The Cobra

"Some trust in chariots...but we trust in the name of the LORD our God" (Psalm 20:7).

One of the tellers at my bank has a photograph of a Shelby Cobra roadster on his window. (The Cobra is a high–performance automobile built by the Ford Motor Company.) One day, while making a deposit, I asked him if that was his car. “No,” he replied, “that's my passion, my reason to get up every morning and go to work. I’m going to own one someday.”

I understand this young man’s passion. A friend of mine owned a Cobra and I drove it on one occasion. Believe me, it’s a mean machine! 

But a Cobra, like everything else in this world, is a wasting asset: It's value depreciates over time. It cannot, of itself, complete our happiness.

That's because we were made for God and nothing else will do. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in," C. S. Lewis said. "Aim at earth and you will get neither." Earth thrown in? Perhaps a Cobra to drive? Who knows. But it is demonstrably true, a truth we validate in our experience every day: Nothing on this earth, of itself, completes the joy that we seek. 

"God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself," Lewis concludes. "There is no such thing."

David Roper
1.24,17