We are perhaps the poorest judges of what is truly valuable in life.
We know, and we pay lip service to this truth, but do we really believe it? We quote verses like 1 Samuel 16:7 “man judges the outward appearance but God sees the heart”. ‘How very comforting’ we think, and then we walk away and trust in our own judgments once more. In the end of course we have to trust our judgements since they’re all we’ve got, and we have to try and order our lives around what we consider to be of most value - it’s the best we can do. But we ought to be chastened by the knowledge that a lot of the time (most of the time) we’ll be ‘off’.
Remember that of Jesus (who is the most influential and important person in history) it was said that there was 'nothing about his appearance that would have recommended him to us' and that 'we considered him stricken by God. We esteemed him not.'
“Crucify! Crucify!”
“Release for us Barabbas!”
When it comes to our lives, how we live and what we value, many of us aim at working hard for Jesus. We offer our lives in service to him and we defend sound doctrine on his behalf. We aim to lead our children in the ‘way they should go’, we make sure to pray with them each night and we apologise to them when we sin against them. We try to sacrifice our needs and put others’ ahead of our our own, we seek to love our neighbour as ourselves. We do all of these good things (valuable things even), but we mustn’t forget that we're still unfit to measure what’s most valuable in our lives.
Heman the Ezraite wrote many of the psalms in the Bible. Among them is psalm 88 a psalm of despair with no light of hope in it. He describes being rejected “my friends have shunned me” and impending death “my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near the grave.” The last word of the psalm is ‘darkness’ which just about sums up the whole: my only friend is darkness!
Meaningless suffering and pointless pain, that’s all Heman saw from his life. He judged his situation to be utterly desperate and he spoke the truth as best as he could see it. Surely no good, no lasting worth anyway, could come from such suffering, could it?
And yet we’re still reading his words to this day. We’re finding comfort and a voice of expression in his words even now.
Heman’s lament got recorded in the Psalms, a collection of songs that’s been named even by atheists as the greatest compendium of wisdom, poetry and history in existence. Heman thought his suffering was a dead end, but God had other ideas. Not only did God permit Heman to write the words he did, but he also oversaw the process ensuring that his words got recorded in holy scripture where they’d be preserved for all time.
French philosopher Luc Ferry says that the fundamental purpose of philosophy is to help human beings acquire mastery over death. What sets us humans apart from animals, he says, is that we live with a conscious awareness of our mortality. Knowing (and fearing) that we will die we're then forced to reckon with this reality and live with it day by day. Christianity offers us salvation by another, a saviour, whereas philosophy, Ferry says, tries to offer us self-salvation through reason. If we can only gain a particular perspective on our lives, it says, we’ll ‘beat death’ not in the sense that we won’t die but in the sense that we'll truly live.
In pain and suffering what we’re really feeling and fearing is our own death.
Pain impresses upon us weakness, and weakness impresses upon us the fact of our inevitable decline, and the reason decline is so dreadful is that we know where it ends - at the Dead End of death. We want to live to see this or that thing happen, and so we fight to prolong our lives and avoid the yawning emptiness of the grave. By our assessment there’s nothing much to hope for beyond death and so what other options do we have?
Some men chase legacy by opting to try and ‘beat’ the grave by securing an influence over others even after they’re gone. This was what lured Achilles to his death after all, the promise of immortality by reputation. We could say that Heman achieved this with his own darkness since his words live on for all time. He’s helped more people in his death than he ever could have done in his life. Is that it then, is that what we’re to aim for? Live well and others will remember you after you've gone?
We might try to discern death’s meaning by looking around at lost loved ones of our own. We could try and see what God has done with their deaths. Can we thereby draw conclusions about what good their death has done? By this method perhaps we may draw comfort about our own deaths and about our own suffering. However, as with Zhou Enlai’s answer in the 1960s about the influence of the French Revolution, ‘it’s far too early to tell’ what God will do with our suffering and pain.
For God the grave is not final. God, not darkness, had the final word with Heman’s suffering. This then is our judgement, our hope and our comfort. Not that we can measure the meaning of our pain or make sense of our suffering. I say again: we are the poorest judges of what’s really valuable in life.
Do we really think that we can conceive what God can achieve with such offerings as ours? Who can tell what God will do with the pain of infertility, or the agony of losing a child? No mind could conceive the type of thing God can grow in soil watered by those tears.
There’s an old illustration about a monkey at a typewriter. The idea goes that if you give a monkey enough time striking the keys of a typewriter, before long it’ll be able to produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Given enough time. In actual fact you’d need a trillion monkeys typing one keystroke per second for 14 billion years, for them to have a shot at producing just the opening line of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet ‘to be or not to be.’
Random chance cannot produce meaning and beauty, but a human mind can and in fact did since The Complete Works of Shakespeare actually exists.
God is an order of magnitude far greater than any human being. He’s so much greater in fact that it’s hardly worth us drawing the comparison, and yet let’s imagine.
Since it would take a trillion monkeys 14 billion years to type ‘to be or not to be’, we might wonder at what a trillion human philosophers over 14 billion years might come up with, for an idea of what God can create with our suffering. Could we get close to conceiving what God has in store?
Consider how many human minds, across however many thousands of years it took to conceive of what God did on the cross. We didn’t get even close to imagining or dreaming up the world changing redemption and the eucatastrophic moment of Christ’s suffering. Instead we invented rapist gods (Zeus), gods who enslaved human beings (Marduk), gods who close their eyes to the suffering of the world and called it all illusion (Buddha), and gods of blind, pitiless, indifference (materialism).
With what God did on the cross, with how he orchestrated and engineered it across the centuries prior and with how Christ's death has gone on to affect the ‘air’ of human civilisations ever since we've been given a glimpse into the opening line of a famous heavenly soliloquy, a song sung by all the angels over and over again: “worthy is the lamb who was slain!”
It’s true, we are terrible at judging what’s truly valuable in life.
In our weakness we are strong, in our pain God’s purpose is perfected. All is not lost, since he loses none who come to him. We can therefore be at peace.
We may indeed experience trouble but he has overcome and since he has overcome, and we are with him, we too will one day look back and gasp at what we see.
I'll end this blog with some words from Aaron Keyes' beautiful song 'Sovereign Over Us':
You are wisdom unimagined
Who could understand your ways
Reigning high above the heavens
Reaching down in endless grace
You're the Lifter of the lowly
Compassionate and kind
You surround and You uphold me
And your promises are my delight
Your plans are still to prosper
You have not forgotten us
You're with us in the fire and the flood
Faithful forever, perfect in love
You are sovereign over us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPkMbhydU9I&ab_channel=aaronkeyes