Not God's Best!

There are certain expressions, within certain contexts that really get my goat. It’s not just that they’re annoying and foolhardy, they actually make me angry. Although the list hasn’t grown for a while, of late I have steadily been adding expressions to it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me getting older and becoming more of a curmudgeon, but in hindsight I think anger and annoyance are the proper response to these expressions.

For long and long, somewhere at the top of my list were either the drunk drivers or texting tweens who plowed into an innocent and killed them, employing the go to line, ‘I wish it was me instead of them.’ I’m sure you do. I’m sure the individual’s family wishes it were so as well, but if wishes were horses we’d all have stables, and there would be allot more cowboys about.

Every time I hear the line, it just angers me instantly. You chose to drink and drive, you chose to text and drive, you took a life because you were reckless and foolish, and you wishing it’d been you and a quarter will get you a stick of gum, if that.

Another expression that really gets me fired up is ‘he is a good boy,’ within the context of some testosterone filled young man or another doing something truly awful, then having his aged mother come to his defense. Obviously he is not a good boy, madam! He shot three people, killed one, and tried to run over a police officer with his car. He is not a good boy, and you saying it does not change the reality of what he has become. Perhaps, when he was younger, playing with his Legos or Tonka trucks he was a good boy, but now he is a full grown adult who has taken a human life, and his having been a good boy at one point does not change the present reality.

Now lately I’ve been hearing another expression coming from America’s spiritual luminaries, and it has the capacity to infuriate me more than any other. If we were to look back, I believe the originator and purveyor of this expression is none other than everyone’s favorite theological powerhouse Joel Osteen.

Whenever any pastor who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty is asked about his opinion on homosexual marriage, polygamy, or any of a dozen other aberrant practices, they put on the plastic smile and deliver the line they must have practiced in the mirror a hundred times: ‘Well, I don’t believe it’s God’s best for them.’

Oh, really? Not God’s best? Is it that difficult to utter the word sin? Is it that difficult to grow a spine and say with the conviction requisite your station that it is in fact a sinful act, and if not repented of will lead men to damnation?

By this logic, whatever it is that men practice, whatever perversion or sinful act, simply isn’t God’s best. Are you a polygamist, a pedophile, or a zoophile? Well, you know, it’s not God’s best don’t you? Is this the most accurate Biblical answer we can give? We couldn’t come with something more substantial, or dare I say Scriptural?

We’re not even talking about lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, licentiousness, avarice, greed, or covetousness anymore. These things are so rampant within the church that to speak against them would be to empty out an entire congregation faster than if someone rolled a live grenade down the center aisle. We are talking about things that God Himself sees as abominations, and it is these things that our spiritual better see not as sin, but simply not God’s best!

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.