27 Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,
God’s timeline for humans is very different than ones created by man. Western materialists, those who believe that this world is all there is, believe that once we die there is nothing for us. Since their inflated sense of self-knowledge has not included measuring the non-material world, in their minds, the non-material world does not exist. They attempt to explain the universe without ever answering the question, “What was before the Big Bang and who pushed the plunger that set off the Bang?” For them the sequence goes: we live, we die. No purpose or meaning is imposed from the outside, non-material world. In fact, meaning and purpose are in and of themselves impossible in their world. Accidents don’t create purpose. You can’t stumble upon an enduring purpose, if an enduring purpose cannot exist in a random chance universe. Purpose needs to exist prior to its discovery. There are also people who believe that we get recycled, that our lives do continue after death, that we become part of the “cycle of life” as presented in the movie The Lion King. Reincarnation is the ultimate recycling program. We get to choose whether we move up in the cycle the next time we reenter the universe or go down the ladder. Good deeds move us up, bad ones move us down. I keep wondering what a good deed is for a slug, a mosquito, or a bacteria. If they are going to move up, they must be able to make the moral choice to move up. What does a moral choice look like to a hamster? This sounds like a very bleak way to live one’s life, never really knowing which direction you are moving, never sure of what lays ahead for you. I can see how this belief fits into the caste system where the place you are born in society is the place you will die. There is no chance for advancement, no way to move out of a very narrowly defined role in this life. It brought hope to those at the bottom that maybe in their next life they could do something other than clean toilets. But Scripture says we live and then we can really live, that this life does set us up for the next life. What we do during this life does matter, because there is heaven and the presence of God. Our lives matter because reality is anchored in the being and character of God totally apart from this temporary creation. But that is another topic for another day.
The Arnold Journey 