Let’s talk about fairness.
The concept of fairness is one that permeates our society. It’s considered a good thing to be thought of as fair – it is perceived to mean that one is tolerant, understanding, and even-handed, but it is a great lie.
Is the world fair?
Babies are born into wealth and poverty. Some are born perfectly normal with fully functional minds and bodies and others are born with some sort of defect that will either hinder them their entire lives or leave them with an extremely abbreviated lifespan.
This is just one brief example of how the world is not fair. To think it should be otherwise is our pride roaring within us. When we see unfairness, we want to hammer it out – correct it, fix it.
We are trying to claim the authority of God when we attempt to enforce fairness. We are effectively saying to him that we know better.
We can no more force the world to be fair than we can tell gravity to not hold our feet to the ground.
The Truth – The only fairness we should expect is the fairness of God’s judgment for only He is perfect and righteous. There can be no justice, equality, or perfect liberty without God.
When man enforces his will – the outcome will be imperfect and ultimately fail. That is what has stricken our country and our world. Mankind has thought that it has dominion over this world – we are at the top of the food chain, there are billions of us, and we have the tools and might to shake the world – or so we thought. Despite all of our advances in technology, medicine, philosophy – all of our vaunted progress, the TRUTH is that we are nothing.
We generate power by splitting atoms, but millions sit in the dark.
We grow food from the ground, but cannot feed the world.
We speak lofty words of fairness, equality, tolerance, yet can only try to force such concepts into reality through naked force.
The world is not fair. You have to accept this truth or you are deluding yourself in pride and envy. You cannot look at someone who has something and wish the same for yourself just because you think or feel that you deserve it. The simple fact is that we ultimately deserve only one thing – death.
The good news is that we have a righteous God who is love and compassion perfected. He gave us the Truth. He offers fairness, liberty, justice, mercy, and grace. He will perfect the imperfect and only asks that we lay down our pride and envy and follow Him.
Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.
But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile,for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
freedomsbrushfire 
Max
/ July 26, 2013So what is your point? “That kid was born with a medical illness or biological defect. Sure we could treat him, but God wants him to die.” I mean if all we deserve is death, why should we bother living at all?
I particularly like you comparison to gravity and our feet to the ground. Considering we overcome that every single day. I don’t just mean through technology like airplanes and space shuttles. Just the act of jumping, sitting with our feet up, or holding yourself up takes our feet right off the ground much to gravity’s chagrin.
Likewise, we have proven far better at improving and adjusting the world to be more fair than it otherwise would be than if we simply through up our hands and said “well the world ain’t fair so why try fixing it.” After all, that kid with a birth defect lived a long and normal life because we worked to overcome the medical unfairness that child was born into.
cyclimus
/ July 26, 2013My point is not that we should not try to improve the world, but to expect the world to change (for unfairness to become fair) is not within our power, but is dangerously close to assuming the role of God. We must look at the world through the eyes of an enlightened man – fully aware that this world is merely a blink in eternity and that we were not created to live like this.
Your point on gravity is actually incorrect. We perceive that we overcome gravity at a point in time (the moment of takeoff from a runway in flight for instance), but we are actually only overcoming the force of gravity with a greater force from lift caused by what is called the Bernoulli effect (disparate air pressures over and under the wings of the aircraft causing the aircraft to be pulled upward by the lower pressure over the wing – this is essentially what aerodynamics are all about). An aircraft is actually always under the force of gravity and would fall from the sky without the greater force being enacted upon it by lift. Every atom in your body is under the effect of gravity regardless of whether you jump free of the soil under your feet or not because that downward force is always being exerted upon you based on the very nature of matter and mass-proximity attraction. Even astronauts in space are experiencing a gravimetric force which is why they must orbit the Earth in order to maintain velocity and keep a constant proximity and distance from Earth in order to equal that downward force.