What is a normal life?
How is a normal life to be defined?
Better yet, who defines what a normal life is?
The dictionary definition of normal states that this descriptive adjective
means: Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern,
level, or type.[1]
So if a normal life is one which conforms to a norm or standard of living,
then who or what establishes the norms and standards?
Our culture here in the United
States, in a vigorously constraining manner is moving rapidly towards a
secularist society. A society that is not simply devoid of Godly influence
(What they call ‘religious’), but a society that repudiates, disavows and rejects
any and all ‘religious’ influence of morals and values. These secularists are iconoclastic
and nihilists. They will not be satisfied until the God of the universe is
stamped out of existence. Paul mentions these godless men as those “who
suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”[2] For
that is exactly what they are doing, suppressing the truth about the God of
this universe and the normal life which He provides.
For believers to say that these suppressers
really don’t know what they are doing to our culture demonstrates a lack of
Biblical knowledge. To think, as the secularist does, that they have the ‘right’
to destroy the principles of our nation’s foundation so that they can ‘do their
thing’ without any moral restraints, is dangerously foolish. But the most devastating
failure is that a Christian consensus to the otherwise has not emerged.
There is also this determined effort
in our culture to accept “alternative” lifestyles as normal. By this is meant
that if a person is homosexual, lesbian, transgender, or anything other than
heterosexual, then these are “alternate” lifestyles and thus, normal.
But based on Scripture, any lifestyle
that is devoid of Christ as the center of a person’s life, that is an alternative lifestyle. It is not the life which God has
designed for all of mankind. The normal life which God intended is that each
man, woman and child should “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind.”[3]
For Jesus stated that He came “that they may have life, and have it
abundantly.”[4]
It is a Biblical fact that if we
Christians have been divinely delegated to proclaim and demonstrate this normal life which the God of the
universe has offered to “whoever believes in Him,” consequently we should also
speak up loud and clear about the ultimate benefit that they “shall not perish,
but have eternal life.”[5] And
that His normal life (eternal life)
which He bestows, begins at the moment of faith in Jesus Christ.
We dare not as Christians stand by idly
and allow the secularists to define a normal
life as a life without God, without Christ, without eternal life – which dooms
men for all eternity.
[1] The American Heritage College Dictionary,
p.948
[2]
Romans 1:18 NASB
[3]
Matthew 22:37 (Deuteronomy 6:5) NASB
[4]
John 10:10 NASB
[5]
John 3:16 NASB