Can we lead ourselves?
Should humanity depend on God or himself? If yes, why?
I love the subject of dependency because as I learn more about life, I see much of how dependent humans are. I mean, we depend on plants for food, at this lowest level of life, by the way. We depend on the air for breathing. We depend on the sun for the body’s vitamins.
How then did we conclude that dependency is such an awful thing for man?
You depend helplessly on your emotions and feelings to act, react, and feel. Sometimes we say what we don’t mean, hurt people, and sit in the corner of our room, regretting why we acted that way or said those things. Other times we are determined to do better and act better, but once we step out, we are back railing on those we love.
We are slaves to our desires, even if we don’t know how we picked them up in the first place.
Because of such patterns of slavery in human behavior, we concluded that man cannot help himself alone.
So, we begin to study and read and rely on other people’s works. We learn their principles and imbibe their knowledge to see if we can change our thoughts and lead better lives. At this point, we can satisfactorily agree that we are dependent on each other both for growth and survival.
So, men are dependent on one another.
Now, how about God?
Is man dependent on God?
I have a theory:
Adam, the first man, was to learn about God through Jesus. But he felt he was powerful enough to lead himself and so didn’t believe in Jesus. His unbelief led him to be independent from God.
He did things his way, made discoveries his way, and made his own choices.
But this decision cost him access to Jesus.
You see, without Jesus, Adam would not learn about God. And without knowing God, Adam would not be able to fully explore himself and all that God has created.
You can say this isn’t true and that humanity is already exploring so much because you don’t know what would have been possible if we had explored ourselves and creation through God.
I watched a movie not too long ago about how man has not been able to use about 10% of his brain or something like that. Then, in the movie, a lady mistakenly ingested a special drug that activated her brain’s ability and wound it up to 100%. Well, the things she was capable of doing when her brain’s ability hit 100% were totally out of this world. She transcended earth, time, space, and matter.
She could create, manipulate, and explore multiple timelines, hear the beating of her heart when she was a baby, solve all complex mathematical problems, etc. The earth could no longer contain her. She dissolved out of physical existence.
Again, you look around at what science without God has created and think, “This is great.” But imagine what science with God would create.
“Without God” and “with God” are italicized because I am referring to a kind of scientific invention that begins with, or is integrated with, spirituality—not just research, testing, and laboratory work.
The complexities of just one strand of human hair alone or a single sinew are enough to show us how much we would have been if we hadn’t become independent.
What we have now as science is billions of times away from what we would have been with God.
We are celebrating shadows because we have not seen the real thing.
When a man has lived in darkness all his life, he can never know what it means to be in light.
Christianity is not one of the religions out there. Neither is it a “part” of human existence that is religious. No.
Christianity is our key back to exploring science, biology, technology, and other human inventions that have not come into existence yet.
The gospel of salvation is only the beginning to get back to God and begin to do life through him.
So, can man lead himself? No.
Man was not designed to have self-leadership.
Man was designed to depend on God. Man was designed to keep eating of the Tree of Life (the word, Jesus). It is by depending on God, his creator, that man begins to know God. And it is in knowing God that man begins to understand creation and what to do with this world.
We were not supposed to come into this world and start guessing why exactly we are here. We were not supposed to work or learn, just feed, get married, give birth, and die. No intelligent being creates something so dumb and useless as that.
Traditional Christianity has done even more damage to this way of thinking by teaching that our hope is to strive to live rightly so that we can leave this evil world.
Think for a moment.
What exactly are we doing here?
Why did we come here only to struggle to keep certain instructions so that we can one day leave for some heavenly home?
Why not just create us and put us in heaven right away? Why let us go through life on earth if our final destination is heaven?
This is my quarrel with traditional Christianity, which teaches ideas such as the rapture and the destruction of the earth in some end-time apocalyptic cataclysm. It does not make any sense whatsoever.
I’d rather side with agnostics who have found comfort in their inability to explain this world and have concluded that nothing has a definite explanation, nor does life have any inherent meaning.
Roman 5:6 says, “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.”
NLT reads,
“When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.”
What does it mean to be “helpless” or “weak”
Was it referring to the weakness of our bodies?
No.
Because the context says, “Christ died for us when we were utterly helpless.”
Some other time, we will look at what it means when it says we were helpless or weak, till Christ came and died for us. But for now, understand that man without God is helpless.
And,
Everything we see all around us as inventions is born out of our weaknesses.
Imagine what we would do when we are strengthened!