The chaos of mankind: How did we end up here?

                                                                    

The obsession with life should not deprive us of the time we need to reflect on what actually is most important: how we got here.

Life was beautiful and exciting, if I may use the word, at first until a discontinuance from the Light through willful disobedience brought darkness into subsequent Creation and with it death entered into the world in all its wakes.

Everything began with the Primordial Light, that is, what religions and science refer to as God and mysticism believe is the Infinite Intelligence. It is perhaps on this basis that scientists are of the opinion that everything is ultimately made of light. God is this light of which everything is made of! Life revolves around It because the energy radiating out of It animates and revitalizes life, consequently sustaining and furthering creation.

When a body of matter or anything is closely attuned with the Primordial Light and the energy that sustains Creation, it experiences life at the highest level possible, in which case it experiences only eternity, knowing only joy and profound peace. One does not need a seer or a prophet to prophesy and declare what would happen if something was no longer attuned closely with the life-animating power of the Primordial Light.

Because God is the life-animating Light, whatever walks in darkness has no life and walks in death! But there was no death or darkness when Creation began until man permitted a dark energy into the world. The entrance of this dark energy into the world marked the beginning of chaos on earth! Like every other thing, it started mildly, but it became increasingly severe as darkness continued to exert itself on the earth and in our time a thought of this chaos alone arouses fear that continues to murder peace! Our time is indeed a perilous time because the situation of darkness and the destructions it has brought to the world has climbed to a critical level or heating point!

The question, "How did we get here?" can be summarized in the few sentences aptly expressed above.

While life began with submission to the will of God, death began with submission to the will of Satan. The way to eternal life is just opposite the path to eternal damnation! Man does not walk on a crossroad; he either walks the road to eternity with God or treads on the path leading to everlasting torment in a bottomless pit that burns ceaselessly with fire and brimstone! Life, therefore, is not a random walk, but as defined and specified by what a man thinks and does.

But God has been so gracious and merciful in that he has given us free will-the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate, that is, the ability to act at one's own discretion. In other words, life gives us options but we make the decision. The life a man lives is only but the product of his own actions and not the actions of his mother or father, or any of his own blood relative. Man is what he does over time, as the saying goes, "Practice makes perfect." Man will be perfect at what he does if he practices it every day, just as a woman can actually enlarge her genital or breasts through constant sexual indulgence and message respectively! The free will man enjoys gives him the power to design a world that sounds ideal to him and to create a future that to him represents the perfect future. It is a thing of marvel that in our strength also lies our weakness!

If the free will was not given to man at first he would have been absolved of the failure or inability to walk and live in accordance with the will of God. But that he enjoys such a free will, he will forever remain the architect of his own fate! Thus man is what he thinks in his heart he is! The beautiful thing about life in spite of the chaos and attendant evil is that man was created in the image of God, having the power and the capacity to either create or further a perfect world or destroy a world of peace and harmony. Being created in the image and likeness of God means being equipped with the necessary tools needed to create or destroy what is beautiful. But the primary purpose of possessing such God-like qualities was to become the agent and harbinger of what is good and perfect, and of course to live and experience eternity; for God did not create man after His own image so that man might be a destroyer, one who destroys whatever is good and perfect.

Now that we have learnt how we ended up here, albeit in a brief,  what we should concern ourselves with should be finding the way that leads out of here, out of where we have come to find ourselves in.

God is the ultimate provider. With Jesus Christ, He provided man with the way out of the chaos of the present time . Thus a life without Christ is synonymous with crisis and depression! It is a life of utter darkness and bondage. A man without Christ is like a sea tossed to and fro by the wind, and enjoys no place of safety in times of stormy gale!

Just like man had the free will to either ignore the tree of life or eat of its fruit, he enjoys another free will of either rejecting or accepting the rulership of Christ. Just as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was close to man and strategically planted in the midst of the garden(his home as at that time), the Son of God is at the door of our heart, ever close to us! He does not come with a bag full of goodies to entice you into obedience, and neither He is beckoning at you to awake from your spiritual slumber. The way has been graciously provided for you, even though you did not work hard or do anything to deserve. In this lies the real meaning of the grace man still enjoys today. The onus is now on you to either reject or accept the rulership of Christ. The man of today must repair the relationship that was broken by Adam.  The Son of God is to the man of today what the tree in the middle of the garden was to Adam, the progenitor of the human race.

As the disobedience of Adam brought ruins and darkness to the world, your obedience to the will of God will bring restoration and redemption to salvage the last vestige of strength still left in the core of all that is awake and alive!

