I am amazed at the lengths people will go to avoid acknowledging God’s claim to their lives. We as humans would rather acknowledge the rights of the ‘primordial soup’ to control and determine our lives, than to bow the knee to Jesus. What is up with that? The answer is easy. The ‘soup’ makes no claims that would change our behavior. If we are just the accident at the end of an innumerable sequence of accidents, then our actions not only mean nothing, they can never mean anything. Accidents don’t produce meaning. God on the other hand is all about purpose. If God has claim to our lives then, He also has something to say about our behavior, and He has the power to do something about enforcement. The series of ever-decreasing moral choices presented in this passage demonstrate that we universally recognize God’s authority. We might say stealing is OK if someone is hungry, but then we get upset when it is our stuff that gets stolen! We acknowledge God’s voice of moral authority by our unconscious attitudes, but then brush off that voice when we want to rebel. We are not accidents! God has a purpose for our lives. Listen to God’s claim for your life and behavior. Let us not live with an untested mental process, a life where we blindly go where so many have gone before and think the outcome will be different. God calls us to use our minds to examine our behavior and see it for what it is.
The Arnold Journey 