God Cares!
My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?
Call also means a decision or ruling by an official of a game, traditionally conveyed by a shout, that the ball has gone out of play, or that a rule has been broken.
To fully appreciate this kind of call, one must understand the rules of the game because the officer controlling the game will shout when declaring a decision or making it clear when a rule has been broken.
Life can be equated to a game, entitled the “game of life.” The rules of this game are not like any ordinary game where man gets to set the rules and even change them to fit his whimsical nature for winning.
There are rules to football and other athletic and sports games, table-top board games, even games of chance where many sink into debt and shame over the loss of how much money they gambled. With man-made games, rules are rules; you win sometimes; you lose most of the time.
The ‘game of life” has its very special set of rules; and these rules are clearly laid out in the thickest “play”-book ever written, and given to appointed officials in every nation to monitor how we play it out. The “play”-book is designed to make everyone winners and to receive a great prize once the game is over. This “game of life” is often referred to as a race. Each person alive runs this race at his or her own pace. The goal is not to be the first to finish, but simply to finish it according to the rules and receive the ultimate gift.
Here are some of the rules:
1) You are fearfully and wonderfully made—uniquely gifted and the apple of your Creator’s eye. You are special.
2) The real you is housed inside a physical body—whether yellow, brown, red, black or white—and you are to love yourself and others equally with no prejudice or preference.
3) Because you are precious, you are to honor your body by keeping it holy, or clean from any kind of immorality which includes how you think, what you watch, the words you speak, and the actions or movements you make with any part of your body.
4) You are to love what God gave you—your talents—and understand (or embrace) that you are a complete package—YOU ARE ENOUGH.
5) God, your Creator, loves you unconditionally, and He cares about everything concerning your life.
Yes, the “play”-book is thick, but these rules are a summary of what you can discover in the sub-points of these rules when you read this book yourself.
Now, you may be asking, “If God cares about me so much, why do bad things happen to make me wonder if God really exists at all?” “What’s the point to living by these rules if all I get back is more disappointment?”
Many struggle with these questions because they have not yet discovered the secret of victory when running this race called life. And when told the secret, they either quickly reject it or refuse to apply it to make everything work for their highest good with a victorious outcome.
‘The bad things that happen to us’ is the shout of the official of the game waning us that we have gone “out of play” or that a rule has been broken. A girl getting raped or an armless boy murdered on the streets does not appear in life’s “play”-book. If every being created by God played by the rules, no evil would exist.
But we all are familiar with the powers of darkness that do exist. Yet the source of this dark power was also created by God—all things were created by God. Evil comes into play when even one of us turns away from the light. God is light. God is love. The force of darkness breaks every rule designed by light—it is the nature of darkness. If we allow ourselves to be enticed and eventually ensnared by the darkness, there is a penalty given by the official watching how we play out on the track of our life. He calls the shots. We simply have a choice—to obey or disobey the rules.
God cares through all our pain. My God, My God, why have You forsaken me? Jesus cried out in Mark 15:34. Jesus, the Light of the world, painstakingly dying on the cross at Calvary, was consumed in complete darkness from noonday to three o’clock, the time when the sun is supposed to shine its strongest. He took all the powers of darkness into His own body forcing out the presence of His God-being, so that sin (all the penalties for breaking the rules in the game of life) could be nailed to the cross. This act of God’s love erased every mistake, every consequence for going off track (out of play) that every person committed when he or she came into the knowledge of what is good and what is evil.
The darkness represents the sin and shame for breaking the rules of the “play”-book. And this is the secret to winning the race called life: That God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us(Romans 5:8). And to those who believe this secret, we are forgiven and given a new life to start afresh, to play by the rules of light, and win the race victoriously.
To care means to have complete concern over the total well-being of someone. To go through all the agony of the cross in order to change the destiny of mankind from darkness to light is the ultimate demonstration, or show, of care. Grasp this secret into your spirit-being, your soul, throw away the darkness, and open up your heart to let the sunshine in.
© 2022 by Patience Osei-Anyamesem. All rights reserved. Published by The Light In Me Enterprise. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews or other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Special Note: You are loved no matter how much hatred is around you. Read the “play”-book, God’s Word, the Bible, every day. You may not understand it all at once, but you can contact us and ask questions. There is another book (made into a film) called The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus, by Lee Patrick Strobel (© 1998), which is a true story of the walk of an atheist out of darkness into God’s glorious light.
Unless otherwise stated, all scripture quotations are from The New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Paintings by Fred Mathews: "Gift From God" and Greg Olson: "No Greater Love".