How lovely the Epistle reading for tomorrow puts it! Do not lie to each other for we have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created Him!!! How eloquently is is put! How can we lie to another fellow man since we are created in God's image? What a blasphemy against God would that be... We do forget sometimes that lying to others is like lying to God himself; Anything we do to wrong our fellow man is like doing a wrongful act against God.. Alas in our stupidity we think we can run away with it... We only end up hurting ourselves with our naive thinking that we can "outsmart" the one who knows even the number of our hair...on our heads. Who are we fooling? Not God but just our own selves.... How vain and naive humanity is to think that we can outsmart our creator...Our source of strength and comfort then becomes our enemy; our buggy man...We become afraid of His presence and we start to hate instead of loving; We become cold, calculating, vicious and scared full of fear for tomorrow ...alone ....abandoned. I think Adam and Eve comes to mind when I think of the loneliness of God's alienation of God's abandonment... What a pity we have to hit rock bottom sometimes to realize what we miss!!But how necessary to realize Him to realize what it means to live in God's absence! And now sweet it is when the tears come and we ask for Him and His presence and His comfort back to us! Frustration and doubt are undoubtfully parts of human experience part of what makes us humans part of our free will to seek out Him... Part of His plan is to be able to disobey Him for if we did not then we would be just not free to come to Him but highly obligated and slaves of His will. We are NOT! We chose freely we believe freely in Him. He is not a God of obligation He does not persuade us to believe in Him by his "obvious " presence for if He did then we would follow Him out of pure empirical obligation and emptied out of Divine wisdom! Because there would be no free choice but pure obligation and we know that God would not want us to believe in Him by forcing us to do so. As we come to the end of this rant I will conclude that the last verse is where we can see the freedom that is universal in its nature... "there is neither Greek or Jew .....slave or free" . The beauty of the Gospel is how it encompasses all people into its message! The equality that is so much desired from all people esp the ones who are discriminated and talked about in a dismissing and diminishing manner are equal in Christ Jesus! Nothing to fear nothing to be afraid off as Christ makes it all equal; pure and clean and anew . Christ makes a slave equal to his master; an educated man to an uneducated man; a male equal to a female and a wealthy man equal to a beggar or a homeless.... It takes God to heal our wounds to ease our pain and to make up for the society's wrongs. It takes a God who was incarnated to "redeem us" to make all wrongs right and all pain disappear
Good night and happy Sunday