It matters. What you believe matters. Your beliefs shape how you see yourself, how you view the world, and how you relate to other human beings. 

We are living in a hard time. Although it’s certainly not the most difficult time in human history, it is for many of us the worst time we have ever experienced. And every challenge we face today, the pandemic, social unrest, political division, economic stress, has caused deep divisions and a fracturing of unity that is painful, confusing, and destructive. How we as individuals react to this depends on our fundamental beliefs, the things that shape how we see life and live it.

I hope that by now my readers will know that I’m a Christian, and that my faith is founded on the truth of the Bible. So to start with, I believe we humans are created beings, made in the image of God for the glory of God. Out of this belief come three principles.

1.  Life is a gift from God, and should therefore be precious to us. We live in a culture that sees life as a choice, that one can choose to snuff out the life of another human while it is  still in the womb. That is wrong.

2.  When God made us, He created us to live in relationship; with our Creator and with each other. He created a special relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife. This relationship is intended to be an exclusive, lifelong bond, one that would produce children and provide for their nurture. No other sexual relationship is prescribed or condoned. In fact, all other sexual relationships outside of marriage between one man and one woman are forbidden.

3.  When God created the first humans, creating them in His image, He gave them work to do. They were to tend the garden, have children, and walk with God in the cool of the evening. Although they lived in a paradise, they were not to be idle. No one then, should presume to live a life without work at something that bears fruit, it is part of our nature and essential to our human dignity.

I am not the author of these truths. Accept them or reject them as you will, they are not “my truth”, they are God’s truth. Like you, I have fallen far short of right living, but by the grace of God in Christ Jesus, I have been forgiven, and I am being made new every day.

My immediate purpose in writing this, less than two weeks before the presidential election, is to say that the three principles above guide how I will mark the ballot. Which candidate or party is most likely to advance these truths in how they will govern? What standard will you use?

There is a prevailing belief in this country that God does not exist, or if He does, He has nothing to say to us that’s relevant. The system has taught that we humans are the product of some chance circumstances, that out of some primordial slime, life happened. If that is true, then there are no rules to live by; there is no higher authority than the individual. If that’s what you believe, then you make up your own rules to suit your own needs in any given situation. You can be anything you want to be and do anything you want to do.

The idea that you and I and all the world around us are the product of blind chance is absurd. But if that’s what you believe, then that belief will influence everything you do. Which would you rather be, an accidental life form or the creation of a great and loving and wise God? Belief matters.

Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”