Michael Row the Boat Ashore; A waste of time

Submitted by Michael S (United States), May 30, 2016 at 22:26

Luck??

Aren't we dealing with certainty here? Barring a slim chance that there's some sort of "rapture" coming, you and I will most certainly die. When that happens, we will be in the company of those who have died, in the "land of the dead". All the brilliant scientists like Stephen Hawking will be there, telling us there is no afterlife and no God, and that our best hope is to get on rockets and go into outer space. He will not be in Utopia on Planet X, living with aliens. Let me assure you of that: he will be with us, in the land of the dead. We will no longer be in mortal bodies. We will no longer be breathing air. Those things will be left behind; that is a certainty. What we will be left with is our faith.

There isn't any luck here, nor any uncertainty. Wherever you are, you will be there forever; because in this present world of time and space, men and women might search and search for you, until this whole place rots, decays, explodes, melts, whatever these time/place things do, and they will not find you nor me. We will not be holograms on the Twilight Zone. We will not be six-armed Hindu gods. We will not be anything here: We will be in the land of the dead.

So, where's the struggle? This isn't a casino. We won't win or lose some jackpot: We will be in that other place.

Do you know what the ancients believed about that other place? The Greeks believed there is a river there, the River Styx; and we need to pay the ferryman to get across to where we're going. That's why the Greeks put a coin under the tongue of their beloved, so that somehow the ferryman would take them to a nice place.

Do you believe that? How big a coin do you want under your tongue? Would a South African Rand gold piece suffice? How about some paper securities? or a lucky rabbit's foot for the ferryman? Does that sound ridiculous? If you think so, I will grant you that Greek religion only goes back to about 1500 BC, when their gods presumably created mankind. By that time, Moses' father had already been born in Egypt. So who should know better? Moses, or the Greeks?

Nevertheless, even the Bible gives credence to the Greek imaginations; because they borrow their language in the Greek translations: The Hebrew "Gehenna", an allegorical term speaking of the garbage dump in Jerusalem, is replaced in Greek translations by "Hades", the Greek land of the dead, comlete with its river. Even Christian "spirituals" talk about such a river; a popular song from the 1960s gives the ferryman the name "Michael", and calls the the Styx "Jordan" to make it sound scriptural, but it's pure pagan baloney. Do you believe it?

I don't think we'll end up on the banks of some mythological Greek river. I prefer to believe that we will be judged by the King of the Universe, the God of the Bible. We will be judged according to what we have done on earth. Does that make sense? What else are we to be judged by? The things we DIDN'T do? The things other people do? An arbitrary judgment, having nothing to do with life? Either we will be judged by a just God, according to just standards, or our lives are

MEANINGLESS.

Where's the chance here? There's a 100% chance that we will stand before the final judgement seat of God, or that our life is meaningless. Also, since the land of the dead is not in time and space, we can expect that our judgment will be eternal -- whether for good, or for evil.

If you're wrestling over the terms of that judgment, that makes sense. Maybe you can win favor with the Judge. We have to believe that however your wrestling turns out, God will return a righteous judgment. He will, of course, consider your wrestling; but He will certainly render a fair judgment. Otherwise, this whole universe, and everyone and everything in it, is, in the words of Solomon, "vanity; a vexation of spirit'; in other, more scientific terms, "a waste of time".

Shalom shalom :-)

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