The Real Meaning of Life

I know I repeat myself a lot, but if you are a new reader, I want you to be informed. I don’t have all of the answers. Before I study scripture, I pray that God opens my heart and mind to understanding, I ask Him to send His Spirit into me to teach me the truth, and I pray that He puts the right words in my mouth to share to others.

I’m not a pastor, I’m not a prophet, and to the extent I am aware of, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the voice of God. What I do know, is that many times after this prayer, I will sit down and type my thoughts about what I’ve read, and these thoughts just come to me. Nothing I write is planned, I don’t sit down in advance and write out an outline, I don’t “choose my words carefully”, I don’t even use spell check or check my grammar. My purpose is not to write the perfect essay, but rather to simple share my faith.

While I like to think that God is writing the message through my fingers to the keyboard, I can’t even guarantee that. I just know how the process of this blog works.

Wanna know something else? Sometimes nothing comes. Even after prayer, sometimes I read chapters like some of these is Isaiah, and all I can see is another “mumbo jumbo” wordage. Sometime it’s much of the same; Israel has strayed away from God, they will suffer the consequences of that, but God will redeem them.

But that’s okay too. Sometimes when nothing seems to impress me, I just sit back and meditate. I’m not in school, so I don’t have to rely on a good grade, so it’s okay for me to just sit back and meditate on what I’ve read. Sometimes we don’t have to “find the answer”, sometimes we just have to relax and meditate on the word of God.

And in my opinion, it’s not good to “hunt” for the answers. If we get frustrated that the scripture doesn’t mean anything, we might have a tendency to dig too deep, to search too hard for what it is God wants us to know, and to do this to the point we end up making up something in our head that isn’t right. We certainly don’t want to convince ourselves of something that isn’t true just for the sake of “understanding scripture”.

Now, I’m not a smart man. And much of what Isaiah writes is very poetic, very deep, and yes, very much over my head. I read what he says and I think I should understand it, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t. My sister loves the Book of Job. Ernest Hemmingway says the Book of Job is the greatest literary work of all time. You know what? I don’t get it. I’m not that smart. I didn’t pay close enough attention in English class to understand “literature”. But that’s okay too. The message of Job, in a nutshell, is to maintain faith in God regardless of what struggle you face in life. Pure and simple. Oh, and that most of the trouble in our life is caused by Satan, not a punishment from God.

So as I read these chapters of Isaiah yesterday, and again today (because I didn’t get it yesterday either), I’m going to have to suffice in just meditating on what he is saying. And I think the message is simple. We can stray from God and sin. We have to suffer the natural consequences of our separation from God, not His punishment, but rather the consequences of distancing ourselves from God’s design for life. And that no matter how far we stray, God will redeem us.

If we let Him.

That’s the key. We have to be willing and ready to allow God to redeem us. Just like the kid in the supermarket whose mother won’t buy him that sugary breakfast cereal that is basically just cookies and milk, so he throws himself to the ground and begins to have a hissy fit. It he allows, his mother will pick him up, hug him, console him, and teach him why it is bad for his health to eat cookies and milk for breakfast, i.e., she will redeem him. But if he continues to fight, resist, and continue the actions of kicking and screaming on the floor, there is nothing the mother can do. Yes, she can snatch him up, punish him for his actions with a physical spanking, but that is not our God. Our God doesn’t punish us for doing bad, he simply hope that we don’t resist, and if we do, we suffer the natural consequences of our actions.

None of what I’ve said pertains particularly to the subject matter of these chapters of Isaiah. But what I’ve written wasn’t planned, so maybe this was God’s message flowing through my fingers. Maybe God wants us to know that scripture isn’t a test in which we have to search for the answer or we fail. Maybe it is a simple message.

“Stay with Me and everything will be alright.”

Stay with God, and everything will be alright.