 The genesis of every problem faced by man lies in rejecting God, in failing to recognize the truth and live accordingly. In contrast, the solution to all problems lies in living in one accord with the laws of nature!

God did not make man to live independently of Him, but to think and live in Him.  Adam knew this at first but derailed in the face of temptation, just like many of us today have fallen and still falling when confronted by temptation. 

"How did we end up here?" is a question that should give us a reason or two to study the Word of God, to dig deeper into the Scriptures and to pray without ceasing for revelation, without which a leader can neither lead aright nor he that is led follows in the right manner! Revelation unwraps the mysteries of life to bring to our consciousness the knowledge of the only true God and the One whom He sent to lead us out of the chaos and confusion of the present time. A man who spends little or no time in the living Word of God lacks revelation and is without direction. He is alive but not living! It is possible to be alive but without living creation. Those who are yet to accept Christ into their lives are indeed alive but not living. They breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide on daily basis but are unconscious of life itself.

While it is true that doing so many things in life comes down to choice and at one's own discretion, accepting the Son of God as one's personal Lord and saviour is a necessity. It is not an option. Every other thing may. One who wishes to serve God must deny himself the pleasure of exercising the free will freely and graciously granted him. True freedom comes from submission. Man must submit himself wholeheartedly to God before he may be at least permitted to experience true and lasting peace! For he who loves his life will lose it.

Like with alcohol and other forms of drug, abuse is destructive. The abuse of free will granted him cost man the garden of Eden where he lived in joy and happiness and experienced true peace and life at its highest attainable level. And reciprocally he was driven out of paradise after which he was given a sense of responsibility: to tilt the land. Before now life was serving man, always at his service, and man did not have to work hard to earn anything. The ground was yielding and everything was fruitful as God had designed it.But everything changed immediately darkness penetrated the world through man's willful disobedience. But even after such a grievous error, the love God had for man never went off as God made him a covering to hide his shame and veil his mistake. Thus never for once did God allow man to suffer. The grace of God is always with man, as has been since time immemorial. Yet he continues to abuse it, but at his own cost.  Man took one way (disobedience) to end up like this, and by another way(obedience to the will of God) he will end up where God had designed him to be. The essence of life is living according to the will of God. No other life worth living except this.

The moment a man accepts Jesus into his life, he takes a thousand steps forward and is closer to eternity with God than with darkness, and the reverse is the case if he rejects the lordship of Jesus Christ.

One way led us here and another will lead us out of here. The first Adam took the road that led us here but the last Adam walked the road that leads us out of the chaos and confusion of the present time.

The foundation of the evil plaguing the earth today was laid long before the emergence of the first civilization, in the luminous garden of Eden, when the first man chose to disobey God.

Because fate is defined by the content of our daily thoughts and the actions we take, the willful action of disobeying God led Adam to his fate where he had to evacuate the garden- a beautiful and perfect place for the development of the human spirit, and indeed a symbol of rest!

In the Paradise of the human spirit, there is no room for fornicator, adulterer, murderer, liar or even backslider. It is a resting place of the righteous, of those whose garment is glowed with purity and who have kept themselves holy and thus won the race to make eternity with the Light.

When Adam chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he lost the right to the garden and was evicted accordingly. He must from that point of eviction work his return to the garden! The essence of life is to reunite with God, to return back to our first state of perfection where man could neither lack nor suffer common human ills as are prevalent today, and where man had divine dominion over creeping, crawling and flying creatures. By choosing to disobey God, man invariably also renounced the privilege and right to  eternal life. In other words, he chose to suffer and die! But it was not the will of God for man to live only for a short while, but to enjoy the best that life has to offer for all eternity. Man died because he wanted to die, even though God has always wanted him to live.

The error of Adam which led us here was corrected with the birth and death of Christ some 2000 years ago! The first Adam led us into captivity and dungeon of darkness, but the last Adam redeemed us by willingly giving Himself up to be crucified. And as the blood rolled down the stake from his agonizing and crushed soul, salvation was being offered at no just cost and the gates of Hell were shaken to their foundation. And as He arose from the grave after a brief trip to Hell, the chains of darkness were loosened and the righteous could no longer be stopped. Many came to life once again at the resurrection of Christ! 

As Christ made His way back home in ascension, a place of honor at the side of God was being prepared, replacing the place of shame of the first man. Christ thus became the first of a new breed of humanity. On His return back in the millennium, a new world will arise! There shall be a new heaven. Glory be to God. Amen.

                                                               

Excerpt from the Book, The Road to Ephesus by Samuel Goshen John.

The author can be reached on @onfojohnesoh(twitter)

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