Day 43: Living Daily in Reality: The Cosmic Death
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Why do we see good and bad in our world? Why do we often witness deeds of
heroic unselfishness on the one hand – and then actions of extreme
selfishness and cowardice on the other? Because our Creator wants us to
see clearly the consequences of the choice we make. This world is a
simple demonstration of life lived as if there’s no God – no creator
– as if we had made ourselves!

When we live like that we become perverted and corrupted. We were
designed to to bathe in the approval of the loving Father who made us to
express his only Son, but we reject that whole plan and try to get from
the approval of others the sense of self-esteem that we need. This
deception develops throughout our being a perversion and corruption that
we cannot correct because our whole nature is affected. This is why all
our self-help systems and religious observances fail.

All of them require the consistent exercise of our wills, but this is the
very place where our failure lies – the despairing cry of human beings
is the same in every country – “the good that I want I do not do, but
the evil that I do not want is what I doâ€(cid:157)! If there is a creator we
want to do what he thinks is right, but we find ourselves instead wanting
to please our peers or our friends. Our little eyes search for the
approval of other human beings even though we know they will die like us
while our maker will live on.

One might say that we are made to live from the inside to the outside –
to get from God’s Son within us what he wishes to do through us; but we
instead live from the outside – from what the world around us wants!
The creator has put us each here to do something that he has fitted his
Son to do through us, but we reject that reality and instead try to do
whatever will help us to survive or gain attention. The result is that we
become little sponges that soak up the praise of other people or all the
material possessions we can get our hands on. It’s as if we cannot help
ourselves, however hard we try. What we think is a little
misunderstanding on our part about life becomes a basic perversion of our
personalities that we cannot change.

God foresaw that our very natures would be perverted and that only he
himself could rectify them and remake them: this is the meaning of the
statement in the Bible by Paul in Romans 6:6 – “for we know that our
old self was crucified with Christ so that the body of sin might be
destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sinâ€(cid:157). Sin is simply
living as if there’s no God – living as if he does not exist – as
if we are self-existent creatures. Thus our natures have developed to get
all we need from the world and our fellow-creatures; we have developed a
“body of sinâ€(cid:157) – a physical and mental organism that operates as if
it is on its own – self-dependent – with no maker – no loving

Father. It now exerts its perverted habits on us so that we cannot do
what we know is right – what we were made to do. Our physical and
mental natures have become a “body of sinâ€(cid:157) that is no longer ruled by
our own wills but responds in knee-jerk reaction to the world around us.

This is why God expressed in his son’s death the cosmic death that he
suffered in each one of us in eternity – that great present moment that
is eternity. He alone can radically change what he has made and what we
have perverted. This is the meaning of the cosmic death expressed by his
son in 29 A.D. – “for we know that our old self was crucified with
Christ so that the body of sin might be destroyed and we might no longer
be enslaved to sinâ€(cid:157).