The Eternal Question Down through the ages and around the world people have been asking this question. Thousands of years ago, a man known as Job, put it this way: "But how can a man be righteous before God?" [Job 9:2] In the first century AD, a desperate jailor cried out: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" [Acts 16:30] You may have asked the question something like this:
Why do most of us ask such questions? The Scriptures tell us that God has put eternity in our hearts [Ecclesiastes 3:11]. We are not like the animals who live by instinct; we have been created in the image of God. The heavens declare the glory of God [Psalm 19:11] and we long to understand His purpose in creation. The Test As we open the Bible, we read that God made the universe out of nothing. His desire was to share His love with the ones He made in His own image [Genesis 1:26]. Adam and Eve were not to be robots who had no choice how they'd respond to God. Instead they were given a test: would they obey God of their own free will? You can read about this in Genesis 3, how both the woman and the man ate of the one fruit which God had forbidden. They believed Satan's lie that they could become like God. Now they had sinned - their relationship with their holy Creator was broken! Not only were Adam and Eve affected by sin; all their descendants, including you and me, were affected as well. "Therefore just as through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned." [Romans 5:12] With this in mind, we can understand Job's question even better: "But how can a man be righteous before God?" What about Us Today? Perhaps it begins with an uneasy feeling, that something just isn't right. Life somehow seems empty and meaningless, even when things are going fairly well. You live from weekend to weekend, somehow struggling through the daily grind. Could it be that the broken relationship with your Creator is at the bottom of all this? The Bible describes us as lost sheep: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way..." [Isaiah 53:6] No wonder our lives have become complicated through broken relationships with others - we're going our own way! The further we go, the more painful it can become. But what can be done? The rest of that verse, Isaiah 53:6 states: "...But the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity (sin) of us all." Now there is a wonderful reason for HOPE! -------- -----------There's more to the story, so please check back soon. You can view a flash video called "The Flower"
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