Well, rather than waiting until I’m inspired (which occurs rarely), I’ve decided to make a disciplined effort to extract my thoughts on a regular basis and implant them here on this blog in order to be benevolent with that inspiration.
As for today, I only have one sliver of meditation to offer. It would fall into the category of the spiritual, so for those of you who are already bored, or have a tendency to doze off at the utterance of such nouns as “theology”, “philosophy”, or “orthodoxy”, feel free to go about your business.
I ran across something in a commentary of mine as I was studying Habakkuk yesterday morning (yeah, that’s right-Habakkuk) and reading about the man who is proud. A proud man is wrapped up in himself, therefore his inwardenss is twisted up, crooked. What was interesting to me is the contrast between straightness and crookedness. If I asked you to imagine a straight stick, everyone would visualize straightness. But if I asked you to imagine a crooked stick, everyone would visualize a different shape of crookedness. A crooked stick may be crooked in a hundred different ways, but there is only one way a straight stick can be straight. Goodness is basically simple, but evil is exceedingly complex. Goodness looks only one way, but evil can take many different forms and shapes.
I think we tend to complicate righteousness way too often. This is not to say that the christian faith is easy, but it is simple. Now I do believe there are issues in life that are difficult to resolve, but when your are dealing with issues of righteousness, I believe it is as simple as a straight line. Those of us who are Christ-followers know what is right and what is wrong. We have that inner voice of God that tells us which is which and when we are too dull to to that voice, we have the written Word to articulate these things as well. I think the only time it gets difficult is when we try to bend the rules, legalistically abuse the scriptures, and use fleshly reasoning rather than listening to God’s voice. In other words, if you are following Christ, you know what is righteous and what is not.
Now I’m sure some of you out there have already prepared to advance the theory that I’m a fundamental wacko, and that’s fine; I’m sure you will gain a plethera of evidence here from this blog to support that theory. As far as what I think about myself, I believe there are answers to our questions. I also believe that those answers are right in front of us sometimes and we just need to look past everything else and grab ahold of the truth and never let go. I also believe in treasuring those answers that we find. This is not to say that unanswered questions are bad, but that answers are good. We will never have every answer, but there sure are alot of them out there that are just staring us in the face.