Most people hope for a better life. Many people turn to Jesus because of hope for a better life, but what is the Christian hope for a better life? Sometimes I think even believers lose sight of it.
I was at church yesterday for a meeting I was leading, and I talked to someone who was there for another reason. We talked about the service there the day before for a 25-year old young man who lost his life in a car accident. It was hard.
I made the comment that we are all going to die. I didn’t say it just like that. I recognized with her that it’s hard for someone so young to die suddenly. It isn’t the natural order of things. We miss our loved ones terribly. The ache and the pain is real. A “life cut too short”, as we say, is a tragedy.
But, we should never lose sight of the bigger picture.
We are all going to die.
Sometimes … maybe most of the time … we don’t live like that reality is a fact.
I am not talking about the “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die” kind of attitude. Yet, the people we know who live like that are living with the reality of death, perhaps, more than we might do. Without God, everything is meaningless under the sun!
That reality should point the Christian to Jesus, who rose from the dead, conquering sin and death, and who gives us a better hope. That hope, however, is not just that we will live a better life, but that we will be resurrected to a better life!
Yes, we will live a better life here with Jesus, but this life is not the end game. That’s what I am getting at today. Jesus does not guaranty that we will live a more prosperous life now, a pain-free life, or even a happier life on this earth (under the sun). To the contrary, he said, “In this world you will have trouble!”
Ecclesiastes tells us in no uncertain terms that everything under the sun is meaningless; if this is all there is, this life is vanity; we die like animals and turn back to dust; it doesn’t matter how good we are, how much we accumulate, or how many people like us, know us or honor us. We go down to the grave and live no more, the king and the pauper alike.
This line of thinking prompts me to question: Why do we put so much effort and energy into hope for this life?
The message at church when I began writing this piece was from Hebrews 11. If this topic resonates with you, take some time to read Hebrews 11.
Abraham was a man who listened and responded to God. When God told him to go to a land God would show him, Abraham responded and went, not knowing where he was going. At God’s direction, Abraham left his father’s household, his community and his homeland.
When Abraham first entered what we now call the promised land, he built an altar to God between Bethel and Ai. He, Sarai and Lot continued traveling down south into the Negev desert. Because of drought, they went further south into Egypt. Then, they came back up through the Negev desert to the promised land again:
From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram called on the name of the Lord.
Genesis 13:3-4
Abraham and Lot accumulated many animals and possessions in their travels, and they both had many herdsmen to tend the animals. When their herdsmen began quarreling with each other, Abraham took action to address the situation.
He told Lot it wasn’t good that their herdsmen were quarreling, and he offered Lot his choice of land. Abraham said, “If you go left, I will go right. If you go right, I will go left.” Lot chose the plains of the Jordan, so Abraham went the other direction:
So Abram went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he pitched his tents. There he built an altar to the Lord.
Genesis 13:18
From this portion of the story of Abraham, I am impressed today by a couple of things. First, Abraham is ever the hospitable man. He offered Lot his choice of direction first.
I believe Abraham did this because he trusted God, and he was content that God would take care of him. Thus, he was able to be hospitable and kind. He didn’t need to compete or vie with his nephew. He did the right thing and let God do the rest.
The first point is most important: Abraham trusted God. Abraham listened and was responsive to God’s voice. He went when God said to go.
When he got to the promised land, he did not seek to possess it by his own will. He held it loosely. He came and he went, and he returned again trusting that God would guide him and settle him where God desired him to be.
When he first entered the promised land, he built an altar to God. The first thing he did was to create sacred space and to seek God. Abraham created sacred space, but he did not seek to possess it.
When drought came, Abraham was quick to move, wandering through the Negev desert to Egypt and back again. When he came back, he returned to the sacred space he had previously created.
Even then, he did not seek to possess the land, as if it were his. He was content to allow Lot his choice. After Lot chose his direction, Abraham struck out to a new location. Where he settled he created an altar to God, and he made sacred space at the new location.
