The Most Opportunistic Gift Of All
For a month now, my alarm clock woke me up every day to secular-only Christmas music. While I enjoy melting my credit card on hot sales as much as the next mindless consumer, the absence of God is getting on my nerves like never before. It’s not just “society”. Fully half of my family hosted their Christmas lists on Amazon’s website. The whole (original) point of the gift-giving was to symbolize God’s greatest gift to humanity, His Son, and while that inevitably got financialized... I’m now being forced to use the globalist’s app to give my family gifts. I’m literally just clicking the “buy” button so they don’t have to, for stuff they would have gotten anyway.
The magic is seriously gone.
And why? Why is Christ such an unpleasant thought that he isn’t missed during His own birthday celebration? Do people not understand why Christ is special, or do they resent Him for being special?
The debate between free will and predestination is perennial because the truth is, humanity exists in a narrow window of BOTH AT ONCE. We can choose between Good & Evil, while having the assurance of salvation as if we had never once chosen Evil. (Bearing in mind that God cannot be mocked.)
Why would God do both at once? Well, I do that when I train new staff. I show them how to do the job, then I step back to let them do it, then I step in when they make the inevitable mistake so they don’t get hurt. Similarly, this mortal life is a training facility for God’s children. Our decisions matter, sometimes very much, but God has also promised to set right all wrongs. Which is it, our choice or God’s outcome? It’s both!
You are able to have opinions of your own, affecting your corner of this mortal world. You won’t have that freedom when God is in the room and crushing the free will out of you by His mere presence… which has been documented. Eventually, the free will window will close and with it, I suspect, our opportunity to become more than who we are.
Some believers resent this. They envy the angels who are unburdened by moral demands & mortal hardships. They don’t want to be responsible; they want everything decided for them; they cannot wait for Good versus Evil reduced to ‘Good’. Such people attract bureaucrats like garbage attracts flies. “Why won’t somebody enslave me already!” Because God wants sons, not slaves, Chuckles.
Exactly how our daily lives prepare us for eternal glory is uncertain. There is an entire bookcase of Christian theology wanting to be written on apotheosis via mundane life events. No theologian has explored it because from what I’ve seen, nobody wants to think about God using such harsh methods upon His most loyal followers. They’d rather believe in ‘destiny’ or ‘might makes right’.
For harsh they are. Pretty much every believer reading this has been put through a living hell by now and the social trends aren’t promising. The only reason God cannot be charged with cruelty is because He is able to set the cruelties right, somehow, long after the damage is done. Our suffering is hard to understand because we cannot see the eventual benefit. We are required to have faith here.
A simple example is found in Romans 11:32. “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” It is God’s fault that we are inherently evil, yes, that we never had a fair chance to be holy, and some people reject God for exactly that reason. However, God made our salvation as free as our damnation, so He provided the solution along with the problem.
Then He put us in the curious position of having to choose which we want.
THAT, is why Christ is special. He’s not the coerced answer to a divinely imposed problem. He’s the source of our mortal window of opportunity, in which we can make our own moral decisions, develop our personalities and character, without the oppression of the Almighty forcing infinite perfection upon us. A reality in which we can fail without being damned… and perhaps learn better.
Sometimes it’s all suffering, no learning, and I don’t have answers for that.
I don’t see any suffering OR learning happening in the halls of Clown World power. They don’t just isolate themselves from reality; reality isn’t trying to reach them, either. They get no feedback on the decisions they make. As harshly judged as we believers often are, it’s easy to resent them getting free pass after free pass… until you look at it from the spiritual side, and realize that God is not bothering to teach them better.
Hebrews 12:11 No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Hebrews 12:7-8 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.
Checkmate, wicked plutocrats! You get free passes in this world because nobody needs to learn how to burn in Hell. Meanwhile for us believers, the next snake to show its head in Eden won’t know what hit it.
That is why I give gifts to celebrate the Gift of Christ, the greatest gift of all: an opportunity, a window of freedom in which to learn how to be children of God Himself, loyal yet unique, without inevitably wrecking our souls in the process like Satan did.
That is why I don’t like receiving gift ideas from Jeff Bezos’ greatest grift of all. His kind of people think godhood is just another commodity to be purchased.
Godhood is the free gift of God the Father, mediated by Jesus His Son, who has given us this hour of learning-experience opportunities that will not be repeated for all of eternity.
Happy Birthday, Lord Jesus! Best… gift… EVER!
Merry Christmas!