Stuff Matters

3 August 2025  Luke 12:13-21

“Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Luke 12:20

There are five questions that all honest people have to answer sooner or later. The first one is this: “Is there life after death, or not?”

If not, then it truly doesn’t matter what you do with your material possessions. It doesn’t matter if you are completely selfish with them, or give them all away to the less fortunate. It doesn’t matter if you kill other people, take their stuff, and make it your stuff. If there is no life after death, who cares?

Some people may say that it matters what you do with your stuff, but if there is no life after death, they are simply wrong. The only way that it can matter what you do with your stuff is if it is objectively true that it matters. So, all honest people also have to answer the question, “Is it true that objective moral values and duties exist?”

So now there are at least two questions that all honest people have toanswer:

1. Is there life after death, or not?

2. Is it true that objective moral values and duties exist?

If objective moral values and duties exist, they can only exist in a mind – after all, they are not physical realities but mental ones. And if they are objective moral values and duties, they cannot exist in my mind or your mind, but in a mind that is over all minds, and can create obligation. If there is a mind like that, it can’t be part of the physical universe, because then it would be caused by something, like everything else in the physical universe, like the physical universe itself. Objective moral obligation must originate in a Mind that is uncaused, outside of time and space, changeless because change implies time and the Mind must be outside of time, and personal because that is the only way you can get a temporal effect from an eternal cause. So, that raises a third question that all honest people have toask:

3. Is there a timeless, spaceless, changeless, personal Mind outside the physical universe?

To answer that question, there would have to be evidence that such a Mind exists, and it turns out that there is. Physicists have determined that the most reasonable explanation for the existence of the physical universe is an event called the Big Bang, a massive singularity in which all time and space simply exploded into being, a universe that is rational and mathematically explainable, with basic mathematical principles existing from the first instant of creation. We know that because we have minds capable of perceiving and doing the math. That raises a fourth question that all honest people have to ask:

4. Why do we have minds capable of perceiving the Mind that is outside of space and time, the kind of Mind capable of creating the universe, as well as objective moral values and duties?

The answer to that question points us straight to the reality of life after death. We are already connected to the Mind outside of Space and Time. Christians have vigorously underscored that with the reality of the Resurrection.

So, it matters what we do with our stuff. It matters how we get it, it matters why we get it, it matters why we get some things and not others, it matters what we keep, and what we give away. It matters because it is all going to be judged, and we are already connected to the Judge. That raises a fifth question that all honest people have to ask:

5. How well do you know the Judge?

You can know Him, you know. He has made that very clear. He has sent Prophets, Apostles, and Saints to explain it. He knocks at your door still.