The world’s course
I live in Augusta, Georgia which becomes a world focus once per year in that April tournament known as The Masters. Golf becomes king around our city as homeowners prepare their houses for guests, law enforcement prepares our roads for vehicles, and the Augusta National the course for their patrons. A golf course is called a course because each player must make an orderly passage along it from hole to hole.
Many people have no interest in golf, but everyone is on a course of life. We all start our walk on the course of this world. Paul wrote of the Ephesian’s journey along it. They did what was natural puttering along beside their colleagues, friends, and family. Doing what came naturally they went.
Paul said that this course was trespassing. God’s eternal setup proscribed the things that humanity was fully engaging. The course the world offers is a death course. Continuing with the golf analogy hazards abound in the way of trespass. Merely being there is the way of death. After the 18th hole, well, you get the picture.
The Devil’s course
There is another dangerous strand woven throughout the course of the world. The natural course of people is that of Satan whom Paul calls the Prince of the Power of the Air. In the airwaves of earth’s death culture are words and whispers of one who has the worst interests at heart. The Grinch wants badness for Whoville. Satan does not just follow his own course and leave a trail of broken people on the roadside as he brushes past them. It is worse than that. The way Satan designs his course is to break people. He actively involves himself in human experience with an aim to disrupt. That equals temptation: a goal of harm.
I will often tell patients as we wind our visit down and they head out the door, “We’ll see you next year unless the wheels fall off. If they do, we’ll be here.” Usually, the wheels don’t fall off because, like I also say, “God built our eyes pretty good.” (I know that is vernacular, but ordinary people talk that way; they understand it.) Along the path of life, the Prince of the Power of the Air has placed a variety of hazards with which he hopes to jar our wheels to the point that they come off or the axle breaks. If he can get us to crash along the road of life we too will become burned out hulks of prior hopes: just what he intends.
On December 12th, 2018, the New York Times reported on the sentencing of former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. It quoted Cohen as saying his allegiance to Donald Trump had caused him to stop listening to his own “inner voice,” his “moral compass.” While some, likely many, would compare Donald Trump to the Devil the Devil is far worse. Donald Trump plays by the rules of this world. The Devil puts a delicious spin on them.
The world’s course and Satan’s course are braided together, and just like the thick braid of a teenager’s hair, there is a strength woven in living this way. Getting off of that death-path is impossible without God. Time and again we see the road of life littered with broken pieces.
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