We live between the poles of birth and death. One filled with possibility and one with regret. For the materialist, this presents a bit of a quandary. Believing that a purposeless universe gave birth to purposeless creatures they find themselves unable to explain why they spend eighty years obsessing over purpose. Believing that life is a crapshoot they can’t explain why it appears as if the dice have been loaded. Believing humans to be collections of collocating chemicals they can’t explain why most of them experience a spiritual interlude? Believing that humans are just animals without free will they can’t explain why they feel like evolutionary apostates every time they ask, Why?
Atheists tells us that we are just meat computers but for the vast majority of us that just doesn’t compute. Our well-oiled biological machines seem to be haunted by ghosts who continue to clang their chains and prevent us from resting in peace. The search for spiritual answers has been the obsession of humans ever since they first came on the scene. Even the vocal atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledges as much, but then considers our religious inclination to be just one more monkey wrench in the evolutionary tool box.
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth –consuming, hostility-provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion. Some educated individuals may have abandoned religion, but all were brought up in a religious culture from which they usually had to make a conscious decision to depart…Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.(My emphasis) – Richard Dawkins
The problem is that he doesn’t explain why creatures with their noses to the earthly grindstone would bother to look up and contemplate the heavens. The vast majority of us can’t help but look heavenward because we know that the world is spiritually broken. Unwilling to swallow the materialist pill we seek spiritual healing.
Most religions conclude that the solution to this physical/spiritual tension is release from this troubled physical world. They take the afterlife pole seriously but then end up treating their physical birth as a bit of an inconvenience. Christianity, on the other hand, embraces both poles. It makes the case that there is something very good about this life and instead of boarding it up and moving into cloud condos it makes the audacious claim that it would be better if it was restored. In fact, Jesus took this physical renovation so seriously that He emptied Himself, became a Carpenter, and took hammer, nails, and wood and flipped the world for God.
God heard the groans of the planet but instead of offering lip service He got quite Cross.
The Christian God is the only God who pays respect to the two poles. He incarnates in order to show us that He takes life seriously and then is crucified and resurrected to show us that death doesn’t have the last word. Jesus’ earthly interlude ends up not being a shared problem but a shared solution. God, rather than giving up and pulling the plug on a dying planet, establishes a lifeline and infuses it with Christ chemotherapy.
In the beginning God spoke the world into existence and in the end He will have the final WORD. As alpha and omega, He not only pays tribute to the poles of life but also sanctifies the stories in between. From our first cry to our last breath we have a God who sympathizes with our weaknesses. So if you want to find a God who truly cares about you then all you have to do is consult the polling data.
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
