Choose God

Why? Why do I care? Why should you care?

I care because I live. I cannot help but acknowledge the reality that I exist and not by my own power. I have been created. I have been created by God. Every breath, every heartbeat, and every thought exist through the life given me and sustained by God. Do I comprehend God? Not very much, but what I can comprehend is overwhelmingly incredible. My most fundamental choice, a choice that I have been ordained by God to exercise according to my freewill that He has given me, is to decide if I will receive and enjoy my life in submission to God, or not. God does not force the life that He has designed on His creation. God’s love is manifested in our freewill to receive life or to reject it. We are not forced to live. If we desire to live, we must live according to our design and by the power of God. There is no other possibility.

God has instilled within our very being a knowledge of Him. God communicates with us through our consciences. If our desire is to know God, we can know Him just by paying attention to Him. God's voice and inspiration within us is not the same thing as our own inner voice. God's voice corrects and informs our inner voice. God's voice leads us to other sources of knowledge about Him including His Word, the Bible. When we pay attention to God's voice and obey it, we grow in relationship with Him. To persistently disregard God's voice in us is what the Bible calls grieving the Holy Spirit of God. As you read these thoughts about God's voice, you will hear both God's voice and your own inner voice which is likely arguing with God's voice a little.

To deny that God even exists is to reject God. To say that God exists while disregarding what He has revealed to mankind is to reject God. To behave religiously in the name of God while disobeying His Word and law is to reject God. To worship any god other than our Creator is to reject God. To hold personal philosophies that contradict or disregard God's Word is to reject God.

Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? James 2:19-20

To choose God is to make Him your ultimate authority in all things which includes the Bible.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. 2 Timothy 3:15-17

As far as reality is concerned, there is just one. That’s the definition of reality. Reality may be far more complex that any human has ever conceived, but reality remains what it is. This reality exists by the power and will of the one true God.

I will submit to God or I will reject God as my authority. This is the fundamental first step that we must take as children of God. God’s love allows us the freedom to choose to not exist. Our choice is manifested by our actions, by the fruits of our lives, in the declaration of who our authority will be. Our authority is our God. Our God is either our Creator and Sustainer of our lives, or our authority is ourselves. God’s love honors our choice about who our authority will be. Since God is the only source of true life we cannot continue to exist if we reject God as our authority. If we choose to reject God, we reject the life that comes from God.

Iniquity is the self-delusion that we can somehow continue to exist and live while rejecting the reality and authority of our Creator. Our capacity to be self-deluded is a necessary possibility if we are to truly possess freewill. God’s love is grounded in His vulnerability to be rejected by us making a genuine choice. We are truly free to reject life. The unavoidable consequence of rejecting life is death.

Life is not simply existence. Life is existence according to the design by which we have been created. Life includes living according to the very nature of our Creator which we know as His laws, His character. We cannot exist out of harmony with God’s laws. To reject God’s law is to reject life.

We are promised that eternal life is possible with inexhaustible fulfillment, but it all begins with choosing to live in submission to the authority of life. We must choose who will be our God. Our choice does not include our ability to determine alternate realities. Our choice is limited to accepting or rejecting the reality given to us by God. We cannot by our choice diminish God. God by definition is the ultimate authority. God was, God is, and God will always be. Our choice is simply whether we will exist in harmony with His power and love or not. We have the very real option to reject God.

Don't feel too confident about understanding who you worship. Most people don't have a clue. Most people, rather than paying close attention to God's Word themselves, have accepted traditions and philosophies of men that lead to a rejection of God all while professing a faith in God. That's called being deceived. The Bible calls that believing false doctrines and drinking the wine of the wrath of fornication. It's a real spiritual problem in the world. God's Word tells us that most people will be deceived. The only way to avoid deception is to apply the truths given in the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit of God to discern truth from error. You won't use the Bible that way if you have not in fact made God and His Word your ultimate authority. If you lean on your own understanding, your own intellect and supposed understanding of science, then you are placing yourself above the Word of God and you have rejected God. If you determine that God's Word is unreliable for any reason, you have rejected God. The God who is capable of creating in six days the earth and all life on it as recorded in Genesis is fully capable of providing mankind with His written Word in reliable form. If you deny that, you reject God. You can only find fault in even small ways with the Bible if you think that you know more than the God who gave us the Bible. That makes you your own god. We can accept that we don't fully understand certain things in the Bible, but we cannot deny the authority of the Bible without denying the authority of the author of the Bible.

