APRIL FOOL'S DAY -- Devotional for April 1, from "Good Seeds"

The Fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1)

The first day of April has long been known as April Fool’s Day, a day we can play pranks on people and get away with it! No one really knows exactly how, when or where it got started, but it is as universal as it is ancient. We do know it is related to the coming of spring, as nature itself seems to enjoy playing tricks on us with its fickle weather changes. Case in point: Last Friday we donned shorts, played in the yard and got sunburned – but then on Sunday we nearly didn’t make it home from church due to a huge snowstorm! But impending spring seems to bring out the child in all of us, and we can’t resist cutting up a bit. April Fool’s day grants us license to play practical jokes with impunity, not unlike how some see Mardi Gras as the church’s permission to indulge in the flesh, prior to the disciplines of the Lenten season. But April Fool’s Day can have some positive value: 1) A test of friendship: Will your buddy still be your friend after you play a trick on him, like sending him on a fruitless errand (ever heard of a “Snipe Hunt”?), or in some other way fool him into believing something that isn’t true. I remember as a Tenderfoot at my first Boy Scout Camporee I was sent on a mission to locate a “Left-Handed Smoke Shifter.” The other troops were very obliging, telling me they didn’t have one (or theirs was broken) but to try the next camp. I went all over the place determined to not fail in my first test as a serious scout – before I realized I’d been seriously duped! It was the twittering laughter from one group that put me straight! Or, 2) A development of character. In the movie “Fireproof” the station chief wanted to bring one of his men down a notch from his narcissistic arrogance, so he challenged him to a hot sauce contest. The captain went first, feigning great pain as he completely downed a small bottle of the fiery liquid. The other man then took his bottle of hot poison. As he began to drink he screamed out in pain and ran to the sink to for a drink to stop the burning. Great laughter followed, and that was the end of it – until a couple of days later when his boss said just two words: “Tomato Juice!” The younger man realized he’d been “had” but hopefully he had learned his lesson. Teaching someone a lesson through pranks may have some value. Looking for fun at another’s expense is not so cool. But the Bible gets far more serious than either of these when it identifies a fool as the one who toys with his own eternal destiny by entertaining the possibility that there is no God. “Imagine,” sang the Beatles, “no hell, heaven, no God…wouldn’t it be wonderful! No, it wouldn’t! These lyrics are from the pit, and will take you there! The devil is the Joker – but when this joke is told, nobody will be laughing, for its punch line is damnation! “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12).