[Vision2020] To Whom Do We Owe Our Allegiance?

[Chasuk]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: kjajmix1 at msn.com

> You owe your primary allegiance, as a Christian, to God, not to your
> family as "a sovereign entity." Period.

> Further, if anything asks of you the allegiance (worship, submission,
> acknowledgement of power) due only to your Lord and Savior, you are to
> deny it. Within that God-allegiance, though, is the freedom to
> acknowledge support or affection for anything else in many different
> ways -- in ways that, I hope, are more meaningful than simply raising
> the flag. Nothing, however, ought to be exalted over your God.

I don't enjoy disagreeing with people that I like and respect, but I
am going to have to disagree here.  Even when I was a Christian, I
would have disagreed.  In fact, for the purposes of this conversation,
I'm going to pretend that I am a Christian, and reply as I would have
done when the words "Lord and Savior" were still meaningful to me.

God is my creator, I am not His.  That I was born was His doing, not
mine.  I am never going to be in a position where it is necessary to
take care of God; senescence will never set in for Him.  However, God
will always need to take care of me, when I have reached my
senescence, and even before it.  God thankfully gave me tools to take
care of myself, but my toolset is limited, whereas His is infinite.

God expects me to take care of my children because it is my
responsibility as their creator, and because, having created me in His
image, it is the natural, proper, and loving thing to do.  After my
children are adults, if I have raised them well, they will be able to
take care of themselves.  They might owe me some sort of allegiance,
assuming that I have earned it by being a good parent.

We will be ultimately be equals, my then-adult offspring and I.  They
will be responsible for themselves as I am responsible for myself,
until my senescence sets in, and then the allegiance (and the love)
that I have hopefully earned will motivate them to take care of me.

I will never be God's equal.  I will always be an infant in comparison
to God.  Infants owe nothing to their father.

Therein is the crux of it:  Infants owe nothing to their father.

I don't believe that God punishes us or rewards us.  We, as a species,
reward and punish ourselves.  God gave us the intelligence to devise
the tools of medicine, and we punish ourselves if we wait for Him to
heal us when we are capable of healing ourselves.  Illness and
catastrophe are not tests, no matter how much our vanity tells us that
they are; they are just the normal operation of the universe, and He
watches as we either punish ourselves or reward ourselves by using, or
failing to use, the tools that he has enabled us to invent.

I'm not quite sure where the last past paragraph fits into this topic.
 Maybe it doesn't, but it seemed relevant at the time that I wrote it,
so I'll leave it there in case it provides some illumination on what
preceded.  :-)

Cheers,

Chas