The keys to heaven or hell

“Either/or is the key to heaven.” … “Both/and is the way to hell.” _Soren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, 1843)

*****

Everything can’t be relative, can it?

Does randomness rule the day?

Are opinions all we have?

Is right and wrong at the mercy of the ballot box, or whoever has the most bullets?

If so, collectively the human race (you and and me included) are on our way to hell. Not a hell made by God but by our own hands.

Surely there are some things that are absolutely right or wrong all the time. If not, we’d never get on an airplane!

(The first time I hear an airline pilot say, “I’m of the opinion that the suggestions of physics may work today” I’m doing everything within my power to get off that plane and I’m never looking back.)

Hedging your bets, hem hawing around, waffling on the issues, being urban, open-minded, tolerant and inclusive will only take you so far and then you get bogged down in a murky swamp of relativism and the strongest and best resourced that you tolerantly included will walk on you, pushing you under the murky waters and you slip into a hell of your own making.

Am I being overly dramatic? I think not. (Can you say “Ukraine”?)

If we hope to build a better world it will have to be built on something more than both/and.

Everyone can’t have it all. Everything can be both right and wrong. There will have to be some dividing lines – “This is right and this is wrong for all times and for all people.” (either/or).

It doesn’t have to be everything or even a lot of things…just enough to open the door of heaven.

So how do we decide?

The concept of divine revelation is mocked and trivialized in our day. But I have an old book that I treasure called “The Holy Bible” which is a collection of divine wisdom that goes back thousands of years. Laugh if you will, but I’ll take the old book any day rather than building my life, my country, and our world on the latest polls and election outcomes, or biggest army of our day.

The ONE THING for today: Ultimately truth is contained and revealed in a person – Jesus Christ. Start with him: pursue him, know him, obey him until you love him and you will be just fine.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

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