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In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Prior to Genesis 1:1, the material world did not e<\/span>xist. There was nothing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, when God created the heavens and the earth, He created everything that is a thing. Nothing that could be seen with the eye, touched with the fingers, heard with the ear, smelled with the nose, or heard with the ear existed prior to that moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every single atom, every single electron, e<\/span>very proton, every neutron, every quark was created by God and He formed them all into elements, organisms, mountains, rivers, forests, jungles, oceans, planets, galaxies, the universe.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every photon of light exists because He spoke it all into being.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, when the Bible says it all belongs to God, it ALL belongs to God.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. (Deuteronomy 10:14 ESV)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And yet, we like to act like there’s some line between the things of God and the things of man. Somehow, human beings came up with this word, “secular” which we define as, “denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.”<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Really?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How can that be? If God created everything and it all belongs to God, how can anything<\/em> have zero relationship to Him?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sure, He gives us gifts which we steward and manage, but isn’t that because of His love and mercy and grace? Can we really and truly claim to have produced or created anything on our own?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Doesn’t He send the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike? Does He not feed and clothe and shelter even those who hate Him and\/or deny Him? (Matthew 5:45)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sometimes, it feels like we just – don’t – get – it.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Case in point: A brief news story on Kinship Christian Radio reported that a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 86% of Americans believe there is a lesson to be learned from the coronavirus outbreak.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n About 35% say the lessons were sent by God, but 37% say the lessons were not sent by God. Another 13% do not believe in God, and 13% say there is no lesson to be learned.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, I’m deeply concerned that a full one-eighth of the population believes there is nothing to learn here at all, my heart breaks for the one-eighth of the population who do not believe in God, and I am mouth-agape flummoxed by the 37% who say there are lessons to be learned here but God wasn’t at all involved.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, I know that there are people who believe that although God did create the universe and everything in it, He kind of wound it all up at creation and is just letting it tick-tock wind down like a watch without really being involved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n That kind of theology has zero Biblical support and completely ignores the love of a God who would send His only Son to die for us, take away all our sin, and win for us eternal life. A worldview without Jesus in it makes no sense because without Jesus, we are dead in our sins.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It appears that the 37% who do believe in God but don’t think He is involved in the lessons we should learn think that God doesn’t really care. Either that, or they don’t want to attribute something they view as bad as having any connection to a good God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n See, and that’s where we all get tripped up so easily. We look at things through the lens of this life while forgetting about the eternal perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We stub our toe and curse God, never thinking that our aching toe is telling us to stop walking around in the dark. We never come to the conclusion that we should turn the light on for others so they don’t stub their toe in the dark. We curse the darkness never considering that God, acting through a whole bunch of people starting with a guy who was sick and tired of lanterns that burned kerosene or whale oil made light in the middle of night available to us by flipping a switch.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n When was the last time you or I praised God for a light bulb?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And, when you stop to consider that Thomas Edison didn’t even fully understand the physics of light, (and we still don’t) it’s even more amazing that we can recreate the very first thing God created pretty much whenever we want to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, I am among the 35% who believe God is behind the lessons in t<\/span>his pandemic and the lesson becomes clearer and more succinct with each passing day –and it’s no different than the lesson Jesus taught us when He was here with us:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Love God and love each other.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is no such thing as “the secular.” That concept cannot stand in the light of truth. We are eternal beings having a temporal existence here on this earth. Our purpose and our mission is to shine with the light of eternity which was made physical and real in its most ultimate sense in the being and person of Jesus Christ.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If anything is obvious from all this, it’s that we are nowhere without God. Everything is under His control and exists because He made it to be so. All of the stuff of this earth that diverts and distracts us from the truth of His sovereign love and power is and will amount to supreme nothingness. In the end, all that will remain is love. This earth will one day cease to exist, but love will remain.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Love is eternal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There will come a day when we have no more days to shine that light here on this earth. In the meantime, we must love well. We must be a people known by our love of God, of each other, of all people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today’s Praise<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n And God said, \u201cLet there be light,\u201d and there was light.\u00a0God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. Genesis 1: 3&4 (NIV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 Prior to Genesis 1:1, the material world did not exist. There was nothing.\u00a0 So, when God…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":28164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 22:32:12","action":"delete","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}