet sadly so many never will because this world continues doing everything it can to make that which is wrong so very normal that folks think it right.

Indeed, we live in the time in which light is put for dark as is again proven as simply as within how prudes are considered fools whereas pride is publically fun. I know I’ve even mentioned this before but I had someone I know, called a friend at one time, post this photo online of a cartoon Jesus covered in tattoos wearing sunglasses holding weed in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other with a caption that said that if you don’t sin then Jesus died for nothing.

It literally make me physically sick to my stomach, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up to even have to repeat that garbage.

And yet folks are out here tossing it around as if it’s humor.

Please someone convince me then how we don’t need a Savior!

I guess the issue is that we’ve all embraced this outlook on life in which we “have all the time in the world”. And that then means that we’ve always plenty of time to enjoy ourselves, to live our best lives, to have all the fun we can possibly fit within them. And too that we’ve then always time left before the end in which to say our sorrys and ask for forgiveness for all the fun we had in the lives we’d lived thinking that we were only here to have fun.

Problem is that we only have time in this world and it is running out. And yet nearly everyone continues ahead unashamedly without any apparent care nor concern as to the Christ nor that He died to call us out of a sinful life unto a holy one.

And that which is holy is that which is set apart.

In fact His Word literally asks that we come apart from the world and touch no more of their unclean things and promises that He will accept us if we accept that call to leave it all behind and take no further part in this world falling apart.

Yes, He asks us to come apart from a world that’s coming apart!

It’s like asking someone to get into a lifeboat on a ship that is obviously sinking.

And yet we watch the vast majority arguing that they’re such good swimmers that being on a sinking ship is somehow going to prove more fun than being safe and warm in the lifeboat.

I can’t make sense of that.

And so what then should I care whether or not this world thinks that my faith and how it’s inspiring me to live my life makes sense?

No, I think it best to just agree to live at odds with this world as, well, most clearly continue to agree to a concept of time in which there’s always plenty left. I find myself believing too much in that which was before and the hope we have only after to agree. No, I believe that God was there before all of this began, that He created us in His image and thus to be like Him, that we fell and continue to fall heartbreakingly short, that He sent His Son to die in my place upon that cross because of my sins, and that, having been resurrected, He will one day come again to put an end to time and thus my time within this life within this world in which time exists.

There are no clocks in eternity.

Unfortunately there are no sinners in the best of it either.

And yeah, I guess the argument could be made that makes God mean, an argument people make all the time. “Why does hell exist if God is so kind and loving and good?”

Because we’re not and He’s not going to force us to be or do anything we simply don’t want to.

So instead He stands both before time began holding still His plans for us to be His and too after time has reached its end reaching out His hand calling us to take it so He can save us through the helping us to live a holy life spent apart from this sinking ship.

Most are perpetually lost in the middle neither believing He created them to be more than they’ve become nor that He will come once more to take home to peace those who sought for it above their own pleasure and pride.

It’s up to each of us how we live these lives.

He’s made it clear what He thinks of our choice on that cross.

What does the way we continue to live our lives say about His choice to take it in our place?

And just how much time do we think we’ve left to make sure we’re right so we don't get left?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold