Thursday, November 10, 2022

The Flaw of Human Unity

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Don’t be so surprised!  Indeed, the time is coming when all the dead in their graves will hear the voice of God’s Son, and they will rise again.  Those who have done good will rise to experience eternal life, and those who have continued in evil will rise to experience judgment.  John 5:28-29

In this Gospel account, Jesus has just healed a man who had been unable to walk for thirty-eight years.  For nearly four decades people walking through this busy intersection had seen him lying there, powerless, fading into oblivion.  Now he could pick up the mat that had been his home, and walk like God created him.  Good story!  But, what does it have to do with human unity?  Well, it serves as the perfect illustration of the illusion of human unity.  We all want what the man got.  He was sick, disabled, and weak; Jesus made him strong and able.  Yup…you keep doing that, Jesus – that’s what we all want.  And it seems so.  And many preachers teach so.  But it isn’t necessarily so!

The strength all humans crave…to be more fit, more healthy, more wealthy and wise, comes at a price.  Often that price is the strength of others.  If there is one at the top of the heap, that means all the rest are below…and at least one at the bottom.  If you have a dollar more than I do in the bank, you have more, I less.

Today there is a huge push towards unity and equality in the human family, and that is not a bad idea, in fact it’s a grand, ethereal, Godly ideal.  But the humanistic view of unity has a crack that will eventually reveal how much crumbling is in the future for the house of cards upon which it stands.  That crack is the void of faith that still separates.  At some point (to be determined by the Father in Heaven) judgment will divide that crack, and all human activity and plans will cease.

Scripture tells us that if there is no faith, you cannot please the God who made you.[1]  Those who fling-about catchy slogans, like Together we’re stronger, or pump their fist in the air as a show of human strength and unity, yet leave God back in the closet of antiquities to be ignored, are living in the crack of the foundation; even worse, they’re hiding the crack, providing a false hope of some utopian myth, that, if we will all just agree, or be unified (on all my ideas, of course, not yours, thank you), well, in that case, everything will be just fine.

Decisions are a definite turning-point, where you go left, instead of right…north, instead of south.  And when it comes to eternity, and the God who is truly Lord of all, the Supreme author and sustainer of life and existance, that decision is vital to the most important question you can get answered:  What’s to become of me?  Jesus minced no words when he stated that in four short sentences:

“Everyone who acknowledges me publicly here on earth, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.  But everyone who denies me here on earth, I will also deny before my Father in heaven.  “Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth!  I came not to bring peace, but a sword.  Matthew 10:32-34

For You Today  

Whenever you hear a plea for unity drop from someone’s mouth, it would be a good thing to remember that true unity can only be found where Christ is honored and obeyed.  Human strength builds a tower of Babel kind of monument to human strength.  Godly unity has the dew of Aaron’s beard[2] all over it, bringing a harmonious healing to the crack in human-shaped unity.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

       Leaving God Behind   and   Circle of Life

Images: Title image Pixabay.com Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©  

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