Mankind’s history has been framed as a battle for our allegiance. Will we worship our Creator God and Father, or will we put our own understanding above God's authority and put forth a false god? This choice has been a part of God’s creation even before the earth and mankind were created. God’s creation includes Heaven, the angels and other worlds. One third of the angels rejected the authority of God and were cast out of Heaven. Two thirds, however, submitted to God's authority when He declared the authenticity of His only begotten Son even though they had to accept God's Word by faith. Mankind is not God’s first creation. It appears, however, that mankind has been created with a particular purpose and design that is unique. Mankind has been created in the image of God such that the freewill that God includes with His offer of life is so important that He has provisioned a second chance for mankind to receive life after having rejected it once before. God designed mankind to be like Him, to be in relationship with Him, to live with Him forever.

It's true that many translations of the Bible have been poorly translated in certain places or have even been deliberately altered to change the meaning of God's Word. However, we also have God's Word the way it was originally inspired in the original languages to use to validate or correct Bibles in our own languages. With a little effort you can know the difference.

Not even God’s desire for mankind to be in relationship with Him will cause Him to force life on us. We must choose to want life with Him. The image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) in which we have been created includes the capacity to procreate. The billions of individual humans who have been given the opportunity to choose life have come into existence through the process of birth. This is an illustration of one aspect of the image of God. God gave life to His only begotten Son and through His Son created all things. In a similar way, God has given life to Adam (Genesis 2:7) and through Adam all of mankind has come into existence. The only begotten Son of God came from the bosom of His Father, from the very substance of God. (Proverbs 8:24-25, John 1:18) The only begotten Son of God had no mother. In a similar way, Eve came from the bosom of Adam, from one of Adam’s ribs, from the very substance of Adam. Eve had no mother. Through Christ by the power of His Father all creation and the life possessed by that creation has come into existence. Through Adam and Eve all of mankind has come into existence. Mankind is in no small way an illustration of the relationship of God the Father with His only begotten Son.

The significance of the design and creation of mankind is memorialized by Christ becoming human as the mechanism by which to give mankind a second chance to choose life. What God has intended in His creation of mankind is truly remarkable and well beyond our comprehension. We can know by what God has revealed to us in limited fashion that life is real as is our freedom to accept it or to reject it. This freedom that we have is the love of God and the price of this freedom has included the sacrifice of His only begotten Son to prove His love to the universe.

God will settle for nothing less than our genuine and complete choice to accept life. The sacrifice of God's Son will not be wasted on people who do not fully accept it. There is nothing in between choosing life or rejecting life. We must be either hot or cold in our choice. To allow any amount of rejection of God is to destroy true choice. If we could live by both asserting the authority of God and our own authority in defiance of God’s design and law, then God’s love would be nullified. Eternal life possessed by mankind will be as gold refined in a fire. There is a necessary purity that corresponds to the perfection of God that must be manifested in our choice for life.

Our choice is summed up in who we will worship. Do we fully submit to our Creator and His love or not? There is no alternative god to choose. We either submit to God our Creator or we falsely assert ourselves as our own authority. Since we do not possess the power to give ourselves life, the choice to make ourselves our own god is to choose death.

The first created being to assert himself as his own authority was Lucifer. Lucifer has engaged in a campaign to persuade others to likewise assert themselves in place of their Creator. Lucifer succeeded in persuading one third of the angels in heaven to reject their God before mankind was created. Lucifer has not only asserted his own false authority for himself but has sought to make himself a god of sorts by seeking the worship of others. Lucifer, being the first one to assert this mystery of iniquity, has been the leader of rebellion in Heaven and in this world. Lucifer desires our worship. Lucifer's argument to the universe that he is worthy of worship is based on his allegation that Jesus is not the pre-existent divine Son of God and that Lucifer should be equal with Jesus. Jesus is divine. Lucifer is not divine. Jesus is our Creator through the power of His Father and together they are worthy of our worship. Lucifer just wants to look good and receive worship, but he is not divine and is not worthy of worship. Lucifer is seeking an impossible bid to be divine and has proven his willingness to destroy life, even the life of the Son of God, to pursue his futile objective. Our part in this story is to choose if we will seek to elevate ourselves above our Creator as did the third of the angels who fell from Heaven with Lucifer and ultimately share in thier eternal demise. This is an important choice, more important than any worldly priority or distraction.

God’s love is fully demonstrated in allowing His creation to exercise their freewill choice. More than simply allowing creation to experience the consequences of rejecting life, God has exposed a piece of Himself through His only begotten Son to experience this freewill through incarnation. Jesus has come as God with us and has experienced the freewill of choosing life in God with the very real option to reject His Father God. Jesus triumphed. Jesus faithfully chose life through the same exercise of freewill that we all as humans possess. Through the life and triumph of Jesus mankind is given a second opportunity to choose life. God’s love persists in giving us freewill. Just because we have a second chance doesn’t mean that we have been deprived of our choice to reject God. We cannot truly love God without the real option to reject Him.

