Day 4263 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 29:1 NIV

A life for learning

Such is in truth what all of us have and thus what all of this is. It’s all just one big lesson that we’re given the chance to live here learning in regard to what is right and what of that is actually righteous and how sadly often we’re neither nor anywhere close. For such is the truth of the path we’ve chose. It’s this daily drive to be like and liked by a fallen mankind who continue to fall to and through all sorts of opportunity to do better, to be better, to indeed find more.

Nearly every such chance left broken on the floor of a life fallen to flood as is poured in all we love and the little we learn about why we maybe shouldn’t care for it quite so much.

Alas, that’s never really a thought that we seem interested in ever even trying to think about maybe thinking about. Rather whenever we determine that we like something, enjoy something, love something or someone, most questions just stop being asked. We just bask inside the supreme simplicity of letting things be whatever they’ll be as we’ve apparently already made up our minds that they’re all alright and thus, well, we must have had reason to assume so whenever we did.

And who are we to so doubt ourselves when it’s always to we ourselves that we look and upon whom we lean to both know what all this life means and thus too the best way to then live it?

We can’t risk finding out different!

So we don’t welcome anything that says we might be wrong in regard to what we think, what we do, what we love and, these days at least, what more we don’t. And don’t get me wrong, I completely believe that the enjoyment, the appreciation, the thankfulness that we have for things is a good thing, a God-given thing in fact. And I believe that because God has in fact given us the ability to enjoy things, to appreciate things, to be thankful, at least sometimes.

But the problem I’ve come to find and feel is found and felt in just how easily we anymore do agree to appreciate or enjoy certain things. Because the glaring reality of our fallen reality is that we’re all always more than ready to become enamored with basically anything of even a passing, or pretend, sense of glory or gain or glimmer.

If there’s even any possible idea that it can do something for us that makes us look or feel better, or our lives the same as are seen from all those who we still think are looking our way, then we’re all in.

And, again, once we’re in, we don’t ask any more questions.

Why?

Because I think that deep down we know we’re wrong about not just some things and that not only sometimes but that we are in fact usually wrong about most things and that pretty much all the time.

But still we’ve managed to get it in our minds that these are our lives and the fact that they often times seem to go fairly well if not really good seems only to prove that maybe we really do know what we do and that, even more than that, we’re maybe even right in doing it.

After all, if it manages to match up to what we think is good, a matter measured usually in only feelings and our finding our personal favorites thereof, then it must really be good.

“’Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’” Mark 10:18

Well, there goes that!

And indeed, that’s pretty much why so very many who’ve been given this gift of whatever it is to live a life have sought to do so without ever opening the Bible. It’s because we know what it’s going to say. I mean, after all, it’s a Book which touts itself as being the very Word of He who is the Truth, and so, if the truth is involved then we’re probably not interested. And that because we already know it.

Just we’ve managed to pick the side of it that hasn’t actually set us free but that’s rather left us oddly in love with lives lived in all of these pretty chains and captivating captivity.

We love our lives, love them to death actually. And we even have all of these little Freudian-slips that we let, well, slip along the way. Such as those things of which we’ll happily admit that we do indeed love to death. Indeed, we oddly enough spend our lives testifying against ourselves in the court of God’s opinion simply because we’re often focused pretty much only on man’s. And that usually only our own.

And that because we’ve forgotten that these lives are ours on loan and thus both to be soon given back to He who gave them to us on what is this try-and-find-out basis and thus that He’s the only One who has any right to tell us what to do or not to do with them. Something that we again know He’s done did within the Bible that most have probably never read.

For it says stuff like “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and that alongside another which reads that “the wages of sin is death” and thus, when just those two are put together, we come away easily with realizing that since all have sinned, and that sin earns only death unto those who commit it, then as those “all” who have sinned we then have earned the wage of death.

And around here death is the one thing that we all think we’re not ever supposed to think about, talk about, worry about, even claim we know about.

Because everyone here is busy living a life that we’re all trying, reasonably so, to ensure always goes the best it possibly can. And so, no, none of us have any time, inclination nor interest in hearing about the heavier side of life. We want to have our fun. We want to enjoy ourselves. We want to live our best lives, which might be one day found to be the best Freudian-slip of them all.

For if we are all truly down here doing our best and that because we all legitimately want these lives to go as well as we can get them to go, then why is so much going so bad?

I mean, are we just dumb? Not actually able to know what good is? Is the concept then of whatever it is that “best” might be truly so subjective as all of our chosen and both vastly different and rapidly diverging ideas and ideals seem to say it is?

Or are we just wrong?

In truth that’s literally the only two options in what is a life we all live inside of a place in which we all claim we want to do good, to feel good, to look good, to add up all of that good into what we all think best probably is and yet we all go about getting there so very differently that most days we end up just arguing with one another until today when we’re all pretty sure it’s best to just hate one another as surely we’re still the ones who are right and then everyone who sees something else is simply wrong.

But friends, again, how can any us be right, be good when so much continues to go so wrong and feel so bad?

Again, are we just struggling with finding whatever best really is?

Or are we just so far away from it now that, thanks to pride, we can’t bring ourselves to look in or toward the one place we know it is?

For in truth, that’s what the purpose of this life is, at least the time we’re given to live it. It’s a journey given us in which He who gave it us knows that we’ll wander off in search of all of this stuff that we’ll along the way back to Him become convinced is better than He is. And He allows us to go off on all these little tangents because He knows that all of our varied targets will only end up letting us down and that, as stupid as that might be of a way to learn the lesson that is both hope and humility, it’s simply the one we need.

Because He knows we’ll not learn any other way.

