Resurrection 5 Resurrection and Reality (cont.)

[HKHaugan]

A fifteenth reality we all share is the need to hide like Adam did. It seems everyone is looking for a safe haven, a retreat house, a cave, a place to feel emotionally and physically secure. It’s a place or an activity we can rationalize as a need and justify its importance. The more obvious are those that are socially acceptable like our jobs, families, clubs, games, leisure activities, degrees, diplomas, projects, homes, possessions, church, charities, TV, radio, computers and other general ‘busy-ness.’

A sixteenth reality is safety or ‘right’ zones. The question then is why do we hide? To understand the need to hide we have to look at two strategies or techniques that proceed from fear, pride and aloneness. We just mentioned them above. They are self-justification and rationalization. When we look at the activities that take up our waking moments they are rationalized as ways we meet the need for self-worth, social acceptability and that inner need to be right. We use them as the means to be right, to feel self-justified. We made the right choices, have the right goals and believe we are, therefore, filled with the right intentions. That makes us therefore, just plain right. We declare ourselves right apart from God. That is further evidence of sin’s products, pride and fear. Can we really be right without God?

A seventeenth reality is we are always searching for perfect relationships. We are looking for perfect give and take relationships, relationships that last, relationships we can trust, relationships that are productive, dependable and reassuring. But there are none available in the horizontal world dimension. What we want most we fear most, a faith relationship with God. Is it because we can’t see Him? Relationships by nature are unseen. We chance a relationship with someone we can see and it’s by faith. But the reason we want to relate is because that is the way we are made. What we discover is that the one relationship we are avoiding is the one offered by God in Jesus Christ. This is the one which human beings avoid yet the only one that will satisfy the fearful self-justifying, rationalizing self.

The eighteenth reality that sums it all up and must be faced finally is spiritual reality. This is the real dimension that demands final processing. Everything we do is motivated by what we can’t see. We are spiritual beings adrift in a sea of aloneness and separation from God and one another. We have to face the fact that we are separated, isolated and alienated from God which is why we go through the acrobatics of choosing safety and self-satisfaction. The final enemy of the self is a hidden being lurking in the unseen, the arch manipulator who is the master hider, the devil. His unholy spirit is sin, the spiritual disease that instigates our fear, our insecurity and our tendency to hide. Sin has so consumed the individual that he neither sees God nor has any sense that the devil exists or that he is the source of our problems. The very idea that I can control my own destiny, that I can make right choices and decisions about who I am and where I am going without God, shows the nature of sin and the nature of the one who hides in the shadows of our loneliness. Sin makes us completely self-absorbed, self-indulgent and self-controlling to the point that there is no room for the One who made us.

Next, the good news of the Resurrection, Jesus defeats the power of sin…stay tuned……….