Design and Destiny

Regarding human life, mankind seems taken with its length, while God is most interested in its quality.  For eternal God, time is a created factor so receives less concern for him than his functioning in the eternal context.  We can be sure that God understands our necessary relationship with time, and accommodates us in that context.  At the same time, we must accommodate God in the context of eternity.  Perforce our secondary interest is in life quality because we perceive that quality has something to do with the length of life.  That life quality is often disregarded is cause for decline in the intended length of human life.  The length of life for human beings in the physical (animal) context can be long (as in turtles), or short as a day in insects (mayflies).  God offers length of life to the attention and application mankind gives to values. 

That attention relates to human adaptation related to health of mind, body, social and spiritual contexts.  Health of mind relates to education (formal and informal) and that to life application: of body as it relates to factors of nutrition, sleep, moderation, exercise; of social as it relates to cooperation, service, peace, respect (brotherhood); and, of spirituality as it relates to righteousness (right), love, peace, values, wisdom, faith, identity, and immortality.  The human being is torn between factors that advance the health of them and those destructive.  It has always been so.  Christianity addresses factors so to offer a holistic life that God cares about.  That continuance is not in the design of earth.  No matter how carefully human beings design their lives in all that goes into healthy life – natural (created) life will end.  Earth life, measured by mankind in time is temporary.  Life is measured by God, separate from the created time factor, becomes permanent when he has been factored into it in the context of his government of immortal life principles so to gain that life.  Life is a mystery that found in human beings reflects the image of God.  (Remember. God is invisible.) Our ability to think reflectively leads to creativity and change – as it does for God.  The great difference is that we are limited to nature in mortality, and God in eternity.  Mankind has presence: God has omnipresence.  We have power: he has omnipotence.  We have knowledge, he has omniscience.  Comparisons/contrasts can be continued.  We sense the love factor in human nature: God’s nature is love.  We can understand and practice life in righteousness: God’s practice is in his nature assuring holiness. 

At this writing there is a research program carried forward in the beginning of this third millennium of the Christian era by the Buck Institute, related to life, its quality, and the management of death.  (There are other similar research programs in the world, but not so intense, quiet, completely focused and shunning publicity as this one appears to be.)  From these studies we have discovered that length of life relates to various influences as divergent as the DNA of birth, to the amount of formal education one gains in the course of the early decades of one’s life.  Until about the middle of the 19^th century the length of life had gained and held at about forty years as life expectancy starting at birth.  Since then the increase if life expectancy has increased on the average weeks each year since. It now stands, in 2016, at about 80 years.  At the present rate of progress, the length of life in 2050 AD in America will be 88 years.   Theories, based on current trends in age groups, suggest large shifts for life action and environment for the future.  Aging populations are less interested in change, in materialism, in politics, and much else that goes into economies which are based on consumption, national relationships – leading to warfare, breakup of families, cost of maintenance for the aged, sexual interests that drive much of what younger age groups do, and the differences between a young population and an old continues in that train of thought.  Evolution, a controlling factor for humanists is disinterested in what happens to mankind – it does not favor keeping an organism running a long time period.  We search and wonder.     (The Atlantic, October, 2014, pgs. 61-72) The Christian response to all this is to argue for a spiritual component to the analysis, to recognize the obvious that keeping alive infants contributed largely to the expansion of life expectancy, to recognize other changes that can turn human prophecies in other directions.  As valuable as our studies are – and they are valuable – it is in God we trust to bring us out at the near or distant end of our lives.