As a teenager, I viewed the Scriptures as an account of what we must do to attain God’s favor. Close examination reveals that the Scriptures are an account of what God has already done and we are simply acting in response to it. This provides a much more difficult task than paying one’s dues to receive a ‘ticket to paradise’. In this case the tickets have been offered freely. How then do we pay for what we cannot purchase?
Man has been led to believe that value lies in what a thing cost to attain it. What a thing costs, though, depends upon the demand. Could it then be that people are so burdened in life that they can’t imagine being free? So burdened that they don’t wish for life to continue? Could it be that our apathetical response to the grace of God is due to the fact that eternal life has little value for us? Our ignorance of what's to come is much like our ignorance of a foreign country. Our imagination rarely matches the reality so we may view eternity with a negative eye. Like receiving tickets to a place nobody wants to go. Have we so entangled ourselves in the pursuit of pleasure only to find that we really have moved from a previous freedom and dependence of childhood, to the bondage of independence that wearies us to the point that eternal life (as we know it) holds no attraction? No wonder men don’t offer everything they own to gain eternal life anymore.