Living the Christian Life Magazine
What is twisted cannot be straightened, what is lacking cannot be counted (Ecc.1:15)
It is a truism to say that order in nature depends upon right relationships; to achieve harmony each thing must be in its proper position relative to each other thing. In human life it is not otherwise.
The cause of all our human miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God and to each other. For whatever else the Fall may have been, it was most certainly a sharp change in man's relation to his Creator. He adopted toward God an altered attitude, and by so doing destroyed the proper Creator-creature relation in which, unknown to him, his true happiness lay. Essentially salvation is the restoration of a right relation between man and his Creator, a bringing back to normal of the Creator-creature relation
In determining relationships we must begin somewhere. There must be somewhere a fixed centre against which everything else is measured, where the law of relativity does not enter and we can say "IS" and make no allowances. Such a centre is God. When God would make His Name known to mankind He could find no better word than "I AM." When He speaks in the first person He says, "I AM"; when we speak of Him we say, "He is"; when we speak to Him we say, "Thou art." Everyone and everything else measures from that fixed point.
As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.
In the Bible God has fixed boundaries in which lives. The Ten Commandments as such. They set firstly the existence of a creator God and our relationship to Him and secondly our relationship to on another
When we detach ourselves from a creator God then our moral standards are somewhat suspect.
Godless living is unsatisfying v8
God has appointed fixed laws for the well being of man; He has set boundaries where man may dwell. He has given him the consciousness of another life Ch.3 vll reminds us
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He also set eternity in the hearts of man, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end”.
Romans Ch.2:18
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.
Man outside of God will ever be a restless creature, ever trying to satisfy his needs, and yet never being satisfied always striving to fill that void.
Man was made to worship, he is a worshipping being he can only find true satisfaction when he surrenders his own kingdom for the kingdom of God and live under God's ordinances
Man Find will only find “True wisdom and happiness” in this state
Man’s Reasoning & Weariness of Man -
Ecclesiastes Ch.1 v1-18
The chapter reminds us that it is vanity and the weariness of man that leads him down the spiraling decent morally, because of man's inability to straighten what has been made crooked and to furnish what is defective.
To Make You Think