M74, nicknamed the Phantom Galaxy, as seen by the James Webb Telescope
In my daily reading today, I read these verses from the Letter to the Hebrews:
“In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe; like a garment they will be changed. But you remain the same, and your years will never end.”
Hebrews 1:10-12 NIV
These words were written in the 1st century, and they recall the words in Genesis that were written many hundreds, maybe even thousands of years before:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1
The statements written in the letter to the Hebrews and in Genesis, long before that, were all written before the revelations of modern science.
We argue today over the passages in Genesis about the creation of the world, whether God did it in seven days or over seven periods of time. Some people say we should take Genesis “literally” (whatever that means), and other people say that the creation account in Genesis is simply poetry and should not be taken literally. There are many people in between, and many people who do not believe or take the Bible seriously either way.
Yet, whether these words are intended to be read as a literal, seven day creation event, seven periods of time, merely a poetic conception or otherwise, they express by faith an understanding that God created the world we live in – “the heavens and the earth”. They also expressed an understanding that God is greater than the creation He made, that God is timeless, and He will outlast the creation as it is and as we know it.
Whatever you believe about the description of creation in Genesis and elsewhere, the understanding is accurate: that the earth and the greater universe as we know it will not remain the same. It is subject to entropy governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In poetic words, “[The Heavens and the Earth] will wear out like a a garment…. like a garment they will be changed.” In more philosophical terms, the Apostle, Paul, says:
“[T]he creation was subjected to futility….”
Romans 8:20
We don’t need to have a sophisticated scientific understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to realize that the universe is, in a sense, winding down and wearing out, that it is “subjected to futility”. The earth, which is such an incredibly minute part of the universe, will not support the life that teams on it very far into the future.
We live in a very narrow band of time in which creatures such as ourselves can thrive on planet earth, sandwiched between ice ages and other inhospitable fluctuations and epochs space and time. Out time will pass like a flower that blooms one day and is gone the next in relation to the full space/time continuum.
Regardless of any Herculean efforts we give on our part to preserve the environment of this planet as we know it, the laws of the universe guarantee that life will no longer be supportable on planet earth, or anywhere in the universe for that matter, at some point in the future. It is inevitable.
It is remarkable to me that the writers of these ancient texts understood this fact by faith, though they had no hint of the science behind it. Knowing nothing of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they understood nevertheless that this world will wear out.
They also had faith that the God who created it is the constant. Ignorant of the science, they nevertheless perceived and understood the reality of God, His creation and their place in the world.
Though modern science seems to reveal that our universe had a beginning, just as these ancient writings stated, many modern people who have the aid and benefit of science fail to see or acknowledge the creator. This is not a failing of science, though; it’s a failing of faith.
Though science provides many benefits, science is not essential for our faith or relationship to God. All the science in the world is not sufficient to gain us knowledge of God, as it necessarily rests on faith. At the same time, we can have none of the knowledge and understanding of science and still know God and our place in the world.
I love science, as it reveals the wonder of a universe that God made understandable and searchable by us. By faith we grasp all the reality we need to know, but science reveals majesty and wonder and appreciation of the greatness of our God all the more.
By faith, we also understand that God loves us. We understand that there is more to reality than the physical, space/time continuum. We perceive that God had a purpose in subjecting the creation to futility:
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hopethat the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”
Esther O’Reilly…. I mean Bethel McGrew, as she is wont to be known now, writes in her Essay Preview: Missing God of Jordan Peterson’s interview with Sam Harris in which Harris prodded Peterson to commit to conclusions on his flirtation with God. Harris teased Peterson into grappling with the idea of a personal God, but Peterson characteristically sidestepped the invitation.
Jordan Peterson is far more popular, or notorious, a subject than my extraneous musings, but Peterson isn’t the focus of my thoughts today. It isn’t Sam Harris either, though I have written about him before. Rather, the trajectory of my own past flirtations with the idea of a less personal God now prods me forward.
