One of the drawbacks to having rather limited law enforcement presence on our island is that it has caused some people to reach the conclusion that there is no law enforcement presence here. As a result, it is not uncommon to see people completely disregarding the regular rules of the road, whether that might mean a parent allowing their clearly unlicensed child to drive their rented golf cart down the main paved road on the island, or watching a dump truck blow right through a stop sign without the slightest pause. Thankfully, law enforcement does exist here, so there are occasions when people are held accountable for their behavior, which then provides us with sufficient anecdotal information to convey to visitors, encouraging them to behave responsibly.
There’s a secondary risk that comes from thinking that rules won’t be enforced. It is a simple leap from thinking about unenforced laws to thinking that a law wasn’t necessary in the first place. After all, if you constantly disregard a law without any consequences, it becomes difficult to think that it was ever doing anything other than putting in place a needless restriction on your behavior, and therefore you are right to ignore it.
Of course, when you are driving the dump truck and you blow through the stop sign, and the 10-year-old driving the golf cart has neither the reflexes or the understanding to successfully avoid the collision, the need for those laws become painfully obvious. Further, the consequences for disregarding them are suddenly far greater than the fines that would have been assessed by law enforcement had they caught the offending behavior prior to the tragedy. (note: no, this didn’t actually happen – yet).
It is easy to fall into a similar trap when considering God’s laws. For whatever reason, God didn’t send out a team of spiritual law enforcement agents to watch over you and pull you over every time you break one of His laws. Frankly, that makes it so easy to think that there will never be some moment when we will be held to account, which is definitely not the case. However, the idea that those laws weren’t really needed, and that we are more than capable of deciding the proper behavioral standards for ourselves, can also bring about devastating consequences. God, who created us and knows us better than we know ourselves, put forth His laws precisely because He understood the hazardous living conditions that we would establish when we tried to live the way our personal desires lead us. When we try to live without regard for God’s wisdom and His laws, we stop living in reality – even though reality never ceases. Emotionally, spiritually, and even physically, we suffer when we try to live in a world of our own creation, which causes us to look towards substances and entertainment to distract us and fill us, even as we fall deeper into darkness.
Please don’t be lulled into a sense of false security if you are living without regard for God and His laws, and don’t mistake His patience for approval. He gave those laws for our benefit, and He wants us to live as we were created to experience this life. But we can only operate in a manner contrary to our design for so long before it catches up with us – whether it is in our life here or the life to come. So, open up the instruction manual – the Bible – and familiarize yourself with the rules of the road. And stop by the church on Sunday morning at 10:00 am, to see what you have been missing.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron