I love it when time-tested truth appears in the most random places.
Exhibit A:
I know a lot of you feel the sentiment of this post. Criminals and porn stars are making bank while you're trying to fight inflation to afford food for your family.
Sometimes it can be overwhelming.
But we're not the first people to go through this. Not by a long shot.
Lots of commenters felt the opposite way.
No, you can't.
But not because people who don't sell naked pictures on the internet are good people.
None of us are good people. Not even one of us.
It's hard to relay this to a modern audience. The ancients knew these things intuitively. They knew that there was a God or gods or spiritual beings that control and fashion the world in ways that are beyond us. They knew there was a price to be paid to go to heaven. They knew mankind was corrupt at heart.
We have forgotten these things as a culture. Until we relearn them, it is difficult to understand why this claim astounded the ancients 👇
Even uneducated farm boys in the Bronze Age believed that people are selfish and that the gods demand an account.
But Jesus Christ - and all the prophecies written about him for thousands of years in the Jewish scriptures - absolutely baffled them.
In Jesus, God himself paid our debts.
In Jesus, God offered eternal life freely to everyone who believes.
In Jesus, God offered to adopt us as sons and daughters.
Everything hinges on whether or not Jesus came back from the dead.
Everything you do in life is a gamble. You can hustle to be wicked, and maybe you'll be like the 1% of porn stars, cheaters, drug dealers, pirates, traffickers, and bullies that actually get real success.
But there's a 99% chance that you sell your soul and don't get fame, fortune, or power.
If you like those odds and don't believe in life after death, I suppose it makes sense.
But don't think you're intelligent for betting your wager on that outcome. You're not morally smarter than your ancestors.
Consider Blaise Pascal, a leading mathematician of the 1600s. Using game theory, he stated the wager beautifully:
Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
You must wager on God. If you ignore Him, that is still your wager in the game.
If God does not exist, then perhaps you can find a brief moment of happiness - the odds being exceedingly low for each person. But to better your odds in gaining power and wealth, you must ignore your conscience (because your conscience testifies to the existence of God). The ruthlessness required for cutting off this one part of your soul will, of course, cause you to do unspeakably ruthless things to others.
If you are right in your wager and there is only blackness after death, then both you and the poor righteous man - the man who worked his fingers to the bone to provide for his family and do what is right - mean absolutely nothing. You lose nothing.
But if you are wrong, there is not just a finite difference in outcome between you and the poor righteous man, but an infinite one.
There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain -- a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss -- and what you stake is finite.
There is no wager in any stock market, betting app, business venture, or crypto coin that is even remotely comparable to the losses you will suffer if you are wrong.
What this means is that the poor-but-moral person is better at game theory than the criminals who think they've won.
Think hard on that the next time you feel jealous of those with "success."
I'll leave ya with a link to Psalm 73.
