The Atmosfear in the Atmosphere

[HKHaugan]

The Atmosfear Within the Atmosphere

 When we consider that prophecy brought the specifics of what a Messiah, a Savior, would be like, sinful man changed it from being relational to a religion he could control; something he wanted, not what God wanted.  From Genesis on to Malachi, the Old Testament reveals man’s deeper nature being influenced by a self-centered maneuvering called sin.  Sin is the self-orientation an individual unconsciously uses when pondering how to be human.  Outside of God a person is his own god rationalizing his thinking and justifying his behavior by choosing what seems best at any given moment.  It is a life of social and physical survival, which ever one dominates that moment. 

 Sin ruling a heart causes us to assess the surrounding social atmosphere self-protectively.  Sin leads us to ‘fit in’ the safest way we can to whatever the moment demands.  The world is an atmosphere of sin-directed individuals producing sin-produced results which develop an increased sense of aloneness and fear.  This basically is what the word ‘world’ means in Scripture, a relational atmosphere where everyone is alone and afraid, making the most out of what they have been given to survive.  Sin is the spirit of the devil, thus his title, the ‘prince of this world.’ 

 When we think we are in control all by ourselves, that’s when the devil moves about like a roaring lion devouring individuals through division, hate, anger, planned social disruption and groups built around physical, ethnic and social distinctions.  Apart from God who loves and unites, they devise survival strategies contrived internally by fear and employed externally by angry hostile action.  Anger is a sign of fear’s presence and control.  It is an ‘atmosfear.’  As the British author Thackery concluded, the world is like a Vanity Fair.  It is “a world in which everyone is striving for what is not worth having.”  Consequently, life in this world is an individual experience in an ‘atmosfear’ where conflict defines existence as a tragic melodrama in which the characters are all nobodies trying to be somebodies. 

 Who will come into this maelstrom of emotionally driven violence, all humanity’s desperate hearts, these bags of dry bones thirsting for a drink of immediate acceptance only God can provide?  There is nothing humans apart from God can do.  Can we now see why the Lord God sent us a Savior?   A Savior who would die on a Cross executed by foreign government in a conspiratorial tie with the leadership of his own people and an angry hostile mob?  Why is it someone always has to die before we get the point that our problem is spiritual, not social, economic, class or appearance?    It is into this intense ‘atmosfearic’ world that Jesus was born.  But not only born but born of a virgin.  Now when the human mind hears that, there is an immediate reaction, impossible, scientifically impossible.  Yet, right there is the prophecy from Isaiah 7:14 that will be realized 7 centuries later.  The Messiah the Savior God sends, will be born of a virgin from a socially and politically rejected people, in the most modest of circumstances.  But why?  Because it is sin in the individual heart that is the problem.  Faith is the solution.  And every person on every level of every social scale is in need of a personal Savior and Lord.  There is no other solution for fear and pride, the manipulative forces of sin that maneuver the heart without God.

 Sin is a spiritual problem in every human heart.  Only a personal relationship with God who created human beings can solve that problem.  And it won’t happen overnight.  The problem is too deep, too ingrained, too far spread.  Only God can reach the heart and change it.   “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me (Is.6:8)!"