Wrestling with Eternity
A historic family anecdote went something like this.
My dad’s father, Karl Clement Lewellen Bastian, had ascended to a significant height on the ladder of age. Gifted as he was physically, he continued to serve actively as Fire Chief of the Gas City, Indiana, Volunteer Fire Department.
Karl’s home was on Main Street in a town so small that it could easily be traversed on foot from one bordering farm field to the other. The town was laid out in an approximate rectangle of some twelve long blocks east to west, and about eight short blocks north to south. The Mississinewa River meanders past the town at its western extremity where a traversing steel girder bridge bestows that end of Main Street with a grand entrance. Former residents rest in the cemetery nearby.
From the other end of Main Street Karl regularly passed the local funeral home less than two blocks from his home on his two-minute commute to the Pure Oil gas station and car repair business he owned and operated. Beyond that Bastian landmark, businesses lined the street for several blocks. There were no natives in the town who did not know Karl Bastian. Karl himself knew almost every man in the town tribe. He saved their homes from fires and kept their cars in tires.
One day, as my father told it, Karl was driving by the funeral home and saw the undertaker standing out front. Karl called out as he passed by, “You haven’t got me yet.” To which the undertaker quickly countered, “But, I will.”
And he did.
Granddad spent his last day on earth laboring alongside his fire fighters inside a burning structure. Overcome by smoke, he was carried out to the cab of a fire truck. There he breathed his last…as will each of us sooner or later.
Although the term undertaker is still dying a slow death, the term mortician sought to replace it as far back as 1895. The idea was to get away from the person who undertook the task of putting your finished frame underground beneath the smiling daisies. Now, in place of the undertaker we were introduced to the death practitioner…the mortician.
Simply explained–and I like simple–we now get transferred from our physician to our mortician when the former is out of prescriptions.
We have been informed ad nauseum (a mental ailment for which you see a psychiatrician), that we have been born to die. We have heard, far less frequently, that we are born to live forever with the God who designed our DNA, defined our individual purposes, and dealt a fatal blow to our guilt, accomplishing this in the one-of-a-kind visitation of God to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.
Yes, I said guilt. Own up to it. Over-whelming evidence is on file for humanity, not to mention the personal evidence you pile up daily. Any jury on human nature would return a quick verdict of guilty and pronounce the sentence without parole.
For your current soul disease, you need to see a particular spiritual practitioner, a Christian practitioner of the Gospel, a Christ-tician. He need not be a priest or a pastor. He must, however, neither be a fake nor only a lapel-pin lodge member of some Christian fraternity.
You do need a cure. You’ve always known it in your secret, lucid moments.
Man-created religions will not do. The list of imaginative rituals and rules in any one of them comprises more than any person could ever perform with perfection. You might sooner cure stage four cancer on a diet of endless doses of V-8.
The philosophies of the most erudite thinkers of this world will not do. Every one of these will eventually make hash of your brain. Some will try and convince you that there exists no door to any personal, conscious eternal existence for your soul, for the you that is you. Others put themselves forward as having conclusively discovered–through conversations in the smoke-filled, paneled rooms of the speculator lounges of prestigious clubs or universities–the non-existence of any continuing state of being for the human soul.
It’s nice work if you can get it. And, for the logically consistent person, the contorted cranial conclusions of those contemptuous contemplators serve to cut away all restraints, other than those external ones that can get you arrested or force you to pay unpalatable social costs.
To correctly restate a hackneyed and tragically misleading phrase, I make this announcement to you, “All roads do not lead to God.” What a presumptuous pronouncement for any dreamer to make! All roads but one lead away from the One True and Living God. How inconsiderate of the Creator!
Only a specific single lane road leads to God. All the others, many beautifully paved and with multiple lanes, lead to present and eternal disaster. It was never true that he who dies with the most toys wins. At most, he might get a fancier casket.
Human life is distinguished from all other forms of life by our freedom of choice. A tree is unable to choose and then relocate itself nearer to life-giving water. A man can. A frog cannot turn a desert into Thoreau’s serene Walden Pond. A man can, spiritually. And, with equal freedom, we can choose not to…which is the trending choice.
By common observation, man (not to exclude the fairer sex), seems predisposed to rebel at the idea of a singular and narrow path out of his mortal dilemma. One size could not possibly fit all, they reason. Each wants to find a spiritual fashion designer who will stitch together a philosophy that fits his own frame of reference.
God rubs his exclusive plan in the face of rebels. Try this statement on for size. God’s rescuer, Jesus the human incarnation of the tri-complex God declared, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” The “Father” is another essence of the tri-complex God.
As an aside, it is no secret that our culture–and all others–badly need a Father who is the definition and model of fatherhood. The preponderance of families that are broken owe their plight to a broken fatherhood or a broken husband hood.
This rescuer from the eternal abode of the tri-complex God is the singular medicine which our soul needs. It is available exclusively from the one who earned the epithet, The Great Physician. All other spiritual practitioners, without exception, are either dispensing placebos or prescribing poisons, the former to make you feel okay and the latter to assure you that this is as good as it gets…as good as it ever gets.
The One True and Living God–T.O.T.A.L. God for short–is holy, just, and exclusive. He alone occupies the god-o-sphere, but he wants you to join him. In compassion for his own creation, God visited mankind in Jesus, his exclusive answer to our alienation from our God, and consequently, alienation from the purpose of life, from our own life purpose, and from undiluted harmony with others. Bad, eh?
Decipher this text from the Christian Bible if you can:
God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21
And this one:
Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Hebrews 9:27-28
Again, simply put, you must be righteous, like God is righteous, to be able to be in eternal proximity with Righteous God. Let’s change up the vocabulary. You must be perfect in your moral being, like God is perfect in essence. Otherwise, God will remain too dangerous to approach. Religions of effort, and the philosophies of those who are more confused than you are, will not morph you into the required level of perfection, which comes down to nothing less than straight A’s, straight up…no curve.
The path that was designed and laid out by God and revealed to mankind is this; the Almighty allowed rebellious man to brutally execute the divine Messenger of God. The religious and secular powers of the day cooperated in order to rid themselves of him. Unbeknownst to them, the death of the Messenger was ordained to be for the sins of the death-dealers and their ancestors and their progeny.
Let’s do some spiritual math. Hmmm…it appears that you were in the watching crowd by virtue of bloodline proxy. The present question for you is whether you were with those who consented to execute, or with those who confessed to exalt Jesus, God’s rescuer.
To find out, answer this question: which crowd are you caught up in at this moment? Stumped? This might help. Jesus thought to tell us in advance, “He who is not for me is against me.”
Thank you for taking this side road with me while I brought you to the Cross-road. Forgive me for leaving you standing here at the intersection of truth and deception. I leave you to choose your way from here. ~dkb~
'ink Again 