A different way
Part One
The world we live in is one in which for many there is an almost infinite variety of options. It seems that given the will, perhaps some education, maybe some money, almost anything is possible. If you will allow a little reminiscence, in my own childhood most children had a very good idea what they would do after school. Where we lived and the nature of things meant that many would go down the mines or work in related industries. Not far away the Boots company (manufacturing and retail chemists) offered options for the better educated. The railways and steel works would take their share. Some, of course, might be teachers or policeman or some such. A very few might take the great steps into medicine or some other ‘high-flying’ field.
The twenty-first century is very different. Many of what were the traditional industries of Britain are much reduced or sometimes gone altogether. In their place other things have arisen, the service industries in particular. Their is certainly more choice, people can choose to specialise in tourism and many other things that really were not thought of in the past. Overall, we have a richer society, a greater disposable income, very different prospects.
The strange thing is that along with all that we know that we are not happier. We do not really need the statistics, but they tell their own story: increasing crime, drug addiction, the abuse of alcohol, divorce, suicide. An unhappiness one can almost feel that seems to affect everyone, rich and poor. It would at least be true to conclude that there is not a direct link between more prosperity and happiness. It may be true to go so far as to say that the two seem almost inimical: a past generation might have summed up it up by the simple (and perhaps simplistic) ‘the more you have, the more you want.’
It is fascinating to ask why this might be so? After all, one can perfectly well understand that someone with too little food, inadequate clothing and shelter and very little hope would be unhappy. It seems perfectly reasonable to think that if all those needs were met that the unhappiness would be for the most part dealt with.
That is how it ought to look, it is true, but it is equally true that almost anyone will know that this simple link is not the case. I am not suggesting the poor should not be relieved, indeed I would think it essential, but I am suggesting that if we imagine relieving poverty brings real happiness then we would be going against what we all know and what can be and has been proved repeatedly.
This is one of the areas where the theory of evolution breaks down. If humans were merely highly evolved animals, then it would be nothing less than reasonable to think that meeting their physical needs would make them happy. Given food, reasonable freedom, some element of luxury (by which I simply mean the state of having more than the basic necessities, so that choice and flexibility are possible) one would be entitled to think that one were ‘almost there.’ But humans are notoriously unpredictable in this respect! Greed may be the cause why enough is never enough, of course. It may be, but we know it is not the whole story. Humans have other needs, relationship, love, challenge, hope and so on, without which they are always unhappy in some way.
Can we analyse this further? Many years ago, the wise King Solomon certainly thought so. He said:
I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. [Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 ESV]
These very simple words, not at all ‘deep’ or difficult when one compares them with the outpourings of the philosophers and other great thinkers of humanity, actually contain far more than we can ever explore here. Let me summarise what Solomon tells us in these few words:
First, God, the Creator of all things including the human race, has done more than simply create. At one time a theory called Deism was fashionable. Deists believed in God and accepted that he created all things, but they then imagined that he had stepped back, as it were. The creation was like a huge mechanism, perhaps clockwork; at creation it had been wound up and now God stood by, letting it run on (and presumably down!) but not really actively involved. Our Scripture gives the lie to that: God has given the human race things to occupy them selves. The beauty of what is created is sustained by God.
Deists and others did not ignore God. As the period of history known as ‘the Enlightenment’ was succeeded by a period of rapid advance in all branches of science, it became a common opinion that the human race could get to know more about God. The Bible was recorded as too old and from too unenlightened a period to be of real help; the idea was that science and philosophy would open up the whole of our understanding of God. In fact all of that was a false hope, and any objective opinion would tell you that, not merely a Christian one. The various theories and ideas that have arisen have never, not even once, opened up our understanding of God. They have made him a shadowy figure, they have declared that he is an illusion, they have even flatly said ‘God is dead.’ There are two questions that arise from all this. Firstly, why does man’s fascination with God continue? And why is that fascination usually so unrewarding?
Solomon answers both questions: firstly, he tells us that God has deliberately designed eternity into our hearts. That means at the most basic level that we always fail to ignore God, as much as some might try, because at the core of our being is a connection with the eternal, the things beyond our world. It is fascinating to consider a man like Richard Dawkins, the famous Oxford scientist and perhaps most prominent atheist of the time. If he believes that God is purely a figment of our imagination, a nothing, a nonentity of no consequence, an accident of evolution in our thinking, why does he not set an example by utterly ignoring God and getting on with something useful? Instead of which, Dawkins cannot write, speak or appear without addressing the issue of God. He is living proof that eternity has some hold in his being. He cannot ‘get on with anything’ and is perversely, perhaps the most God-fascinated atheist alive!
Secondly, Solomon tells us that God, in inserting eternity into our being, has nevertheless withheld something. By what we know (or might know by observation of what God has made, the world around us), added to the knowledge or fascination with eternal things built into us, we still cannot know enough. He says we ‘cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.’ We can make a beginning in our exploration of the eternal, but the limit of what we can know is already visible, not far down the track!
