I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
John 10:10
Imagine a large orchestra made up of strings, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments.
In the first row, the strings: the violinists, the cello, and the double bass. They begin to play, except, the violinist is playing the melody of one song, while the cello is playing another. And the double bass is simply making up a new tune on the spot.
In the second row, the brass: the trumpeters begin to blow wildly to their own rhythm. The french horn is doing some sort of ascending and descending melody. The tuba just appears to be blowing whenever it feels like. We have yet to hear the cornet take up its rightful place amidst the competing sounds.
In the third row, the woodwind: the clarinet player has not changed its key once. The oboe and flute appear to be playing in opposite pitches from one another. The saxophone is off on a wild melody of staggering notes.
All of the percussion instruments appear to be haphazardly sounding at whim. And even though from time to time in their randomness, they appear to produce something that gives the sense of a beautiful sound that ‘could be’, all hope is quickly extinguished by a bombardment of excruciatingly painful notes that follow. A dysfunctional melody overwhelms the few and sparse glimpses of something delightful.
Question: Is that something that you would enjoy listening to?
Do you think you could ever get used to such an awful sound?
Do you think that after a sufficient amount of time you might actually begin to consider this wild catastrophe as beautiful?
If you answered ‘no’ to all of those questions, then I wonder sometimes why some of us who would so easily identify awful tuning in a symphony, are not so apt to identify what the melody of our lives and the world around us is playing back to us?
If we started on a macro scale, we’d immediately see that everything in our universe requires a divine fine tuning in order to be just right to allow for – and to sustain – life. The distance of the sun and moon in relation to the Earth; the rotation of the Earth; the distance Earth is from other planets and how those other planets along with us orbit the sun, even the specific quantities of the bare elements – all must continually operate with precise exactness in order for there to even exist life on Earth.
Then we narrow in to just the systems within our own planet alone. The cycles of nature; photosynthesis, pollination, the times set for sowing and for reaping; a time for watering and a time for sunshine; all operating in perfect collaboration with each other for animals, birds, and human beings to sustain life.
Narrow in just a little closer and you see society. Children receiving education; visionaries are envisioning; tilling of the soil, farmers are farming. Police officers protecting; builders building; labourers working the land to harvest all that it yields, from minerals to water to vegetables to metals; business opening; employers employing.
Move in just a bit closer and you see families. Father’s are instructing and living with integrity to their teaching. Mothers are loving, nurturing and accepting. Brothers are supportive with mutual love and serving one another sacrificially. Sisters inspire beauty, overflowing with intelligence, and support without fail.
Now look at the individual. A person must be in harmony within themselves. The spirit, soul and body must be in agreement. Our true selves hidden deep within us and our thoughts and emotions that are framed by and regard these realities on a day to day basis must be lived out in the body by act of the will in order to be at peace.
But certainly, this is not the only reality that exists in the world we live in, is it?
Instead, starting from the level of our individual humanity, we see something starkly different, don’t we…
We see a mankind that is constantly at war even within himself (or herself.) We see a breakdown in our spiritual alliances. Some individuals profess God, others profess Satan. Some individuals worship angels, the dead, or the living. Some individuals profess nothing at all. Diseases erodes the living and death is the fate of us all. Some have mental illnesses and are attacked by their own minds. Some have physiological ailments and are attacked by their own bodies.
And as for families, there are parents who molest their children. Fathers who have chosen ambitions over responsibility. Mothers who have chosen forbidden pleasures outside of marriage over the husband of her youth. Brothers who never speak to one another. Sisters who hate one another. Families who commit atrocities together.
In society, some steal and take what they want. Some pastors preach what they do not practice. Some employers cut grave corners that put many lives at risk for the sake of financial gains. Some organizations view members as currency and pawns in their twisted and depraved moves to acquire more power, or stature, or significance.
In nature, glacier’s melt. Earthquakes quake the earth; tsunamis wipe out entire cities; volcanoes erupt and make islands uninhabitable.
Within our universe, asteroids collide with planets. The light of the star’s extinguishes over time. Black holes threaten the very laws of physics.
It appears that the truest reality of this temporary life on Earth is that even though we all possess the ability to carry within our hearts a heavenly vision for what we believe life ‘ought’ to look like, more often than not, due to something that seems to be far beyond our power to control or change, everything appears to have fallen significantly short from what we expect it to be.
So when someone tells me that they don’t believe in sin and its resulting effect of death, I often find the same person hard-pressed to explain why the symphony of life on every single level known to mankind, appears to be playing gravely out of key, all the while with us all carrying expectations and a vision for how we think it ought to play out in its perfection.
If this were not true, we would not think suicide was something that we needed to encourage people against. Instead, we would say, ‘you do what you think is right.’
And if it were not so, we would not be let down when our father’s run out on their families. Or mother’s selfishly neglect their infant children. Or we see siblings despising one another. We would simply surmise, ‘oh well, every choice is equally valid.’
And we wouldn’t see any reason to plant a tree, or preserve clean waters. I mean, we didn’t put them there in the first place, who are we to try to preserve them now? Where would even have gotten the idea that they were worth tending to or preserving?
We would care neither here nor there about whether the sun was to collide with the earth and end our existence, or if an asteroid were to hit our earth and end every one of our lives today.
Life.
We seem to think in the innermost parts of our being that it’s worthy of more.
The universe, nature, community, families, and even an individual life appears to have great significance in our practical estimations.
Jesus Christ represents a solution to a problem we all have but seem unable to admit exists long enough to benefit from.
He said that the very things that have caused this disturbance in the harmony of our symphony is due to sin, which is the very thing that He also came to correct.
Here’s a definition of sin that you might not be accustomed to, “to miss the mark.”
So every time something as fragile as a newborn life is conceived with deformities, to something as cataclysmic as a hurricane with flooding wipes out a country, instead of asking, ‘where’s God?’ what we should instead be saying is, ‘there is the evidence of the wretched effects of sin’s existence upon our world.’
We, along with everything in the whole universe are the proof that we’re searching for to explain the disparity between God’s intentions in design, and what we’ve gotten here instead.
I share this because i realize that if we can first begin to properly identify the correct source of the dysfunction within the orchestra of life, then maybe, just maybe…
We might actually have a hope for finding the God intended solution He has also given for it.
Which is the same reason why I never cease to implore you,
Trust 
Jesus!
Child Of God's Grace 