Broken Chains

I’d like to clarify a sentence from my post yesterday that was addressed in the comments. In my post, I wrote:

Not only do we want to rule ourselves, but we also want to rule others, and when we rejected God, God gave us what we wanted, left the scene, and created a power vacuum.

In hindsight, this sentence didn’t communicate what I intended. God has not abandoned us, but rather, God gave us what we wanted and let us run away, much like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. A better sentence would have been:

Not only do we want to rule ourselves, but we also want to rule others, and when we rejected God, God gave us what we wanted, and let us leave His presence and Kingdom.

It’s worth saying again, God has not abandoned us. Far from it. The story of the Bible is God’s working to reconcile the entire world back to Himself despite our rebellion, and praise God that this was His plan!

This post is the second in a multi-week series. Find the first post here.

A year ago, NBC aired the finale of their show The Good Place, a sitcom about heaven. I haven’t watched any of it, so this post isn’t a commentary on the specifics of the show, but rather a commentary on the name that conveys a popular view on heaven. The idea is that when you die, you want to go to the Good Place, the place where there is no pain or death, you never age, and only good things happen. Sign me up!

But what happens in the Good Place when two men want to marry the same woman and receive her full affection, but only one of them can? What happens when two people want the same job, but only one person can have it? What happens when someone will only be happy if they have more than their neighbor, and their neighbor feels the same way?