Good Monday morning! Does your device need a driver to work with your PC? Of course it does! Sometimes it is pre-installed, other times the operating system can find the driver on the Internet, but once in a while you simply get nothing. The device may be too old, or the manufacturer has not kept up with the latest operating system, but you get no communication with the device. Many folks choose this time to call in professional help, whether it is someone they have to pay or their nephew Bernie. We live in a hopelessly complex world; no one knows everything about every device and connection we may need in today's technical jungle. Even nephew Bernie might have to look at the instructions once or twice to get things working.
We also live in a hopelessly legalistic world. Reams of new government regulations are created each year. For those of you too young to remember a ream of paper, we'll just say that gigabytes of new regs are made each year. If you are old enough in years and young enough at heart to know both then you realize the comparison isn't very good, but on with show as they say. As with technology, no one can possibly know all of the local, state, and federal regulations we live under each day. The larger the city you live in, the worse it gets. And we'll leave alone the tax code and the new health regulations!
Does science help us to understand the world and universe we live in? Yes and no; it seems the more we discover, the more we find there is to uncover. The greatest minds in science tend to change those minds from time to time. The lessons we learned in high school biology, astronomy, geology, and others back in the 70's (at least for me) have changed in some ways since then. We know more collectively, but realize also that we have much to learn. We also have a great many mistakes that will be changed in another 40 years or so. Sometimes you might wonder why we bother learning the latest theory.
Spiritually we have the answers, right? I'm not so sure. If you had no knowledge of religion or belief, but decided one day that religion held the answers for you, you might grab something like Ed Mecklenberg's Guide to the World's Religions. (Don't run down to your library; I'm making that up) The guide would take each religion, slice it and dice it, and tell you what the author sees from his academic high chair. You would read about all the ways the world has invented to earn your salvation from the good works of the Christians to the head down prayers of the Muslims to the recycled lives of the Hindus and many more. "Um, which one is correct?" you might ask after reading about several main religions and the myriad of offshoots, cults, and variations of each. You might just end up hopelessly confused in this hopelessly complex world.
We might just look at the alternative. What if one man didn't say, "I have the answer"; but instead showed up one day and said, "I am the answer!" What if one man said that we cannot earn our salvation, but that he would die to provide it to us simply for the asking? You might run back to that guide to wonder what you had missed. From the academic high seat, with properly detached emotions, the author of the guide will never see the truth about the Way, the Truth and the Life. Christianity is just another religion to many who claim to know about Jesus and many who have read the Bible. Christ, on the other hand, is a very personal savior and Lord to those who will believe first and study the Word second. What is the difference? Let me explain.
In my high school years and before, I read the Bible many times; mostly because someone said something like, "you will go to Hell if you don't read your Bible." I attended classes, memorized Bible verses and quoted scripture back, knelt in prayer and went up front for altar calls. Did any of that save me? No, for the Bible reminds us that our salvation is not of works, lest we should boast about all those duties we did and scriptures we could rattle off. My attitude as soon as I got away from home was that I had enough guilt in my job or school during the week, I didn't need any more on Sunday, and I quit the whole thing. This occurred after I got out of the proverbial and literal foxhole of course. You have probably heard people say the same things; the Annie Savoy character in the movie Bull Durham says it; you might have said the same thing. Guilt is the gravecloth the world wears to the wedding feast.
We don't really read the Bible until we first believe. The devil knows scripture; he quoted it to Jesus. We might grow up memorizing scripture, but we don't learn it in our hearts until we first believe in the inspiration for that scripture, Jesus Christ. The world may be hopelessly complex, but Jesus has a simple message for us: believe in Him and have eternal life. Sometimes it just seems too simple in this complex and fast-moving world, but praise God for the simple Good News! As Jesus told the people when He called Lazarus from the grave, "unloose him!"
Bucky
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