Why Life Is Short
Recently, a tortoise died at the age of 250.
In the days of Noah, it’s not unusual to live to almost a thousand years.
After a period of test run, God decided to reduce the life expectancy of man down to 120 years max.
Not only was that God not content with man for being mortal but also because they were so evil that there is no reason to grant them more time to waste. Who wouldn’t?
But the issue is like ‘chicken and egg’.
The hearts of men were generally evil, precisely, because they had long lives!
For heaven’s sake, even for a life expectancy of 60 years, people today couldn’t stay good for just a fraction of it! Imagine how much evil I would accumulate if my life would go on for another 840 years?
I think that the people of today deserved the flood more than those people in the time of Noah. If the ‘good’ days of the people of old were to be added up, out of those 900 years, it would accumulate to something close to, say, - a conservative figure of - 120 years.
That’s equivalent to two lifetimes, already - amazing display perfection!
That is why compared to the people of today? Those people who died in the flood were angels.
People of today?
I’ll put it like this: it is not surprising anymore to see some people being converted to some form of religion in their deathbed!
Live your whole life in folly and decide to submit to a Christian life for about 6 hours or much less. And hope you don’t commit sin in that span of time.
What a difficult task. I wouldn’t want to be in anyone of these guys’ shoes.
Considering the great plan of redemption –the New Testament, God would really have to greatly reduce man’s life because it is the only way that the gospel of Jesus would fit in and make sense.
How?
If I am still living in the time of Noah and someone in the street is proclaiming “repent, the end is near”, I would wonder what he is talking about. The word ‘near’, in relation to my lifespan, could be 500 years in the future.
No need to rush.
The success of spreading the gospel is partly due to its sense of urgency. For all I know the word ‘urgency’ was invented after the great flood.
What could be so urgent when I’m 200 and planning to have my second child at 535?
I believe there were fewer cases of suicides in those days. If one had already made up his/her mind about committing suicide…then, it must be that bad.
There’d be a very little chance that no one could convince a suicidal person not to do it. “Don’t do it. There’s still hope, my friend, your still young, your only 90, you still have a millennium ahead of you!…Don’t you want to see your children grow up to be fine young 200 year olds?…I am sure you’d have a stable job 100 years from now… Ok, so your life, at present sucks. Let this one slide, stay low for about 50 years and then start a new life”. By then, everybody, including himself, would have forgotten all about it.
Compared to today’s longevity, it’s like; I’ve been given 10 (Like a cat) lifetime opportunities to pursue a quality life. Life like that, who needs reincarnation?
“Boy, after undergoing the triple bypass operation, I feel like 400 again!”
I’m sure, in those days, stress was unheard of.
A person can tell he won’t live long when he’s always under stress.
Simply put, a symptom of a short lifespan is stress.
They say that stress causes some illness that will shorten a person’s life. I say it’s the other way around.
Stress is just a manifestation of a short lifespan.
I believe, that, by the time a person is born its body already knows how long it will live - An info that the owner of the body doesn’t know about.
It works probably like, um, adrenalin; it impels the body to work frantically once it realizes it only has, say, 40 years to exist.
So what stress does is to squeeze-in the same amount of what an ordinary 80 years usually can accommodate in 40 years.
That’s how fair life is.
So, a person who lives a stressful life seems to be working doubly hard, because, really he does.
By the time he’s 40 he’ll die and doctors will claim he died of some kind of heart ailment due to stress.
No, it was really time for him to go.
They will make it appear that stress is the culprit when they should have been thankful, for giving the man a taste of full life… in half the time.
Everybody notices how technologies quickly advance and how things change at a fast pace.
Everything in the universe works proportionately. That’s how it achieves a sense of equality. So the faster things change, proportionately, the shorter the lifespan of people become.
That’s why in the third world, where life expectancy is very low, the very poor usually experience it all in one day and on a daily basis. So it’s like, anytime, they’re ready to go. It’s not unusual to see men who work like slaves during the day and engage in an unparalleled blissful drinking binge after work.
If the drinking turns bloody, then, they should even be more grateful.
Of course, life was slow in the time of Noah. If life were still like in the days of old, then, I won’t be surprised to see Lapu-lapu still on his third leg of a nationwide victory parade for killing a foreign invader… Newer versions of game consoles and car models would come in every decade…retro fashion means, me, naked and holding a spear.
While the phrases ‘love your enemy’ was made popular by Jesus and ‘sleeping with the enemy’ is contemporary, ‘Forgive and forget’ and ‘time heals’ could be just two of many phrases that are still being used today that have their roots in the time of Noah.
=)
