“It is your DESTINY”

In case you happen to be living completely isolated from a Google app and any semblance of human contact for fifty years, this title “It is your DESTINY” is a quote from the character Darth Vader, the black-helmeted antagonist in the movie cult classic “Star Wars”. Darth was deep down, a good guy, just controlled by an evil force that hijacked who he once was. His own life was determined – out of his control.

It can be a bummer to live in a deterministic worldview. “We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work.” (Yale psychologist Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis.)

Haidt’s statement demonstrates a prescient awareness of our human nature, accurately characterizing us as “selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige” and in our longing for community and meaning. I deeply respect Haidt’s work, not only his insight into culture, but also his own humility, to recant arrogations earlier in his young adult life ridiculing religion, morality and meaning.

But the path Haidt trods in diagnosing humanism diverges from the path of the biblical disciple, and that divergence is a wide fork in the road. Yes, Haidt got the nature and longings of man right – when you look at men through the lens of a biblical framework – we are all stiff-necked, every one of us, evil in ways we do not realize, and we each want to be our own god, though few would outright admit that. Haidt’s exit ramp on this dark assessment is that we are determined. Determined meaning we are actually automatons. Products of our programming from eons past. Our evolutional ancestors made us this way. And theirs before them. And so on backward it goes until we just have the angry sloshing primordial soup. All that made us this way.

Contrast the determinism treadmill to the liberation, purpose and destiny that can exist only in the life of a disciple of Christ. (OK, that sounds arrogant…) Why only in disciples? A Christ-disciple, by definition, surrenders the slavery of self-actualization, self-determination and dominance. A Christ-follower dies to their personal captivity, to become a bondservant. How is a bondservant free? Because a bondservant has been sheltered from the consequences of their own making, their own debts, their own self-determined destruction. A disciple – that bondservant is provisioned, adopted, granted immunity from their debts and destruction, fully alive in their own personality and character, yet offered an eternal liberation, eternal purpose, eternal meaning and an eternal destiny (think about that last one). Oh, and one other thing. Disciples distribute that liberation reality to other people, over and over again, for the rest of their lives. Liberated, free, and making it so for others. It is your destiny.

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