|
|
Hard Drives and Souls No, the title is not a misprint; I want to talk about a computer hard drive and our soul. Early this year the office computer crashed (became a glorified paper weight). There were files on the hard drive which were not backed up on another devise (read here, dumb Dennis, dumb, dumb). After a number of attempts at accessing the material, I decided to take up an offer from a friend. He offered to see what he could find and save for me. I procrastinated for a good while and finally sent the hard drive. A lesson on procrastination will be coming sometime in the future, when I get around to it. Well, my friend, who shall remain nameless, since he may not want to be identified with me, called. He was able to access and save just about everything on that disk. This made me to think about that hard drive and our soul. What was on the hard drive was lost but not gone. It still existed but was useless until it was found and restored. In Luke 15 we read of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son. The coin did not cease to exist; it was simply useless until it was found by its owner. The lost sheep was separated from its shepherd and the prodigal son was far away from his father. The same can be said for our soul. Our soul does not cease to exist just because we are separated from God: it will exist on the other side of the grave. The difference is not our consciousness but where we will spend eternity. Finding the material on the hard drive means I will be able to use it in the future. As I told my friend, you saved me a lot of work. In the parables of the coin and lost sheep there was rejoicing when they were found. A lost soul being reconciled with God is a joyful occasion. A computer hard drive’s main purpose is to store information to allow the operator access when he or she desires. If my friend was unable to recover the data, I would have told him to throw it away. We are created to do one thing, to serve God with our heart, mind, and soul, Matthew 22.37. God sent Jesus to redeem us, to restore us back to God. The difference between us and the hard drive is the hard drive has no will of its own. We can decide for ourselves what we believe and what we will do with our information. In the case of a rebellious or unrepentant person, they condemn themselves by refusing to come to Christ. – Dennis Tucker |