3/14/13 George 49
At a McDonald’s, I reached out to a
truck driver named George with a question about eternity. He shook his head slowly – “When we die, we
die. That’s it. End of story.” He seemed so hopeless about it, so I asked
more about how he had come to that belief.
I felt that surely I could give him some kind of hope, both for this
life and the next. But it seemed that no
matter how I approached it, George had some sort of excuse why he shouldn’t believe,
from saying he can’t believe in God because of the sin in the world, to questioning
the Bible’s origins, to criticizing church people, to complaining about God’s seeming
uninvolvement with human suffering. No
matter how we looked at it, the glass was always half empty, never half
full. I soon found out why. After he complained about how Adam and Eve
had been “set up” by God to fail, I asked “If you had the choice that Adam had,
only you now have the benefit of hindsight and you know exactly what will
happen if you disobey God, would you eat the forbidden fruit?” “Of course I would” George said. “Who does God think he is to tell me what to
do?” George had no fear of God. Like Adam, he isn’t willing to live under God’s
rule, yet he complained that God can’t possibly exist because nothing in this
life makes sense. I explained that it
never would, because the Bible says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom”. Nothing will make sense
without honoring God as God and allowing Him to take His proper place in our
lives. Yet I realize that even this
simple advice didn’t make sense to George.
He doesn’t have even the simplest wisdom that comes with the fear of
God. I know our latest spiritual trends
frown upon the idea that we should “fear God”, but George reminds me that it
truly is the beginning of wisdom.
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