Okay, so yesterday I forced your private life on you and suggested that YOUR private life is NOT really yours. Today I want to continue antagonizing you... for the sake of protagonizing you, of course. So I've got a second question for you regarding your private life... and I'm going to explore it in two parts. Catch that? Second Question. Two parts. First part of the second question starts now. I want to ask:
We
like to think that our private life is to remain private. A politician or a major sports hero who
gets caught having affairs might make a public statement like, “In this
difficult time of my life and my family’s life, we would ask you to respect our
privacy.” Well every reporter
blows that request off. There is
no way any privacy is going to be respected. We like to think that our private life should be private,
but do we really believe that?
It’s interesting that when someone else gets caught doing something
wrong, we expect them to fess up and divulge everything they’ve done
wrong. I mean, Tiger Woods is a
golfer. A golfer. He hits a little white ball around the
grass. And yet people are saying
he needs to have a public press conference where he deals with his marital
infidelity before he should be accepted back on the golf course. Seriously, does what he does in the
privacy of his own life impact whether or not he can hit a sand wedge? Wait a second, I thought you thought
that your private life was private?
We
seem to have a double standard here.
We assume that as long as what we do in private stays private, then we
are entitled to keep it private.
But there are two problems with this idea:
Problem
number 1: Your private life is not
private because your private life is known by God. Psalm
44:21 asks, “Wouldn’t God have discovered [what you’ve done], since he knows
the secrets of the heart?” Proverbs 5:21 states, “For a person’s ways are in
full view of the Lord, and he examines all the person’s paths.” Your life never really was private,
ever. To God’s eyes, your private
life is a window. He sees
everything. He’s not a
paparazzi. He’s not following you
around in secret with cameras looking to dig up the dirt or catch you in the
act, “Ah ha! I knew it! I had a hunch you were up to something
evil.” It’s not like that. God is out in the open about it. He can’t help it. He simply sees all things; he knows all
things. And there will come a day
when what God sees and knows will become seen and known by everyone. Jesus said in Luke 12: “The time is
coming when everything will be revealed; all that is secret will be made
public. Whatever you have said in
the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed
doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear, [and I would add]
whatever you have texted to your mistress will be publicized by TMZ. Look, nobody is happy that your private
life will be publicized. But part
of the problem is that we assumed that a private life is private… when it never
really was. God sees and God
knows.
In
the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve did something wrong and they tried to cover it
up. They didn’t want God to know,
so they hid and they covered up their bodies. Before sin, everything was out in the open. As the great philosopher, Cosmo Kramer,
once said, “I’m out there, Jerry, and I’m loving every minute of it.” But ever since then, we have turned
inward, we have become quite capable of thinking we can hide things. But God knew what they had done. And when he presented himself to them,
Adam and Eve put on leaves started making excuses. We were naked, Adam said, so we hid. And so God asked them, “What’s wrong
with being naked- that’s how I made you?
Did you mess something up?”
From the beginning, people have tried to hide and keep private those
things that they don’t want others to know. Adam and Eve, male and female, created in the image of God,
had nothing to hide, until they did wrong and then they became addicted to
privacy. We’re just like
them. We like to pretend that we
can cover up our privates, but we really can’t. God sees. God
knows. Your private life is public
knowledge to God.
