Security and insecurity
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity! What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3)
Having described his life, his successes, his mistakes and his disappointments, King Solomon concludes the whole matter: “Fear God and keep his commandments, because this applies to every person” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Who wants to express himself to be sovereign and necessary chooses freely to do what God recommends.
To do what God re-commends is not a problem but a solution. His commandments do not take away our freedom:
I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants. (Deuteronomy 30:19) God's proposals allow overcoming feelings of worthlessness and finding the desired freedom by collaborating with God. Thus, we will experience that we are one of these “sparks of God” that never dies. Certainly, we shall leave our body and this world, but we will remain forever united with God.
Through the commandments, we do bond with God if we accept the mission to be his co-workers as was Jesus Christ who, by endorsing the will of God, has shown how to bridge the gap that separates man from God. We cannot overcome the anxiety that produces the feeling to be “mere nothing” and the desire of a sovereign existence otherwise then by making God's will ours. Because we are concerned, as long as we do not cooperate with God. The only way of finding real peace is to make God's will ours. The better we serve him the larger is our inner peace.
Today, people seek to approach God by practicing various types of meditation. Thus, they live in total subjectivity. Those who believe themselves to be closest to God are often the most remote. They may spend hours in meditation and claim to be close to God, but if they commit adultery, everyone realizes they are just a clanging cymbal. Theirs spiritual experiences are illusions. To differentiate true meditation from illusion it is enough to observe if the concerned persons love God's commandments.
The commands make us touch the divine, share the Absolute and make us feel that the soul is an expression of God. They provide us a profound sense of security and peace. On the way of the commandments, we can either work in union with God or do what we want, and feel useless and rejected. When God offers “life (eternal) or death”, are we going to answer: “In the name of freedom, I choose eternal death, suffering, insecurity and anxiety”? It would be a highly ridiculous choice.
Many attractive things end up being only a torture. For example, to wake up every morning by having nothing to do is rather paralyzing. Although free, the feeling to be useless will soon give place to anxiety. Inactivity and activities that are not made for God increase our suffering and existential insecurity. Making ours, God's will is, paradoxically, the only means to satisfy our desires. As freedom is the essence of our being, we need to feel sovereign and necessary. We will get it by following the way of the commandments of him who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The Lord said to Abraham, “Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father's house, to a land which I will show you” (Genesis 12:1-4). The Lord gave Abraham an advice, not an order. Therefore, Abraham left his country as co-worker of God entrusted with a divine mission. God offers the same opportunity to everyone to perform a mission on his behalf. His commandments offer us this opportunity. What is our choice? Do we live without even knowing what we do? What must be, will be in any way! However, any real choice leads us to know and to celebrate what we do.
We love liberty when we are free to do what we want, but we hate liberty when it reminds us that our existence is mere possibility, and that we will never ennoble if we do only what pleases us. By loving as Christ loved us, we merge with the absolute reality. “And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father” (Colossians 3:17).