Life and Death Situations

Tonight at youth group we started a new series with the middle school kids, titled "Mirage." It's all about how a lot of times in the world, things are often deceptive, especially in the area of sin. There's four messages, and tonight's was "Sometimes Death Looks Like Life."

While I think that poetically (and artistically) speaking, the ideas of death and life are used incredibly often, and rightly so, because they are two major components of human existence. However, to sound out in the din of the messages about death and life, you must say something either bound in truth, or discordant with the rest of the messages.

Christianity is one place where the message given about life and death is both discordant with the world and bound poignantly in truth.

Now, I would like to remark upon the frequency that, in this world, death very often does look like life. Satan's name of 'deceiver' is no misnomer. He has effectively masqueraded many death-causing circumstances, occurrences, activities, etc., to look as if they are actually the path to life. (Just to note, when I speak of 'death,' the concept I am referring to is not only the literal death or end of life, but also the participation in sin in this world, which, in effect, 'kills' a believer's soul)

If you are unsure that such a concept is true, let me enlist an example:

Lust, specifically sexual lust, has as its goal the temporary satisfaction in a person, something that can be thought to bring life. The bestowing/reception of affection from someone is 'life-awakening,' as is the simple satisfaction in them. One could even make the point that if a child was to come of it, life was born of the original desire.

However, outside of marriage, this lustful desire for someone leads only to death. How many relationships and even marriages have been destroyed when people give themselves over to their desires, lured into the promise of life that the lust gives?

And so I urge you, and hope that you will urge me to not fall into the trap that has been set. I am one of the chiefest offenders in this area, too many times have I followed my flesh into a fallen promise. Do not so follow!

I hope to delve into this idea more fully in the future, and with the ongoing series at youth group, I'll hopefully remember to. For now, I'll leave you with a quote from Jonathan Edwards:

"So there is nothing here below by which we can attain to happiness, though there be many of the high and great things of the world that seem to others that don't enjoy them as though a happiness was to be reached by them. Yet those that have experience find happiness as far from them as from those that are in a lower state of life."
[From Images of Divine Things]