LIES TO LIVE BY

By Akin Ojumu

Apart from God, man is an empty soul devoid of the very essence of life. The heart of a fallen man is a place of severe agony, saturated with guilt and suffused with anguish. 

To assuage the pangs of guilt boiling on his inside, fallen humanity invents a set of lies. These lies are the white noise he uses to mute the raging storm in his sinful soul. With these lies, a sinful man attempts to mask the agony in his vacant soul.

Grouped together, these lies fall into one of five different categories. And they are:

1. Life is Random 

Time and chance are the bane of mankind. Happenstance is the defining characteristic of life. Man is a product of evolutionary chance and an unintended consequence of a galactic Big Bang. There’s no creator, no divine purpose, and no eternal destiny. 

Nobody puts you here and you are accountable to no one. Sin is an illusion, and there are no consequences for sinful deeds. You are free to do whatever it is that makes you feel good with yourself.

2. Truth is Relative 

There are no absolute truths and no moral standards. Truths and morals are hypothetical philosophical thought experiments, and they are labile, pliable, and evolving. You are free to possess your own set of truths. And you can live your life according to your own invented truths.

3. People are Basically Good 

Deep down you are good. If only they take the time to look, they’d find that there is good in you and everyone else. That you do bad things is an unfortunate consequence of bad nurturing. Your bad behavior is not because of an innately bad nature, it is because of your less-than-ideal childhood.

4. You Can Change Your Life

There’s no higher power up there in the sky that controls your destiny; your destiny is in your hand. The power to take charge of your life and take control of your fate is within you. You can be all you can be. You’ve got the power to become whatever it is you want to become in life.

5. Self-Satisfaction is Life’s Ultimate Goal

Being satisfied with who you are is the height of human pursuit. To be comfortable in your own skin should be the driving motive behind all your life’s endeavors. Be yourself and don’t give a hoot about what anyone else thinks. As long as you are happy with yourself, it doesn’t matter what others think. Go on and live your best life now.

In the itchy ears of reprobate minds, this sounds all logical. To those whose hearts have become futile in speculations and whose foolish hearts have been darkened, this looks all rational.

But regardless of what you belief, it is all a lie. This is the invention of broken men who profess to be wise but in God’s eyes are fools.

Life is not random. God is the source of life and the judge of all men. The basic reality of God is plain for all to see. As man tries to put a shroud over the truth, God’s angry displeasure erupts, and the judgment of God falls.

No one is good, except God alone. There’s no one righteous, not even one. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. 

Man is incapable of changing his own condition no matter how hard he tries. In man’s utter helplessness, Christ comes just in time to deliver him from his waywardness.

Self-satisfaction is no satisfaction at all. It is the preoccupation of fools. If anyone wishes to enjoy life, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow the Giver of life. 

Dying to self is the way to life. Satisfaction comes only by yielding to the precepts of God. If your best life is lived in this temporal world, you can expect eternity to be an agonizing ordeal for you. 

What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for? For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for the Giver of life will most certainly find it.