How we react to such information is of first importance. One possibility is to ‘give up before we begin,’ as it were. If we know there is an inbuilt limit, that as one of Job’s friends puts it: Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. If, to put it simply, God is beyond knowing, we can just resign ourselves. We may as well ‘get on with life,’ make our own assumptions and make the best of what we have. The problem is that that reaction is not significantly different from that of the atheist. True, the atheist goes the extra step and says, ‘well then, there is no god,’ but the primary assumption and the end result are the same in both cases. God does not matter.
There is a middle position. This is popular, it accommodates a thousand, thousand variants and will offend almost no-one. It is simply this: we take for granted there is a God. We learn what we can of him by our own observation and thought, and we add to that the experience and conclusions of others. We take all of this and synthesise it to make a God who fits all of this as best we are able, and this God we worship. This is the course that most of the human race has taken for most of history. Its popularity is undeniable, its result is always a God for ‘our time,’ a God who is comprehensible as far as we are able to make him so. However, it has one inescapable flaw: it means we are always making God in our own image! That is one reason why the ancients gods of say, Egypt, are of only historical interest now. We have changed, we have moved on, and eventually the gods of ancient Egypt were shown for what they were. They were no more and no less than what they had been made by the people who dreamed of them and worshipped them, and the day came when other, stronger, very different gods absorbed and replaced them. This process never ends. The gods of the twenty-first century are materialistic, relatively undemanding and ultimately disposable, just as we prefer. The sadness is that even as we manufacture them, we know these gods are frauds, powerless in reality and of no lasting consequence. And all that has happened before; the Greeks and the Romans came to be practical atheists and largely treat their gods with contempt for just this reason. One result was the emperor-worship that was predominant by the time of the New Testament. At least the emperor was real enough, certainly powerful and could be pleaded with. The old gods had too often been shown to be nothing more than empty imagination, their only solid existence that of an idol. Perhaps saddest of all, even the God of the Bible becomes nothing more than empty imagination when we shape him according to our own image. He inherits our failings and our limitations, and so he becomes of no real value, because we already know that our failings and limitations are fatal.
There is, then, one more alternative. It is that there is a God who is real, a God who is powerful, a God who is totally distinct from us, so much so that we cannot learn of him by reference to ourselves. This is what Solomon is saying: we cannot find out about God by any normal means. It is not a position that is very helpful in terms of our pride: to accept this view we would have to admit that the greatest thinking abilities of the greatest men and women of all the ages, the highest scientific achievements, the greatest efforts in any field would not help our purposes. We would need to take the Bible for what it claims to be: a book written by men but inspired (quite literally ‘breathed out’ by God). Rather than judging it by any literary or technical standard we would need to apply our best minds to it to understand it, always holding ourselves in the position of creatures reading what their Creator has chosen to tell them, knowing that at times its content will simply be beyond our ability to process.
Why would we need to do all that? Because only then would we be treating the Bible as it demands. The Bible tells us quite plainly that we can know something about God by simple observation and consideration of the world around us, but it warns us of two problems in that approach. The first is that our own sinful nature will at least limit our understanding, and more likely it will pervert what we understand so that we will inevitably take many wrong turns and not arrive at any proper destination. Secondly, the mere fact that God is God, that he is not like us and that we can never properly understand him will bring a sharp end to what we will achieve in our thinking. The Bible presents the alternative. Here is a book about God, written by God through human authors, that speaks of him and expands our knowledge of him at least as much as we are able to bear. Indeed, the Bible is so comprehensive that it is able to stretch the minds of the greatest of men. No-one has ever reached its limit.
All of this might in one sense be merely academic. Could we live our lives without God? Millions do! Why should be concerned about God? Back to Solomon, you remember that he said that God has put eternity in our hearts. Here is the first reason why God is of concern. No people in history has ever really believed that death is ‘the end.’ Years ago I went to a cremation where the son of the lady who had died was, he told me, an absolutely avowed atheist who wanted to carry out the last wishes of his mother in having a religion-free, and very certainly Christian-free service. So rock music was played, no prayers were offered, much was said about what a wonderful woman this mother had been. And then the son said that now his mother was cosmic dust, mingled with all the other cosmic dust, and undoubtedly happy for it. It is that last phrase that showed that for all his hard-line atheism he could not let go of some vague idea of continuing existence, albeit as dust. Happy dust, no less!
But God is also of concern because most people know that things are not right, not in the world, not in their immediate society, their families, their own lives. Every effort of government, doctors, experts and so forth has not solved the problems. Many people have a profound sense that if there is an answer to the problems of the human race that the answer must come from outside. So strong is that conviction that millions of apparently rational men and women look and hope for alien intervention. Governments spend millions on this issue. Meanwhile, the Bible tells us quite simply and plainly that intervention from outside has already taken place. The Bible is a book of the intervention of God in human history, from the earliest days of the existence of the human race. The grand culmination of that intervention is the coming of God himself, in human form, in the person of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
This direct and personal intervention of God is not in any sense a small matter. For the entire time of its existence, most of the human race has gone its own way, worshipped its own gods, done what it thinks is best. The end result of all of that becomes more terrible with every passing year, as even those admit who do not want to know of God. The God who made us, the God who has not forgotten us, is the God of our hope. We need a different way, and in God we can find it.