Risks and rewards

We call it foolish when a man undertakes a project where the risks outweigh the rewards. Sometimes we don't value the rewards he is striving for; such as when a boy takes a dare to climb the quarry wall. He is looking for peer approval and to prove that he can do it; but I don't look for affirmation from teenagers and I suspect that I can't climb anymore (and hope I never have to try).

Russian roulette is a fool's game: there's no reward at all and the risk is utter loss. Regular roulette more nearly balances risk and reward (but the house gets the edge). The risks of driving to work every day we call negligible (weather permitting) compared to the rewards of the work.

Let's look a bit closer at one aspect of that last case. There are two types of driving risk: those where someone or something else fails, and those where we break the rules ourselves, such as by being inattentive. The consequences of breaking the rules--trying to change lanes without checking all the mirrors or looking to see what's wrong with the radio instead of watching to road--are spectacular, and seem disproportionate to the apparently minor reward of arriving at work.

But without the potentially deadly speed of cars you likely wouldn't have the job at all. The speed and power of our transportation grid lets us employ and feed far more people than we could otherwise--you might not be alive at all without cars. We forget the real reward: you get to live. The risk is that you may suffer or die in an accident; the reward is commensurate with the risk.

There are major risks to breaking the 10 Commandments. Even neglecting eternity, murder is likely to get you dead too, and coveting tends to poison your enjoyment of what you have. God, being love, designed a system that will be better than fair. What are the rewards for following the rules that the stand against the punishments for breaking the rules? What happens when we recast these not in terms of the consequences, but (as with "honor your father and mother") in terms of the benefits?

Stealing destroys the time and effort of someone else. Every thing we have represents the time God gave us that we traded to get the thing. Giving, which I suppose we may take as the opposite of stealing, trades part of our lives to benefit someone else. It sounds like something you don't want to take lightly. If I'm going to trade a day of my all-too-short life to benefit someone else, I want that to be a serious benefit and not some cluttering knick-knack.

In 1Cor11:23-30 Paul wrote that eating the bread or drinking the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner had terrible consequences. Since a loving God instituted the observance, we should expect that participating has benefits at least commensurate with the consequences. That means it isn't a purely symbolic observance, though we don't see visible effects. I'll let theologians describe how it works, if they can.

Sex participates in the creation of human beings, and that alone is a grand adventure. Raising them adds even more responsibility and glory. The rewards of obeying the rules here are also dramatic.

Paul urged the Thessalonians to try to live quiet lives. We make that sound dull, but it should be rich.