The average life expectancy for a US citizen is 78 years-old and I
think many of us live with that measure in mind. When I heard of a Birthday
celebration for Mary Phelps who just turned 111 years-old, I couldn’t help but
wonder if she had ever prepared herself to live 33 years beyond her average. In
the generations from Adam to Noah the men lived anywhere from 700 to 900 years
old. As a general rule people procrastinate, can you imagine how long people
might put off accepting Christ if they lived to be 700 years old?
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I think living several hundred years would be an extremely cruel condition, especially in the moral norms they seemed to have had going on in those days. God wiped these people out because of their wickedness and violence. We find it uncomfortable to live only seventy years trying to avert the risk of being rolled by thieves or shaken upside down by some government. A tenfold longer life gives the thieves and government tenfold more opportunities to get to you. But in nine-hundred years of life, you would be far worse than tenfold more imperiled, because the thieves and the government peoples have themselves tenfold longer lives to learn tenfold better ways to get to you. I am glad my life is assured to be less than one-hundred-twenty (and very glad it will be much less.) Darkness is a side of life that will not go away until the Lamb has vented His wrath upon wickedness and has cast the chain-bound Destroyer into the bottomless pit.
-----That is a cynical attitude. It is hard to avoid because its content is real. Trouble is this life’s middle name. If life itself doesn’t bring enough trouble to me, I always seem to brew a bit more here if not there. So corruption, catastrophes, and disappointments don’t happen only irregardless of my own causing them. Nor do they do happen only by my own causes. The responsibility for life’s heartbreaks is almost always a mixture of mine and others. That concept of mixture is important.
-----Life is not all evil. At the very least there have been one lifetime’s scoop of absolutely perfect actions mixed into this life. Like a flood-light turning on in a black pit, history’s pocketful of a few particular hours raised the most powerful and perfect act in humanity’s timeframe up onto a cross in everybody’s view. So the collection of all man’s actions from the beginning to the end has at least those perfect ones in their mix. Moreover, the treasuries of this life’s annals are packed with marvelous actions nearing perfection, maybe being perfection if they can, actions of those who believe what Jesus said and of those who don’t, actions from normal lives, young, old, famous, and obscure.
-----They are the brighter side of life. But their mere brightness does not overcome the dark of the present deceit and despair. They only testify (some directly and the rest indirectly) to the light on the cross in the hope and joy of its substance. Their testimony pushes back the sensation of the perils amongst which we live. But for hope and joy themselves to take effect within the manifold of our thoughts and feelings, they must find in the reality of our actions something off which to reflect, something made of the same substance as what made that act upon the cross. The light from our good actions is not hope and joy themselves, it is a reflection of them. Hope and joy builds in the mind that learns to sort good from evil in both effect and cause, then uses that learning to produce better deeds for more reflection. The redundancy maintains in the soul a growing process in the Lord that if it were at least stable over nine hundred years, it might produce wondrous knowledge, wisdom, and obedience to the Almighty, in spite of any presence of evil and despair. And that is the optimistic attitude. It is the only way nine-hundred years of this life could be even worth considering. My doubt is similar to yours. I don’t think we would maintain the process all that well.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment