Matthew 10:32: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven.
Finding its roots in younger people but now filtering downstream to older generations, the expression “Whatever” has become a dismissive position to a situation that is not easily understandable. At leading of the devil, we have become a people of shallowness when confronted with things of depth. Society’s celebration of our insatiable fleshly needs and the relentless marketing of the ease to which these needs can be accessed has created a knowingly, or unknowingly, ignorance of the motivation and cost of this push to fill a bottomless cup of desires. When confronted with a caution or explanation of such unabandoned pursuits, our yielding to our hell-driven mindset of the flesh seeks to quickly dismiss such attempts with the word, “Whatever.” Such a statement is a definitive “End of Conversation” escape hatch.
Yet, there is one thing that is intentionally implanted in every created human being. This was a desire to be in a close and personal relationship with Him. According to the creation account in the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible, this is our original design. This design component demands us to contemplate and accept we were made with a purpose – at least to have a relationship with our Creator God. This design component reflects His personal desire to be in fellowship with each of us. However, in chapter 3 of Genesis, Satan questions the truth and voracity of God’s cautionary words of death through tempting Eve to disobey Him.
In an admittedly simplistic and crude analogy, Satan is telling Eve, “Whatever” when she recounts her instructions to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When she and Adam did eat from the tree, that dismissive “Whatever” was blown to bits when the truth of God’s word was realized. Their spirit did immediately die. That deceased spirt severed the connection point to God and left Adam and Eve and every offspring thereafter, with one exception, to be estranged from our original design of being in relationship with our Creator.
When confronted with the sinless life of Jesus, the senseless and unjust circumstances that led to His assassination, and the discovery of His deepest desire to go through such a process, that God-implanted yearning forces even the most elementary of minds to generate the question, “Why?” Unless Jesus was insane, which one cannot conclude given all the wisdom and love He demonstrated during His ministry, then we must resolve that there must have been a purpose in His willingness to undergo such a torturous end of His young life.
If the enormity of the truth of our being designed and created with a minimum purpose to be in communication with God, then perhaps the purpose of Jesus’ crucifixion is to reestablish the original purpose of our design? To the nonbeliever, this will no doubt be a far-fetched linking. Yet, millions and millions of people all descended from Adam and Eve have connected these two purposeful events and found new lives and endless depths of God’s love, mercy, and grace. Can all these people be wrong? Unlikely. At a minimum, they didn’t dismiss these potential connections of purpose with the term, “Whatever.”
Will you, just once, dismiss the dismissive “Whatever” to the soul-calling invitation from your Creator to gently and lovingly you guide you from your hell-driven shallowness into the deep end of God’s love for you? It was Satan who initiated the “Whatever” statement in the Garden of Eden. Jesus initiated the “Whoever” statement in today’s verse. It’s up to you. Do you want to be a “Whatever” or a “Whoever?”