Survival of the fittest may indeed be the way of the world now, but it was not meant to be the way of human life. And yet, since the fall of mankind, life in the world has been a constant power struggle between people and between nations. Everyone is scrambling to be better than everyone else. This situation finds human beings living in fear and competing with one another to feel secure. When we live like this, we live like animals. It is not the life that we were meant to live as children of God. When we enter this competition, we abandon our dignity, and life becomes stressful and empty. One of the main symptoms of this base ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ mentality is a proneness to feel happy at the failures and misfortunes of others. If there is someone who you feel threatened by, then you may also find yourself feeling satisfied when they fail or lose in some way. On the other hand, we might find it difficult to be happy for those who succeed without feeling threatened or insecure about their success. When Jerusalem fell in 586BC, the surrounding nations delighted in her misfortune. They were happy because, whenever God blessed Israel, they felt threatened. God’s answer to them is that they will fall by the same principle they lived by. Those who play the survival-of-the-fittest game will lose even if they win because we were never meant to be playing that game in the first place. We are the image of God; human, not animal. Let us remember who we are and live accordingly.
Reflect on your own attitudes towards the successes of others. Ask God to lift you up to a higher way of thinking.
Read Ezekiel 25
