Apologies to avid readers of the Gospel Blog for my long absence! We are currently having serious work done to our house and every spare minute seems to have been taken up with shifting furniture from one room into another to allow the joiners in, then back again to let the decorators into the first room, and so on!
Apologies also to the promoters of the film ‘Twilight’, which I haven’t seen. I just thought that the question they are using to advertise their film is a particularly apt one. I noticed it while I was being conducted along Princes Street in Edinburgh during the traditional pre-christmas march of the husbands. You know the one where wives / girlfriends vainly edeavour to get some sort of response on the suitablility of presents from husbands / boyfriends who look as though they have given up the will to live. Anyway, the bus-shelters on Princes Street were all carrying adverts for Twilight and I found it eminently more stimulating than the shop windows.
In the book of Genesis we read, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2v7). The breath of God didn’t just mobilise the dust of the ground, it brought into being an individual made ‘in the image of God’; A soul who will continue to exist even after their body has died and decayed. Elsewhere in the Old Testament a man called Job said, “I know that my Redeemer lives, And He shall stand at last on the earth; And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, That in my flesh I shall see God, Whom I shall see for myself, And my eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19vs25-27).
Given that you have been given a soul that will live for ever – what are you going to live for? Are you going to live only for this life – the existence of your body? Or are you going to consider the destiny of your soul? The Lord Jesus said, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8v36).
God has given you the freedom to choose what to do with your life. You can choose to ignore Him and the Son He has freely given to be your Saviour. Or you can choose to acknowledge that His verdict upon you is correct, that you are a sinner who needs a Saviour and that when Christ died, He died for you. What you cannot do is to live your life as you like, without God and then to lay some claim upon Him in eternity! That is the option that so many people seem to want – by their life to deny the very existence of God and yet to want some religious flavour to comfort their passing out into eternity. God hasn’t given us that option.
So given that you will live for ever, either in heaven with God or in Hell without Him – what are you going to live for here and now?