Life is like a board game
We live in what has often been called a dog eat dog world. A word where competition is held in high regard. Getting to the top is the goal. Perhaps you have been living that way your whole life-- at odds with everything and everyone around you. What if I were to tell you that you did not have to live that way any longer? That life is not a rat race! We can live life by a different set of rules. The world was never meant to be this combative. All of us have been living life incorrectly.
The ideal life is not a competitive board game, those are the rules we act like we live under. No, the ideal life is a cooperative board game, those are the rules we are actually under. Now this is not to say that competition is bad in and of itself - no, there are many reasons that competition can be a good thing. However unchecked competition, that does not lead towards cooperation, eats away at personal and societal living. Life is a team game, not a solo project. We begin to truly live life once we have the correct rule set. This whole time we have had the wrong rules, and while we have been traveling the same path that many travel on, this path only ends in destruction. Humans have been searching for the way to live life for thousands of years, to be ethical, to seek what is good. This is a good and noble effort, yet we need to learn that we must do this in community: not alone, but for each other.
In Genesis chapters 1 and 2, we see God create the world out of chaos. He speaks light into the darkness, and what He makes is good. He orders the world so that it works together, everything has a symbiotic relationship. Creatures are in need of each other and are dependent on their Creator. Once humans are made, the same is true of them. God makes them in His image - they are to be stewards of creation. Reflecting God’s love to creation. Humans are to be in cooperation with each other and God. However, something awful happens. In Genesis 3, humans act selfishly, playing by their own rules. They disobey a commandment of God and are naked before him. They seem to be on the outside of God’s rules that He had made for all of creation; they have with all of creation fallen under a curse. Throughout the next chapters of Genesis (4-11), we see humans continuing to play the unchecked competition game-- Cain kills his brother, the world is so full of violence that God destroys it by a flood, and humanity seeks to be equal with God by building the tower of Babel instead of accepting its limited status.
The rest of the Old Testament is about God creating a people for himself to live by His intended rules, to love God and neighbor. They often fail over and over again because they are unable to live under the commands of God. Yet God still longs for a relationship with them and all of humankind. How does he truly put his “rules” in his people? By putting God's Spirit in people. In the book of Jeremiah, God says he will put his laws and decrees in his people’s hearts and no longer will any one say know the Lord for they will all know the Lord. How does the impartation of God’s decrees happen? Through the revelation of God in Christ Jesus.
Now God is once again among people and his rules flip the whole world upside down. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who mistreat you. Just to name a few. How can a person live like Jesus? Surely this is an impossible standard! Remember God promised that his people would have a new covenant and this is done through the coming of the Holy Spirit. God is not just residing among humans but in humans! Are they to be isolated holy ones, no they become the Church, they are a team! The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 12, demonstrates that the Church is in need of each other just as the parts of the body are in need of one another. So we, too, are in need of each other today!
Now competition is the easy route but cooperation in Christ, that is truly living.
