It’s ironic that so many humans trust their own goodness or ruthlessness or family name or physical beauty or social charm or financial standing as the means of feeling good about their future.
And that’s just for this life.
For those who believe in the fact of an afterlife, the notion of human attainment meeting divine, flawless standards is widely embraced even though it is logically impossible.
There is no such thing as “good enough” when the minimum standard is perfection.
Listen, heaven has the original zero tolerance policy.
Nobody gets in if even the tiniest of sin’s stains remain.
For if they did, it wouldn’t be perfect.
And Jesus would have died for nothing.
This truth jumped off the page to me this morning when I read Proverbs 11:7.
“Hopes placed in mortals die with them; all the promise of their power comes to nothing”
It appears that King Solomon might have been speaking of the hopes that people had then that the kings of nations could always protect them from invading armies.
History shows that hope to be terribly hollow.
Countless times the citizens of a country learned in a most sobering way that their king had been killed in battle — they saw an invading army approach with fire in its eyes and blood-hungry swords in its hands.
The king’s promises had come to nothing.
Fast forward to now. Mortals are still believing lies.
Not as much involving clashing armies but certainly as much, if not more, involving false teachings.
Cults and other non-Christian religions around the world are growing at a meteoric rate because of the emphasis on human attainment of the mind or of the flesh.
Even Christianity is struggling in some ways because of this tendency among so many.
How many are church followers or pastor followers who drop out of Christianity whenever the church fails or the pastor fails?
Listen, our hope is to be in the Messiah who was God in human form and who was resurrected.
Any other hope will fail because it always has.
All the promise of power made by king after king, by false prophet after false prophet, by false religion after false religion has — or will — come to nothing.
Those kings, false prophets and false religion leaders are still dead and so are their promises.
Please join me in celebrating the fact that our hopes are in a living King who promises to come in power to deliver us to the “everything” of heaven.
As always, I love you
Martin
