What does today hold in store for its participants? By tonight, some will be dead who didn’t expect it; some will have been born; some will be estranged; some will be reconciled; some will become employed, some unemployed.
According to Omar Khayyàm:
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Quatrain XLIX of The Rubaiyat,translated by Edward Fitzgerald; 1st edition, 1859
I found myself asking: Is that all there is to life? Are we really all just pieces in a great universal game that goes on eternally with no final outcome? If this is so, then it really is difficult to see much point in life. Perhaps Camus was right—we might just as well commit suicide. There is no place for any hope.
Hope has to be grounded in some good, anticipated in the future; but if the future is just some random game of pitch and toss, superintended by some uncaring impersonal emanation—Destiny, Kismet, the Universe, or whatever—then there is little point in life; no reason to bother to continue the struggle. Then he who lives a long life is greatly to be pitied, while those who die young are to be envied because they have escaped a long meaningless existence replete with suffering.
Then one might as well be an existentialist—set your own rules and live by them; there are no moral absolutes; anything goes; do what you like, but just make sure that you do something. Hopelessness rules! Apathy dictates!
Somehow, I blundered onto the perception that, whatever god one may want to worship, the world can make much more sense if that god is a personal, intelligent, all-knowing, all-powerful persona and not just some unseen force, some Giant quad-core processor in the sky. Then, of course, the ultimate Rolls-Royce god has to be the God whose very essence is love.
Once one accepts the concept of a God Who is all-loving (in spite of being all-knowing!), a whole lot more stuff falls into place. Somehow—in a way infinitely beyond the comprehension of mortals—everything then makes sense. Every birth, every death, every disaster, tsunami, earthquake, plane crash, good/bad/ugly event, fits precisely into the eternal plan for the universe, as formulated or allowed by the God Who Cannot Be Caught By Surprise.
Whatever happens for the apparent good or apparent ill of the chess-pieces is precisely what the Chess-Grand-Master wanted to happen—sometimes allowed to happen—sometimes caused to happen—to bring history to its predestined conclusion at some point in the future. And the Chess-Grand-Master loves His chess-pieces.
Oy! That’s hard to grasp with an ordinary, finite, fallen, erring, human mind! It’s like trying to make a man born blind understand what green looks like or to describe the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony to someone born deaf! Better far just to accept that God is in control and leave it at that.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to humans living in our scientific age is to gain sufficient humility to learn to live with mysteries; to accept that there are some things which we will never be able to understand. I once read of someone who did a weird research project. He asked a whole bunch of cycling enthusiasts to draw a bicycle, illustrating how the wheels attached to the frame. Most of them got the front wheel right (pretty simple), but many of them couldn’t get the back wheel right. They didn’t really understand how the back wheel attached to the frame. And yet, they were competent cyclists! They didn’t stop believing in bicycles just because they could not understand them. Why can we not live with supernatural mysteries in the same way? Although we cannot understand/describe/illustrate them, we can still continue to live with them.
Somehow, in my adventure over the past two years, I have had to come to terms—head-on—with the fact that my Sovereign God, who was not wrong-footed by Linny’s cancer, chose not to answer all of our prayers the way we would have liked. Selfishly, I didn’t want to be separated from my wife. But, the truth is, we all have to die at some point. Paradoxically, that’s the only certainty we have in life.
This does not require fatalism. We can’t just flop down and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed. If I fall into the sea, my instinct is to push to the surface and try to save myself—whether I know how to swim, or not. Isn’t this instinct the basis of panic? If we truly were fatalists, we would never panic. We would just accept what the world was throwing at us and prepare to accept the outcome, whether good or bad. But no; we have an inborn sense that things could--should—be better, so we strive to make a difference. There must be something better than drowning, so don’t just fold your arms and submit to fate. No! Flail! Thrash! Push! Thrust towards the surface! Strike out towards the shore, however distant it may be! Make a difference! Save yourself!
Or, for that matter, save someone else. Throw yourself into a dangerous rip-tide because you observe a total stranger in distress—a stranger whose death would not make one jot of difference to your cosy life. Why endanger yourself for this stranger—perhaps someone whom you might not even have liked, had you met one another in business, or at a cocktail party? This just has to be something to do with the nobility of the human spirit—the sense that things ought to be better; that this stranger should not drown before my helpless (or apathetic) gaze—the compunction that makes me intervene, even at the risk of my own life and of the happiness of those dear to me.
Could such nobility have been infused into its creation by an impersonal force—the Great Electrolux In The Universe, Mother Nature, the Giant Pumpkin, or whatever name is currently in vogue? I think not. “Impersonal” cannot give rise to “Personal”. “Impersonal” cannot create or infuse nobility, spirit, love, care, joy, enthusiasm. Non-life cannot give rise to life; non-spirit cannot infuse spirit.
While we might admire beauty, even the world’s most beautiful (inanimate) work of art has never been known for its spirit of self-sacrifice, its passion, its love, its empathy. Those qualities can only be attributed to personal beings. And what you don’t have, you can’t pass on to others.
And so, to return to where I started; I can only make sense of this world in the context of my belief and trust in a personal God Who is all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent; a God Who has given mankind freewill, knowing we would abuse it, and has provided a salvation plan which even we cannot mess up.
[This was the basis of a sermon that I preached early this year in the chapel at the seminary where I teach.]