God’s love is not found in His power, in His goodness or in His purpose. God’s love is manifested in the genuine choice that He ordains in each individually created being. God has defended our freewill choice to accept or reject life with a part of Himself, the life of His only begotten Son. We are but simple created things that cannot ever possess the potential to rival God, yet God has desired to make Himself real and vulnerable to relationship with His creation. God allows us to reject Him and life and He calls that sin. God’s tolerance of sin for a season is limited to a complete demonstration of the disastrous consequences of sin. God hates sin. God will utterly destroy sin. Sin will not be tolerated any longer. Sin had to be allowed to manifest to reveal God’s true love, but for God’s love to be true it must not tolerate sin beyond what is necessary to reveal sin. God’s power can and will end sin with a wrathful vengeance, but God’s love requires His creation to make its choice first. God’s love nor ours in return would be real if God simply denied the potential for sin. Having witnessed and experienced the consequences of sin, those who choose eternal life will stand ready at an instant to stop any future manifestation of sin to avoid a repeat of this world’s painful experience. Those who love God will readily rebuke and correct all sin while seeking to redeem the one committing the sin. That's love. The love of God is nothing at all like the sentimental romantic emotions that the world calls love. True love hates sin.

The end of life on this world as we know it is rapidly approaching. The end of this world is not the result of physical or biological processes. The end of this world will come as a judgement of God. God will soon declare, "It is done." (Psalms 62:12, Jeremiah 17:10, 32:19, Daniel 8:14, Matthew 16:27, 24:50-51, Romans 2:6, 14:12, Revelation 2:23, 11:18, 16:17, 20:12, 21:6, 22:11-12) The kingdom of this world and the dominion of Satan in this world will be replaced with the Kingdom of Heaven and the righteousness of Jesus who has been given by His Father all authority. Our future will follow the future of the kingdom we choose to live in. This world will be destroyed. Jesus tells us plainly that these last days are like the days of Noah. Just think about that. God has already once destroyed most of this world on a global scale with a flood. If you don't believe that, then you deny the Word of God which is a rejection of God. That's just what the entire world chose to do with the exception of Noah and his family. We face the same choice. We face the same spiritual condition as existed in the days of Noah. God's Word was faithfully preached by Noah for 120 years prior to the flood. Nearly the whole world disregarded God's Word given through His prophet Noah. God was rejected in favor of man's priorities and opinion of themselves.

The antediluvian civilization was not primitive as our modern view of world history would have us believe. Antediluvians were far superior in physical and mental capacities than we have today. They commonly lived for 600 to 900 years of age. With greater physical and mental capacities and longer lives mankind was able to engage in deeper levels of sin to the point that God could tolerate such sin no more. There remained a remnant faithful to God in the person of Noah and some of his family.

What we perceive to be modern advances in science, industry and technology will lead many to have a sense of self-sufficiency that contributes to a rejection of God. God gives us each heartbeat. God tells us to obey His Word. Too many people determine that God's Word is only a myth or is in some fundamental way flawed such that man's reasoning is elevated above simply believing and obeying God's Word. Even people who profess to believe in God and function in positions of spiritual leadership proclaiming God's Word choose in their own lives to violate the plainest of instruction given by God. This is justified in their minds by a false version of love and an over-reliance on intellectualism and so-called science. How scientific is it to disregard God's evidence? How moral is it to disregard God's laws. How dangerous is it to assume that God's love will overlook wilfull and persistent sin? God hates all sin. God's love is manifested to give you and me one more chance to hate sin too.

Choose you this day whom you will serve. Will you choose to honor your Creator by accepting His seal upon your life? Do you submit to the authority of God? This choice must be complete and genuine. All false gods are simply expressions of choosing to believe that we can in some way assert our own authority in place of God’s authority. We can’t choose to follow Lucifer (Satan) without first asserting our own authority to reject God. Either our Creator is our God, or we are our own god. Our Creator is the only source of life, so rejecting God is to choose death.

To choose God is to genuinely submit to Him. To love God is to obey God. To love God is to accept the Word that He has given us both in the form of His only begotten Son and in the form of Scripture. Scripture is only the bare minimum of the truth of God that exists, but it is truth. Scripture contains the truth we need to be confident in our choice about submitting to the authority of our Creator. We can be deceived. Scripture provides us with a tangible standard of truth that together with God’s Holy Spirit can safely guide us to make the choice for life. The only way we can reject life is to choose to reject life which we demonstrate by our actions in addition to our testimony. Our choice is revealed by our works even more than by our declarations.