There is a sickness in man and it is terminal and contagious. We contracted this disease the day we ate the fruit from the tree of good and evil. The name of this sickness is called “Thinking we are God.”
Monday I heard all kinds of noise about Jim Carrey and his ranting against gun owners (video of rant contains profanity). I could’ve gotten all involved and hyper exercised by it but I didn’t. I am getting ready for an extended trip and it would have absorbed a ton of energy I don’t have to spare.
So how does Jim Carrey relate to this illness? Since the Garden, humans at our core really believe that we’re as smart as God and smarter than anyone else on this earth. We feel like we have the right to dictate and direct the steps of every other man. We can judge them, check them off as wrong and condemn them for their actions and attitudes. I would like to contest this modus operandi for the believer.
It is a sickness at a spiritual level that says, “I can decide.” I have no right to decide anyone else’s fate nor judge anyone else’s actions. Yes, I think his ranting and cussing and cursing people was over-the-top. He believes someone else’s actions, attitudes and ideas are wrong, so he’s ranting against them. But if I turn around and rant against his wrong actions, attitudes and ideas, how am I any different?
Do I know what activity the Spirit is orchestrating in his life that might bring him to salvation? No, I don’t know what God is doing for or through him at all. I don’t know anything unless the Spirit of the Living God tells me. And as a spiritual man, wrestling with my opinions is just a clanging gong and banging symbol in the ears of any I capture to listen.
I wish that I could say that my soul could not be whipped up by the media frenzy, but I cannot. I’m just as sick as every other fallen human being on this planet. My only hope is to lay down that old man who loves to involve himself with EVERYTHING and stand in Christ.
I do know this, there is enough going on in the Spirit to keep me plenty busy. I never need to waste my time crusading for my personal judgments and opinions. The life and the breath of the Spirit will absorb all of my time, all of my life and all of my energies.
So why would I choose to run around about in circles in a frivolous attempt to be God? I am not God no matter how much I want to be. Well, it put in mind the movie Bruce Almighty, and funny enough, it also stars Jim Carrey. The premise of the movie is a man thinks he can do it better than God, and God gives him the opportunity. Spoiler alert, the result is that he destroys his world and learns he can’t be God.
Well, here is the bottom line: we too will destroy our world if we attempt to dictate from a throne we have erected. I think David says it best in Psalm 131:1 –
“My heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty.
I do not get involved with things too great or too difficult for me.”
