Excerpt taken from The Effective Edge by Gregory Alan Tidwell.
Peter described those who willfully disregard the beginning and the end: “For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished, But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgement and destruction of the unglodly” (2 Peter 3: 5-7).
It is no accident that the “do your own thing” approach exists in tandem with a rejection of creation. Believing God was at the beginning in creation entails knowing He will be there at the end in judgement. Contemporary secular thought, with its direction-less design of self-determining freedom, rebels against the constraints of this framework.
I had a little Oscar fish imaginatively named “Oscar.” More intelligent than most residents of an aquarium, Oscars soon learn to recognize their owners and can even be trained to do basic tricks. I could hold a small morsel of food above Oscar’s tank, and he could jump 4 to 5 inches out of the water to snatch it. The children of the congregation would gather outside my office before worship to see Oscar perform. It was like Sea World.
Unfortunately, training a fish to jump is not prudent when there is no cover on the aquarium. One morning, I arrived to find Oscar’s dry body on the carpet next to his tank, He found freedom from the constraints of his aquarium, but he had only managed to free himself from that which made his life possible.
In just this way, when people reject the constraints of a life lived with God, they are jumping out of a life-giving context into the destruction of the void. “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19).
Believing the Bible, Christians know that God was at the beginning and will be at the end. This information frames our existence and offers a point of integration, providing value and directions for our lives. Being right with God is not merely a part of life; God is the context within which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). A knowledge of God tells us where we come from, where we are going, and how we can safely arrive at our final destination.