Sunday, January 8, 2012

The State of Humanity

For God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and wickedness of those who in their wickedness suppress the truth. - (Romans 1:18 ISV)

2012 is going to be a very interesting year.
According to a Mayan legend, the world is about to end this year.

My comment to that is, so what if it is?
If the world does end in 2012, it does so because we had it coming.

I’ll say it again:
WE HAVE IT COMING.

Now I don’t want you to mistake that as coming from an arrogant, self-righteous, doomsayer wannabe.
I want you to take that as something that needs to be seriously considered, not just for our sakes, but for the sakes of the generations that follow us, namely our children and their children.

Because this will be our legacy to them should it come to pass.
Yes, a devastated earth is going to be OUR fault.

This requires no beating around the bush. I’m throwing out political correction and sensitivity in favor of the cold and hard truth. The emperor be damned, but someone has to point out the fact that he’s wearing no clothes.
How many catastrophes have hit humanity these past few years? How many financial crises? How many wars? How many uprisings?

How many people suffered as a result?
These past few months alone, the Philippines counted over 1000 casualties from flooding and landslides.

I’m not being insensitive here. My own family was a victim of flooding in 2009 when Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy in the Philippines) washed through my wife’s home in Cainta, Rizal, destroying most of her family’s belongings.  These are things that hold value for her, not just in the monetary sense, but also in terms of the memories attached to them. Photographs and other memorabilia of her family, irretrievably gone.
She was lucky. Many had lost family members, relatives and friends.

But then here’s the thing: Is it really just a matter of good and bad LUCK?
Or is there some other underlying reason for the occurrence of these types of events?

Some of you might already be saying: look Chris, humanity and our planet has seen and have been through many of these types of catastrophes in the past. Our history confirms it. And if there’s anything to learn by our history, it is that we have managed to survive, even thrive, despite these events. And just as our ancestors did before us, we will survive and thrive through these events as well.
Now who’s being arrogant and self-righteous?

It is precisely this type of arrogance and self-righteousness which will result in humanity’s eventual downfall, Mayan prophecy notwithstanding.
The fact of the matter my dear friends, is that humanity is messed up.

Left to our own devices, we will be evolving ourselves into extinction, blissfully ignorant of it all the while.
This is no tired sociological cliché. This is the truth. And the sooner we throw away our ignorant pride and learn to accept this truth, the better it will be for us and our children.

Okay Chris, we’ve heard this one before. Go ahead, finish your rant with your so called Gospel. Tell us how our only hope lies by reconciling ourselves with a wrathful God by accepting His Son Jesus Christ who supposedly died 2000 years ago for our sakes. Tell us how having faith in Jesus can save us from our oh-so-imminent destruction. Tell us how we need to be born again into the spirit, and learn to look beyond the apparent and the material, into how everything that we do has much more far-reaching effects than we can realize.
Tell me Chris, about God’s love for me. Tell me how He loves me so much that He sacrificed His one and only Son for us, the very sinners He hates and despises, and is currently pouring out His wrath upon.

Tell me how I just need to accept His grace, His free gift of reconciliation, and how I would end up living for eternity in heaven because of it. Tell me that all my sins, my shortcomings, my failures to live up to God’s standards will be forgotten, wiped away by the blood of Christ, and how God Himself will come running with open arms to receive me into His embrace.
Tell me how all the angels, saints and the heavenly hosts will rejoice in my having turned my back onto my destructive lifestyle, in favor of living a life of love where I sacrifice my own self-interests in favor of others.

Tell me Chris, do you really believe in all that crap?
Yes. I do.

I do because the scathing words I wrote above are my words. The very same words I rejected the Gospel with prior to my conversion.
I carried within me that same spirit of selfish ignorance, arrogance and self-righteousness, and used it to life a lifestyle of blind self-indulgence.

I eventually found myself broken, in the midst of despair when everything I was living for came crashing down around me as a result of what I perceived to be a great injustice to myself.
GREAT INJUSTICE.

I was made to realize that I did not know what those words truly meant.
I was made to realize that the one true injustice is that we turned our backs on our Creator.

The one true injustice was that a man by the name of Jesus Christ, came unto the world preaching love, self-sacrifice, adherence to truth, and living in peace and harmony with all of humankind and creation, and that by living such a life would we be reconciled with our Creator…
AND WE KILLED HIM FOR IT.

I did not choose to understand this by the way. I was MADE to understand this. Not by human wisdom, but by the wisdom inherent in all things.
At the very depths of despair, I was made to understand the real problem in creation:

THAT I AM A SINNER.
That I had fallen short of the purpose for which I was made.

And that purpose is to know and cherish the Creator, and have a lasting relationship with Him as He unfolds His grand design for all of creation.
I have exchanged that relationship for a lie. The lie that I am whoever I want myself to be. That I can determine the course of my own existence by myself. That as long as I believe solely in myself and my dreams, everything will be okay.

2012 is going to be a very interesting year.
It is the year that God will once again prove His love and mercy for humanity, by showing them that despite His wrath, despite how He will continue to pour and rain down destruction from the Heavens on humanity, despite how many human lives He takes away in the process, He is still giving us a chance.

He is still waiting with open arms that are eager to embrace, for the return of the prodigal son.
May humanity soon come to realize the state that we are in.

Soli Deo Gloria.

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