‘Hope & Meaning’

Hope is essential to a meaningful life.  It speaks of confidence and expectation.  Hope provides a stable footing for life.  It helps us navigate the present and look forward to the future.  Secularists have found it difficult to find a substitute for the hope that the gospel gives.  We struggle with conscience and evil, with human suffering and death.  A truncated life, one confined to the present without a vision of eternity, seems absurd and leads many to despair.  You can hear this in these lines from Samuel Clemens’ [Mark Twain] autobiography - “A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other.  Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities.  Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief.  The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year.  At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place.  It comes at last - the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them - and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed - a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.  Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished - to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished - nothing!” [1] According to King Solomon, the fixed cycles of life and the short-lived nature of a man’s existence create an environment of futility that strips away the lasting significance of man’s accomplishments - “a generation goes, and a generation comes” and repeats what the previous generation accomplished, but “the earth remains forever (Eccl.1:4).”  The earth endures but the achievements of a man are soon forgotten - “...all is vanity”...”What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun (Eccl.1:2-4)?”  This is a ponderous question we all have to address.  Life’s hard when it’s pointless and hopeless!

     Even though many have drifted away from a Christian understanding of the afterlife, there’s a renewed interest in primitive religious thought.  Native religions, the occult, and Eastern religious ideas and practice have captured the imagination and curiosity of many in the West.  The conviction is that post-modern man needs to rediscover a sense of the sacred and a sensitivity to the cycles of nature.  Primitive religions seem to fit the bill, and they share basic similarities.  They tend to be henotheistic, recognizing the existence of many gods while acknowledging one supreme high god who is the ultimate source of all that exists.  However, their gods tend to lack love and mercy and are disinterested in the human condition.  They’re impersonal deities.  This kind of thinking is revealed in the account of Jonah’s attempt to flee from the presence of the Lord.  He boarded a ship sailing to Tarshish and was caught up in a severe storm.  The sailors, “...were afraid, and each cried out to his god (Jonah 1:5)” and the captain of the ship appealed to Jonah - “...Arise, call out to your god!  Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish (Jonah 1:6).”  The ship captain’s concept of god didn’t give him true hope.  Perhaps Jonah’s god would be inclined to grant them favor.  This is wishful desperation, but it’s not hope!  Another common similarity among primitive religions is their view of the unfolding flow of life.  Is the flow of life cyclical or linear?  Primitive religion sees the flow of life as cyclical and the goal is to break free from the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.  The conviction is that the universe is controlled by the gods, and religious rituals affect the natural order.  In contrast, the biblical understanding of life’s unfolding is linear, consisting of birth, life, death, and judgment leading to reward or punishment.  Life has a definite start point and a meaningful end point.  Primitive religion is works-based whereas biblical faith is  shaped by grace.  Tragically, works-based religion never provides true hope, just striving.  Christian faith, however, is permeated with true hope: the true hope of salvation; the sure hope of sanctification; and the solid hope of a glorified life after resurrection!

Footnote:
Samuel Clemens, Autobiography of Mark Twain (Seven Treasures Publications, USA, 2010) p. 25.