McGrew observes in Harris’s questions that he unwittingly, if not then crassly, “makes the same point C. S. Lewis makes in his fictional Letters to Malcolm, writing on the problem with trying to depersonalize God’s anger. Lewis’s hypothetical young correspondent suggests that we might reframe our experience of this anger as ‘what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power.’ A live wire doesn’t feel angry when it shocks us, but we know we will be shocked if we brush up against it.”
Before getting to the point, I must confess that I have played with a similar analogy out of a similar desire, I suspect, to make God seem less unpopularly angry. A God who is not wont to anger (or wrath as the Bible unabashedly puts it) seems more palatable to the modern mind, and, perhaps, safer,
Only my analogy, which I have thought to be rather clever, is of two magnets. The magnet signifying God is of immense proportion, of course, compared to the little magnet the size of humans. It doesn’t matter the size of the magnets, though; if we are orientated opposite to God, we are repelled by God.
It’s science. Like the laws of nature. It has nothing to do with God being angry.
I have toyed with the same human affinity to depersonalize an angry God. I admit the temptation to subscribe to the idea that primitive, Bronze Age people are less sophisticated than us and got it wrong to think that a loving God might get angry.
I rather like my analogy, honestly. It neatly dodges the discomfort of “the God of the Old Testament” in our collective faces. Discounting God’s wrath as primitive imagery is, perhaps, convenient, if not a dead end as I now consider.
The temptation to gloss over biblical truths is no less compelling in our time than in Lewis’s time, and, perhaps, with the same unwitting results:
“But ‘My dear Malcolm,’ Lewis writes, ‘what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can’t.’”
Brilliant!
On my analogy, a magnet cannot do other than to repel a magnet orientated with its same pole forward. Of course, a tiny magnet opposing a larger magnet can always reorient itself! Right?
Of course, analogies always break done at some point. Have you ever tried holding two magnets with their north poles facing each other? The lesser magnet tends to want to flip and go the other direction. If the magnet were a person, the “attraction” might be described as unstoppable.
But that doesn’t seem to be the way we operate in our orientation to God. We seem to have this sticky business of free will milling about within us, and a real tendency toward sin that requires us to choose God’s way over our ways (if we want to be orientated in God’s direction). We don’t naturally align with God.
It isn’t quite like science. It’s messier than we like to think of science (not that science doesn’t have its own messiness with sticky things like quantum entanglement and such). We can no more remove God’s personhood than our own from the “equation”.
I am a bit embarrassed that I have fixated on this tangent to McGrew’s point in writing about Jordan Peterson, but it’s what caught my attention and held it. It gave my a springboard for my own thoughts. I have taken her work afield, but it’s the path I am on, so I will continue.
I have been blogging now for a decade. When I started, I felt like I had learned some things I had learned on my journey, especially from many years ago, that I needed to work out in writing. I also wanted to work out new things I was learning through the process of writing.
I felt called to write, but I ignored what seemed like God’s gentle, but steady voice for some time before I relented and committed myself on the path forward. I explored blog tools and sites, and I created Navigating by Faith late in 2013.
I have written 1035 articles since that time. Article views have grown from a meager 728 readers and 1028 views in 2013 to a very modest 22,608 readers and 30,751 views in 2021. In 2022, I finish with 21,716 readers and 30,198 views. Readership picked up through COVID, but it has plateaued.
The numbers ultimately are not of primary importance. The content is the key. The content reflects my own journey – where I have been, where I am, and where I am going. I try not to make it about me, though.
I have worked out some of the threads of thought that were first mined in my college days, and I have gone on to explore new threads of thought as I have applied myself to learning new things and exploring many tangents. From the beginning, I have tried to by guided by that same “voice” that prompted me to write. I have tried to go where it leads.
Following are the top ten articles in 2022 as determined by the number of views. I have added one additional article at the end because the theme it emphasizes in that total. If you want to retrace my steps this past year, jump in and read on.
Navigating by Faith 