Baptism: Pomps and vanity - Page 3

Index

Happiness hereafter

People find it very easy in this life to go on as though God did not exist.  There is so much else to keep their mind off him – television, sport, work and so on. But no one can take these things with them when they die.  “…we brought nothing into the world, and it is certain we can take nothing out of it” (NRSV, 1 Timothy 6:7).  In the next world those things are all over and done with.  Our eternal happiness depends on having God and to have lost him is eternal misery, for God is the only source of true happiness that there is or ever can be.

So, to have all one wants when all does not include God, is in the end to have nothing at all.  The world thinks that is nonsense, which is why the world is discontented and unhappy.

Pomps and vanity

These things, then, such as money and pleasures, look very attractive, but if we let them become the centre of our lives they take us away from God and in the end leave us with nothing at all.  That is why the Catechism calls them worldly “pomps and vanity”.  The word pomp comes from a Greek word meaning a procession, like a carnival procession.  Vanity means emptiness.  So pomps and vanity mean things which look attractive but really have nothing in them.

Sinful lusts

Sinful lusts of the flesh are all the things that the body wants which it ought not to have.  This includes the sins of greediness (thinking too much about food), drunkenness, laziness and impurity.  Such things make a Soldier of Christ a bad soldier.