Fair. Deserve. Rights.

(Today's Music: Cornerstone by Day of Fire)

I subscribe to a number of Internet user forums as a way to connect to other people and to feed my continuing Internet addiction. I get a lot of growling from people about my sig. I don't mind because it's a challenging statement. It goes something like this:

There is no "fair". There is no "deserves". There are no "rights". There is choice and there is Grace. Everything else is just an excuse to live a life of sin.

Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. We spend so much time coming up with reasons why it's not our fault. We depend on someone else to establish excuses for our inability to abide by the most important rule: to love the Lord God with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul, and all our strength.

Are there absolutes? Yes. Dare I say, "Hell, yes." Hell is one of them. God is another. Orange is a third. Justice is not - at least not earthly justice. Therefore, there is no "fair" because fair implies an objective justice, which only exists with the Father. "It's not fair" is a subjective statement which really means "It doesn't comply with my personal views that are heavily tainted by self-interest."

"Deserves" is no better. I go back to my favorite movie line ever. Clint Eastwood, at the end of Unforgiven, sums it up beautifully as the Gene Hackman character lays dying on the dirty saloon floor - "Deserves got nothin to do with it." Do you know what we deserve? Death. Hell. Eternal torment. That's it. Nothing else. We don't deserve forgiveness. It amazes me how Christians have taken all these years of Biblical teaching and have turned it in their minds into "I deserve God's forgiveness." Because God's forgiveness is freely given if we are willing to confess and repent, we believe that it's our due. So we sin with the expectation of forgiveness when it's over.

Newsflash - you aren't forgiven.

When you sin with the plan to ask forgiveness for it later, then do so without conviction you have accomplished nothing except to further delude yourself that God is subject your overinflated ego. You are not forgiven unless you are really sorry. Chew on that for a minute because it's just become words. If you are not really truly ashamed and deeply regretful that you just flipped that crazy driver off, you are not forgiven. Christianity is not that easy. The message is simple enough: Be like Jesus. The execution is much more complicated. Every time you aren't like Jesus, you sin. For every sin you deserve to die. Without repentance (we won't go down the confession to another person road today), every sin still merits death. I'll leave the "deserves" topic with that for now.

And finally to our last and favorite crutch - "rights". Bad news, people. The Declaration of Independence does not hold equal weight with the Bible. I'll bet that really makes you mad. Too bad. The Heavenly Father did not write the U.S. D.O.I. It is not divinely inspired Scripture.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Horse-hockey.

I'll give you the first part. All people are created equal in the eyes of God.

The rest is a lie. These are not rights. These are gifts. They are gifts given to us by God that are given entirely out of His love and mercy. We do not deserve any of these things. We deserve death. Okay, I'll waffle a little on the Life thing. I still stand by it being a gift, not a right, but I believe that Life is the most precious of gifts and that life given by God is not the province of men to take away. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness? No way. These are the words on paper that we cling to when we want to love ourselves instead of God. Liberty is about us. Pursuit of happiness is about us. When we cling to the things about us, we are not loving God with our whole hearts, minds, souls, and strength. We are loving Him after we've taken care of ourselves. It's a lie. It's a lie that has been falsely allowed to become Gospel because we want it to be true. Truth, however, is another of those absolutes that has nothing to do with what we want.

Like orange. Wondered when I would explain that, didn't you? It doesn't matter who you are, what you think, or even if you're color blind. Red and yellow still make orange. A demonstration in front of the White House won't change that. Lobbying and filing a case in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which will challenge anything) won't change that. Having a "right" to believe that red and yellow make green won't change that. You can wallow and splash in your rights all you want, but you ... will ... be ... wrong. We don't challenge orange (well, DesCartes might, but he was wrong about a lot of other things too) because we accept it. Yet we challenge other things that God has told us are true:
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
"And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."
"Thou shalt not kill."
"This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you."
"Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church."

These are as fundamental and unassailable as "Red and yellow make orange" but we don't like it, so we rationalize it away as restricting our "rights".

Enough for today. I'm sure you're as tired of reading this as I am of writing it.