Upholding the Sacredness of Life

“Before you remove a fence first ask why it was put there in the first place.”

~Ravi Zacharias

All of life is sacred. Those that live life according to this pretext, believing it is an essence of truth woven through the fabric of existence, have meaning enough to ask the appropriate questions in order to live well.

The question of the metaphorical fence is an important one. Many come into our lives, thinking they know better ways, and they strip away the long built-up history simply to put their territorial fingerprints on a new conquest. They have forgotten, or are arrogantly ignorant of, the sacredness of life. They, in doing this, only disparage themselves in the end as well as, obviously, all those also in their way.

God’s Will Is In Upholding The Sacred

Being in the lap of the will of God is a state of human destiny both elusive yet captivating. We are destined, due to the Fall, to struggle to achieve it, nonetheless we cannot escape the drive to actualise ourselves in a moral universe.

We were built to uphold the sacred; we were made to seek to discern and keep God’s will.

Whenever we fail in upholding the sacred, missing the mark of God’s situational standard, we quietly condemn ourselves from within, and we present to the world that condemned person in our name alone, by the fashion of anger, greed, and envy, etc. What we experience is despair.

Whenever we succeed in upholding the sacred, on the other hand, meeting the mark of God’s situational standard, we are made to feel blessed—love becomes us, faith is easier, and hope is our more natural outlook.

Respecting What Has Gone Before

We can know the true godly by how they treat what has gone before; how they honour the legacy of history by their interaction with their physical, relational world.

Changing things carte blanche, simply for the matter of changing them, or without seeking to learn why these things are the way they are, and thereby convincing ourselves that we are right, in spite of any truth to the contrary, is a rejection of the sacredness of life. Things can only end badly from there.

Changing things always impacts people. Respecting the sacredness of life is about understanding that which underlies changing things; it’s the people that made these things come to pass in the first place. People are the datum point; and behind them, God.

Whenever we uphold, with respect, the many things we see in our natural environment, we are really saying we appreciate the sacredness of life. We are honouring that which other people have done, that which they have created, from what and whom they are. And in this, we hold God—the Order for Life—most Sacred.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Inspired by a lecture on the meaning of life by Ravi Zacharias.