And so He lets us all wander off from Him in the gift of freewill and freedom that is given alongside an ability to feel such things as doubt, danger, depression, disappointment, despondency, dread, pain, shame, misery. He built us to feel all of these things so that we could learn how amazingly horrible they are so that we could find inside that audacity He’s given us to seek for their opposites.

Indeed, He allows even the fact that every life now owes a death so as to inspire us to stop doing, saying, thinking, wanting those things that only bring us death and instead, hopefully at least, turn us toward those things which bring us life.

Namely the Name that is Christ.

But alas, sadly we still seem interested mostly with all these other things, people, places that we’ve not yet tried or become as are found on this map that is this world in which we live these lives sadly then unable or maybe just uninterested in differentiating the two and insisting them remain separate. Rather we’ve clearly found a remarkable ease, something we’ll always prefer, in just allowing them to remain nothing short of so mixed and mingled that our minds are now mangled into not merely thinking but seemingly actually believing that we know what we’re doing.

And that despite how much of it continues to go only wrong.

You’d think we’d learn.

You’d be surprised the lengths to which we’ll yet go to keep from doing so!

Indeed, mankind has already done some amazing things seeking to avoid such things as humility and honesty and even the reality of hope itself. And indeed, I’ve no doubts whatsoever that we’ll still go even further in our trying to prove that our understandings or assumptions or preferences or presumptions regarding such things are right.

Yes, many here will die never once thinking otherwise.

And then will come the whole “without remedy” part.

Why?

Because the simple truth is that God didn’t give us these lives for us to have become so convinced that we know better than He ever could whatever we’re convinced that we should determine to do with them. Rather He gave us these lives expecting, and rightly, reasonably so, that we’d be grateful for having received them as would be, should be then shown to Him in such ways as our doing those things that He asked us to do, all of which He broke down for our convenience into 10 convenient Commandments that are so incredibly simple, and logical, and reasonable, and in fact rewarding even.

Yes, He made it all so simple as simply asking that we love Him who so loves us that He at first determined to create us, which has worked out pretty well for all of us, and then even went on to give His only begotten Son for us to redeem us from the revelries, rivalries and rebellions that we’ve managed to find our way toward despite the gift that we’ve been given and the stupidly simple things that He asks us to do with it.

Do we then hate that which is easy and makes complete sense?

Seems as though we must because, well, here we are in what is a world visibly, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, literally falling apart.

All while we all again go on in what is a life in which we all pretend that we know what we’re doing and thus that what we’re doing is only always everything that will somehow come to someday add up to whatever our understanding of best might be.

Meaning then that someone has to be wrong because what another considers best oftentimes seems pretty messed up to someone else.

And, again, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Meaning then that all of us have come to do some stuff, say some stuff, think some stuff, become some stuff that God clearly says is so very messed up that we all now deserve to die.

Even though we’re all down here utterly certain that we’re living our best lives.

Those two can’t both be right my friends.

Thankfully He’s given us all these lives to learn which side is wrong. Unfortunately, since we’re the ones who are wrong, our prideful insistence upon believing always otherwise will go on preventing most from ever finding the humility in which hope itself exists and waits for us to come to our senses and realize that we don’t need to be right but to just stop doing so much that’s so very wrong.

Something that God’s been trying to help us with all along thanks to His again having created us to feel such things as doubt, dread, danger, sadness, shame, anger. He gave us the opportunity to feel miserable about things that we see or even things that we think so that we can learn to discern what we don’t feel we should repeat.

Problem is that, being so stiff-necked and stupid as we love to pretend we’re not, we all just keep repeating them!

Indeed, we’re a society that will happily change nothing and simply resolve to mimic everything because, to us, that will always be easier. And that because, well, it is. There is in fact nothing that could ever be easier than our simply continuing to keep on doing only always whatever it is that we’ve all already done before or watch another do unto what sure seems to be a life they truly enjoy.

Yes, we will do willingly, and that endlessly, those things which look good or as if they feel good.

Leaving the flesh our god and our God forgotten.

And He’s giving us all a few more days, maybe a couple more years to learn how foolish that really is before eternity hits the fan and we’re then forced to stop being fans of only ourselves.

That’s what this life is really for. It’s a time given us to get over ourselves.

Problem is that we’ve twisted it into a collection of years in which we think we’re here to love ourselves, to enjoy ourselves, to prove ourselves as those who know always best what to do and to then listen to absolutely nobody else who says anything otherwise.

Such as the Christ who, as He hung there and died, asked the Father to forgive us because we didn’t know what we were doing.

We’re still convinced otherwise even still today.

But friends, the stiffer something is the easier it is to break. And indeed, though His very Word says He wants for none to so perish, the promise is that many will because, well, stiff necks break easier than those bent in humble submission unto the One who gave them the ability to bend instead.

If we choose to remain so stubborn as each of us have become, we’ll have no one then to blame when eternity does not go our way but proves rather to go His who is He that we chose to spend this side of forever ignoring, debating, denying, refusing.

Yes, if we leave this world having only learned how to reject God then all we’ll know how to do is reject God.

And while that can work here, and seems to indeed work well for all those who do it, how different it will be when we’re turned away from Him to spend the entirety of our eternity in that place in which all of His goodness isn’t.

He doesn’t want that for anyone because, well, He is good.

But He can’t convince us to take what He wants us to have so long as we remain so convinced that what we have is so much better than whatever He might be trying to give.

Again, stiff necks, while hard, solid, seemingly strong, they’re vastly easier to break. And, well, it’s pretty hard to live with a broken neck.

We’ve each been given a life to learn that the easy way. If we continue to refuse to do so, well, that leaves only the hard way. What amazes me is that for a people who seek always the path of least resistance, the path most easy, we sure seem dead-set on that being the case, the outcome.

And one day He won’t argue with us anymore.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold