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In reality, to quote G. K. Chesterton, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
The reason, simply put, is that seeking control is not the solution to the human condition but is part of the problem.
The irony of a LIFE UNDER GOD is that we are seeking to exert control over God through strict adherence to rituals and absolute obedience to moral codes. It is Eden’s rebellion all over again. Through our obedience we put God into our debt and expect him to do our bidding in exchange for our worship and righteous behavior.
Some of the most oppressive regimes of the twentieth century were constructed on the philosophical foundations of secular atheism. Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but in Stalin’s Soviet Union, some estimate twenty million people were killed. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China resulted in sixty-five million deaths. And the Khmer Rouge decimated an entire generation, two million people, in Cambodia’s killing fields just a few decades ago. The oppression continues in North Korea where at least two million have been killed.
God has created the cosmos with certain knowable and immutable laws. Among them are the laws of gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, and the laws of mathematics.
Rather than a vehicle for knowing God and fostering our communion with him, we search the Scriptures for applicable principles that we may employ to control our world and life.
“Because drinking is how you know who’s safe. When you drink with another student, you know that you can trust them. You’ve both broken the code of ethics—it’s a sign that you can be honest about other things too. They’re a safe person—you don’t have to pretend with them.”
This is the first failure of LIFE FOR GOD—it puts God’s mission ahead of God himself.
Remember, God’s original intent for us was a mission. He called humanity to rule over the earth, to fill and subdue it, and to extend his creative order and beauty far beyond the confines of the garden of Eden.
But after losing his company in 2003, Vischer began to question the validity of the LIFE FOR GOD values he had inherited and that had driven his early career. The more I dove into Scripture, the more I realized I had been deluded. I had grown up drinking a dangerous cocktail—a mix of the gospel, the Protestant work ethic, and the American dream . . . The Savior I was following seemed, in hindsight, equal parts Jesus, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford. My eternal value was rooted in what I could accomplish.
But the son was furious. “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!”
He wanted a goat to party with his friends - not celebrate with his father. The fatted calf was actually supposed to be shared by all three of them in celebration of reunification as a family
Neither boy was particularly interested in a relationship with his father; instead both were focused on what they might get from him.
In other words, both sons sought to use their father. Both were jerks, one just happened to be of a more socially acceptable variety.
He was showing that both the LIFE FROM GOD and the LIFE FOR GOD postures fail to capture what God truly desires for his people.
We affirm that Christ is indeed Immanuel, God with us, and that in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. He is the image of the invisible God.
J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, often employed a storytelling device he called eucatastrophe. A catastrophe is an unexpected evil, but Tolkien added the Greek prefix eu- meaning “good” to express the unexpected appearing of goodness. He defined it as “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings you to tears.” It has this effect on us “because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth” in which we “feel a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.”
Instead God himself came to be with us—to walk with us once again as he had done in Eden in the beginning. Jesus entered into our dark existence to share our broken world and to illuminate a different way forward. His coming was a sudden and glorious catastrophe of good.
Hope requires a sense of purpose and dignity—a belief that we matter and that our life has value.
No condition of life is more honorable than another, because nothing God does lacks value.
