day no, 15,055: it makes no difference what you chose if you don't chose God

On the treadmill the other day (10/19/19, I also listened to the essay, "A Slip of the Tongue" by C.S. Lewis contained in "The Weight of Glory."

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.” Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies. Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?

This reminded me of a quote by Oswald Chambers from My Utmost for His Highest which I read through annually.

The disposition of sin is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the disposition of self-realization — I am my own god. This disposition may work out in decorous morality or in indecorous immorality, but it has the one basis, my claim to my right to myself. When Our Lord faced men with all the forces of evil in them, and men who were clean living and moral and up right, He did not pay any attention to the moral degradation of the one or to the moral attainment of the other; He looked at something we do not see, viz., the disposition.

What Lewis and Chambers are pointing out is that salvation is a binary decision. You either chose God's way, His truth and His life or you reject the only way, the only truth and the only life there is. There are not other ways, other truths or other lives. There is only God and not God, the narrow way and the wide way, truth and lies, life and death. There is no life to be found outside of God's life. lt makes no difference if you look for life in patriotism and dying for your country or in individualism and dying for your addiction.

If there is only one well, it will make no difference which other well you were looking for or what others paths you took, if it wasn't the path that leads to that well, you will die from thirst. There is no amount of sand that can quench your thirst. You cannot squeeze moisture out of it, no matter how much of it you have or what kind of it you prefer.