Rules of the Game

Are you a fan of games? Games are generally referred to as a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other. There are some games that are truly entertaining and some that are educational. Many can be classified as both. The interesting thing is that games do involve rules. You cannot play football with a basketball. You cannot play pool with a golf club and you cannot complete a crossword puzzle if you only have the rules for sudoku and must use numbers.

We have become quite adept at mastering the rules of the games we play. Some of us are very good at following rules and can win without breaking them. Others are just as adept at side-stepping the rules in order to win no matter what the cost. Whether the rules or broken or not, the player still knows that his win or loss is still only properly measured by the actual rules of the game.

There is a game of life and there are rules. These rules are written in the book we call the Holy Bible. There are many of them but one rule is most prominent, i.e., that you must be born again or saved (John 3:16; Romans 10:9,10) from eternal damnation. There are some who are very good at following the rules in order to avoid this eternal damnation and will spend eternity in heaven. There are others who flat-out refuse to follow the rule of this game and still others who side-step the rules and expect to win heaven's rewards based on their own cleverness.

I would not want to risk my eternal state on breaking the rules of His (God's) game. If I carefully follow the rules of the Bible and at the end find out the book was not true, then I still would have lived a good life. However if I get to the end and find out that the rules in the book really are binding, then I will spend eternity in hell....simply because I chose not to follow the rules of the game. Whose rules are you playing by?