An inability to play in the wonderland of the creation is an occupational hazard of cross-carrying obedience. David could not build the house of the Lord because his hands were stained from fighting the Lord's battles. Moses was provoked until he lashed out at the Israelites. His reward for leading them for forty years, for bearing the burden of their grumbling, unbelieving spirit, was to be denied entrance to the land of promise.

We seek holiness and instead are trapped in a Christ-murdering religious spirit.

Is life fair? No, it isn't. It is dangerous but not fair.

Is God fair? God cannot be otherwise than fair. All sense of fairness comes from God's own Character written in the conscience of man.

How can we figure all this out? We can't, but this is not important.

The important thing is that when we finally are given the right to play we recognize, if we have obeyed God sternly for many years, that we may be saddled with bitterness, self-pity, and a momentum that drives us to keep on gritting our teeth and laboring under a cross that no longer is present.

Many years after the end of World War II a Japanese soldier was found in a cave on one of the islands. He still was watching and prepared to hold off the enemy.

What do we do? We go to God and ask Him to remove all heaviness and dread from us, all that still is striving against unpleasant duty no longer required—all that would keep us from playing as a happy child in His garden.

For those who have an eye to see, the creation is indeed a marvel of beauty and glory. Poets glow and exclaim with delight over the progress of a lumbering beetle or the glorious colors painted on dust as the sun turns in for the night, a reminder to man that there is more to life than plodding through the mud.

But thanks to our own willingness to disobey God we have been given a hoe and required to cultivate the ground under the burning furnace of the sun—to hoe until we cannot straighten up and we return from the field bowed over. It is easy then to forget about palaces and castles where there are no troubles, only beauty, grace, and laughing children. It is time to milk the cows and feed the animals.

But God's elect are all princes, all sons of the greatest King. Their destiny is to inherit the works of God's hands and to govern them, to do whatever their heart desires, to play. The angels are servants who obey the King and watch out for all His sons.

We are given the right to play by first faithfully, diligently, performing the required work.

We develop the right to play as we cooperate with the Spirit of God in our change from the living soul to the life-giving spirit, as we forsake the adamic nature and live by the body and blood of the Lamb of God. His flesh is the only true food. His blood is the only true life.

To be continued.