Humanity: A Coop Of Headless Chickens

Humans are temporal beings, so we seek timely gratification. And why should that surprise God, since He created us that way. God, however, exists both outside of time and within each instant of time. With His eternal perspective, He is immune to our hurried timetables, but moves in our lives according to our ultimate good. So a key issue in our relationship with God is not as much seeking timely gratification, but myopically looking to our physical senses for that gratification. We tend to think of ourselves as immortal, despite death being an undeniable principle of life. Since part of our nature is to esteem most highly what is fleeting, we naturally cling to our doomed physicality for gratification. But death is both physical and spiritual. In fact, one meaning of “death,” as translated from New Testament Greek, is “separation.” At creation, God breathed His Holy Spirit into us to unite with our human spirit. Then, along with Adam, we hammered the wedge of sin forever between our spirit and God's. Since He designed us specifically to host that spiritual union, such a separation created the fundamental human need Pascal called, “The God-shaped vacuum.” Without God's Spirit, our human spirit runs around like the headless chicken, without direction, looking for something but not knowing what. We try to satiate ourselves with all kinds of sensual gratification and counterfeit spirituality, but our headlessness dooms us to failure in our quest for fulfillment just as our sinfulness dooms us to eternal perdition. That's the bad news. The good news is God didn't abandon us to that fate. Like God's law the Torah, the Bible's New Testament is filled with God's redemptive promises, but they all depend on the Name that is above every name: Yeshua(Redeemer) or Immanuel(God With Us), YHVH's(the Self-Existent One's) Messiah(Anointed), or as most of us know Him, Jesus Christ. Headless chicken, or son of God?