how we relate to other people; about the content and tenor of our speech; and even about the conduct we exercise when we respond to certain situational stimuli. “Continual negative thinking” can lead to “obsessive-compulsive disorder,” resulting in impairment of our ability to respond to physical or social stimuli in beneficent ways that uphold our health, happiness, or life. We are free indeed; but relationships are complex forms of associations that often surpass our understanding for finding a proper resolution to a certain situation, e.g., a man and a woman as a married couple, might get eventually divorced, due to what “psychologists” or “counselors” refer to as: “irreconcilable differences.”
Thus, it matters what we let enter into our hearts and minds, souls and spirits. The world is full of “audio-visual stimuli,” “sounds,” “noises,” and “events,” and how we respond to them factors into ways in which we internalize attitudes and/or deduce inferences from what we experience. (Leviticus 19:17; Proverbs 4:23; 15:33; Jeremiah 4:4; 9:26; 14:9–10; Matthew 5:8, 28; 6:21; 22:37–40.)
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 3:26; 14:12; 29–30; 19:21; 23:6–7; 27:19).
Consequently, our “inner-life” or “mental-emotional environment,” is of great importance to what pours out of our hearts when we encounter or face conditions inimical to our safety, health, or life. (Matthew 7:13–20).
By the same token, our “inner-life” or our “soul condition” or our “heart condition,” can also “be a blessing” in facilitating the flow of beneficent Human relations, personal relationships, and social interactions. (Matthew 12:34–35; 22:36–40; Mark 7:14–23; Luke 6:36; 45; 11:28 12:32–34).
Our Creator, Almighty God, foreknew “our predicament,” and thus, freely decided to conceive or ordain “a plan of Salvation” for our greater Human Family; a divine “plan of redemption” for Humankind, which serves to both guide us individually, and instruct us, socially. For all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23; 6:23).
Enters the Word of God, for redemption, atonement, propitiation, and salvation! As prophesied through the Prophets, the Word was fulfilled by the Son of God, Christ Jesus, “the Word made flesh:” The Gospel or “the good news of Salvation” as taught and preached by His Apostles, as written, embedded, and contained in the Holy Bible! (Matthew 28:18–20; John 1:1–14).
In the same way that God said “Let there be light,” Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34).
We’re forgiven and that’s the greatest blessing and gift from our heavenly Father through Jesus Christ our resurrected Lord and Savior.
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RECKONING WITH “OUR PREDICAMENT”
“The Human Condition” is: This intractable, predictable, insoluble, and unresolved contradiction plaguing our lives from birth to old age, from the diaper to the coffin!
There are many ways in which to approach “resolving” this perplexing, vexatious, paradoxical confounding “Reality” in a comprehensively, holistically, healthy manner! But God has “made a way” not only for us to “negotiate,” or “navigate” through all the travails and tribulations we might encounter during our temporal earthly existence, but to also overcome all obstacles that we share with each other and our natural environment, such as our sinfulness and mortality. (John 16:32–33).
Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life.” And no one comes to God but through Him! (John 14:6–7).
Every person who tries to accommodate his or her rationalizations as to “why do something” or “why to not do something,” must eventually reckon with their conscience, an innate capacity for “cognitive dissonance” that might result in our choosing to do what is right in the sight of God and beneficent to one another!
But, however “situational” they might be, rationalizations only circumvent God’s commandments of righteous living, so that we can “feel comfortable” in “staying where we are.” Otherwise called “situational ethics,” this approach to problem-solving relies on the illogical fallacy that “there are no absolutes” or that “everything is relative.” “Moral relativism” or “value neutrality” is an indefensible self-delusion that has cost us, and is still costing us a lot of grief, pain, trouble, tribulation, injury, and many times, even death! But we breathe Oxygen to stay alive, not Carbon Monoxide! We quench our thirst naturally with sweet Water, and not Sulfuric Acid!
The flesh can resist spiritual transformation, a change of heart, or a change in worldview. But, given that our biology requires fulfillment of not only physiological needs but also emotional and social needs having connectedness with the ways in which we “associate” with “the world in which we live:” “Stasis,” or “unchanging,” “static processing,” or “staying put,” can churn for years on end, as people repeat the same patterns of thinking and the same patterns of behavior, yielding, for example, fatal drug addictions, or other forms of deadly behavioral choices.
The lure of pursuing material wealth due to pride, arrogance, fame, power, or vanity, is attached to the “patterns of thinking” and “modes of conduct” that sustain and feed those world-affirming cravings: “the lust the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.” (1 John 2:15–17).
“This soul-condition” or “inner-spiritual dynamic” might engender a desire for satisfaction of wants rather than fulfillment of real needs, of wishes rather than actual hopes, and of inaccurate projections into the future rather than reliance upon God’s will for our lives. (Proverbs 11:28; 12:17; 14:12; 29–30; 15:8–10; 19:21; Romans 8:1–11; 12:1–2).
The constellation of conditions, situations, circumstances, parameters, variables, processes, or events that we encounter during our temporary lives on the Planet, appears to be so incomprehensible and inexplicable only due to our sinful Human Nature, the depths of complexity embedded within our “socio-spiritual environment,” which we call “society;” and the unfolding of “Entropy” within our biology and physical earthly environment. From either side, Human Nature and Ecological Nature, we are assailed by uncertainties that might generate anxieties and stress in our hearts and minds. But the peace of God ruling in our hearts through Christ Jesus restores certainty and security to our thought processes, situational responses, and emotions. (Colossians 3:12–17).
“Cognitive dissonance” or incompatibility between “”what is” and “what ought to be,” may contrive “a sense of dislocation” or “of dissociation,” between our inner-selves and the repertoire of behaviors, or the tapestry of events, unfolding before our eyes and unraveling in our lives to which we refer as “the external world.”
As “spirit-beings,” we’re “only passing through” mortal existence in the material-physical Universe, during which, we have to face, to reckon with, to transact or to “deal with:” “Self, Others, and material-physical Nature!”
Each approach, perspective, worldview, or paradigm, that we attempt to “forge” to help us, guide us, direct us, or instruct us, as we endeavor to “configure” this grave sobering “Reality” apart from God’s divinely ordained prescriptions for living, will eventually fail!
Human Beings contrive many “philosophical schemes” in attempts to resolve these perennial contradictions in our lives. All such “philosophical cages” end-up as “mental prisons” for their purveyors and followers whereby doctrines “revolve in a circle” without ever arriving at irrefutable or “definitive conclusions,” or “box people”
