Last Updated on June 26, 2018 by OCF Communications
by LTC Jim Karr, USA (Ret.)
While practicing my profession in my second career as a financial planner, I frequently discussed with clients the role that life insurance played in a sound financial plan for the future.
I was taught that the alleged origin of modern day life insurance traces its roots from the Code of Hammurabi, circa 1780 B.C. Hammurabi was a king and ruler from the Babylonian era who developed a code to live by.
This code of 282 laws was one of the earliest examples of a ruler publicly proclaiming to his people an entire body of laws, arranged in orderly groups, so that all subjects might read and know what was required of them.
The code was carved on a black stone monument eight feet high; it was discovered in 1901.
The code then regulated in clear and definite strokes how society should be organized.
Yet, Hammurabi’s code is not really the earliest. There are some indications that another code was established four centuries earlier; Hammurabi’s code implies its existence.
With the above as a backdrop, a commentary on mankind reveals that people have always tried to replace random chaos with some type of order.
Stated another way, most people do not like to take risks, and want to envision a secure future. Security is an attempt to replace the elements of the unknown with predictable outcomes.
Hence, life insurance, or any insurance, is an ordering mechanism that tries to take the possibility of something unforeseen happening, and tries to predict an outcome that will keep us whole or stable.
The Bible speaks to our nature in doing this. First, God’s universe is an ordered universe… nothing random about its creation or existence.
Second, true security only operates in the reality of who Jesus Christ is and what He has done for us. Focusing on the short-term versus the long-term perspective always gives us a different aiming point.
Focusing on just today, tomorrow, or next year may pull our eyes off the long-term race we run. King Solomon had it right when he said all this is meaningless.
He said our lives are like a blade of grass, which soon withers and disappears.
Jesus brings order out of disorder…wholeness out of brokenness.
Codes, from whomever the ancient secular author might be, are man’s attempt at ordering the future and removing the unknowns.
God’s insurance plan is simple … it comes in the form of God’s Son Himself who came to earth to save us. Jesus is our eternal life insurance policy that is underwritten by the blood of the Lamb, and is issued when He comes into our hearts.
Has an eternal life insurance policy been issued with your name on it? Don’t worry about any premiums due-the policy is fully paid up!
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