The Bible understands my need for meaning, my need to understand the human story as meaningful and not an exercise in futility. How different to Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”33
Fourth, we see the present afresh
A year back I was in beautiful part of Sydney Australia called the Northern Beaches. Spectacular in every way: sun, sand and surf. I had a conversation with a local pastor and I was shocked to learn of the epidemic of youth suicides in this gorgeous setting—young people who do not know why life is worth living. French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: “Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.” But where can purpose be found?
The book that understands me knows of my need for purpose. Caring is that purpose and it take three forms. First, if the Bible is to be believed, humankind has a mandate to care for the earth. The metaphor that captures this idea is that of steward. A steward has a duty of care. In stewardship under God, we human beings have an obligation to carry out what has been termed “creation care.” This is the creation mandate. The notion that as superior animals we are free to exploit nature for any purpose that gives pleasure or profit is far from the idea of creation care. There can be a religious expression of this that trades on the image of God phrase found in the Bible.34 Second, we are to care for people. According to the book that understands me, that includes not only my neighbor but even my enemy. This is the moral mandate. Last, we are to care about God. That caring shows itself in worship. This is the worship mandate. Worship is a practice that takes us out of ourselves and our self-preoccupations to center on another. In fact, all three mandates are expressed in practices that center not on ourselves but look outwards. To use spatial ideas: downward to the earth, around us towards other people, and upwards to God.
The Bible understands my need for purpose, for things to do. Friedrich Nietzsche was right: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”35 Psychotherapist Jordan Peterson acknowledges the same need when he writes, “[T]he nobler the aim, the better the life.”36
Fifth, we see the future afresh
It was a sobering experience meeting an elderly woman in the nursing home. She was the mother of the husband of my Jewish cousin. She rolled up her sleeve and showed me the number tattooed on her forearm. She had been in a Nazi concentration camp but had somehow survived. Psychotherapist Viktor Frankl had also experienced the hell of a concentration camp and made this observation: Those prisoners who had hope survived. Those who didn’t, perished. He expressed it this way: “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed.”37
Science has blessed us with just so much to enjoy and benefit from. Without medical science and the technology that goes with it I would be facing blindness because of cataracts growing in both eyes. Surgery has made all the difference. The big scientific picture, however, provides little comfort. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was unflinching in facing that lack of comfort and his famous words show it. Although he wrote these words over a century ago, they are still chilling:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.38
Russell concludes his essay with this disturbing thought: “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”39
In contrast to Russell’s pessimism, as we have seen, there is a road. At least that’s the claim. History has a plotline that according to the Bible moves from creation through the fall of humankind to its rescue and in final act the restoration of the entire created order. But to be part of that restoration is a matter of embracing an invitation. Invited to what? The answer is a “whom” not a “what.” I am invited to trust another. Insight is well and good. But relationships are the key to human joy. I can love knowledge but it can’t love me. Persons love. In the pages of the Bible I meet a person who loves me.