Can Hope Be Real?

It’s early on a Saturday morning, and I’m wide awake when I should be sound asleep. I had some stuff rolling around in my head, and so I decided the best thing to do would be to get it written down so I can do what any self-respecting male would do on a rainy Saturday morning – get some more sleep!

Here’s the biggest problem we face in our culture, in my opinion. We have trained our young people for several decades now to think of themselves as nothings that come from nowhere and who are going nowhere. We have systematically eliminated any knowledge of God from our school systems, preferring to talk about the religion of evolution that tells us we mysteriously appeared by chance over a great amount of time, with no purpose or definition that impels us to greatness. By the way, I call evolution a religion because it takes a great deal more faith to believe its foolish claims than to look at the evidence of a beautiful, elegant universe and realize that there is no way it could just appear out of nothing. Someone personal, infinite, and intelligent had to design it and start the whole thing rolling. You cannot live consistently with the belief system that tells you that you came from nothing, that you have no meaning, and that you’re going nowhere.

Everything inside us screams at us that the opposite is true. We instinctively know that someone ought to notice us, someone ought to be paying attention, someone ought to be telling me that I’m worth something and that I can have an impact in life. Instead, we tell our children that they don’t matter, that abortion is one of the great cures of human ills, that mother earth is more important than they are (remember to be “green” and don’t leave any carbon footprint that might disturb the polar bears or the little tadpole that swims in a mountain stream!). Then we are totally surprised when some young person believes the message, and realizes that the only thing that makes any sense in the worldview that we’ve thrust upon them is to end everyone’s pain – mostly their own – by killing as many as you can before you kill yourself. Nihilism is the only logical conclusion of the worldview that dominates our culture today. If we come from nowhere, and are going nowhere, what’s the point anyway? I would eat, drink, and be merry, but the pain is too great, so I’ll destroy myself and take as many with me as I can.

This is the death culture of the young generation, and it is unthinkably tragic to someone like me. It’s tragic because I have a totally different worldview than the one I’ve described. My life matters, and so does yours, because there is an infinite, personal, beautiful Someone out there who thought me up, who designed me, who speaks to me about my identity and purpose, and who infuses His own life into me so that I can live up to His vision of who I am. This Someone is God, and because He is there and is communicating, my life has meaning. I can know who I am to Him, and I can know who you are to Him. Therefore, you can mean something to me, and I can relate to you in love because I have received the love that He has for me.

I can know these things because this God has spoken and continues to speak. He is personal, so He has communicated personally. He is intelligent, so He has created me with intelligence and with the ability to hear Him and to understand what He says. Though the information He gives me is not exhaustive, it is true. There is mystery to be sure, but the mystery is not nonsense. The mystery is a realm of wonder that is available to me by the Spirit of God, if I will seek Him on His terms. Since He created me, He has the right to set the terms of our relationship. He has spoken consistently and truthfully over the ages, and His truth is made real to the human realm because He lived it out personally on the earth in His own Son, Jesus Christ.

This line of thinking is no leap of faith into a realm of mystical imaginings. These things have been revealed by the Spirit of God through the ages to human beings who wrote them down. Their message is consistent and it fits human life as it really is. Jesus is not an ideal to be copied, He is a real person who is also God, and who proved His divine-human connection by living perfectly, dying in my place and yours, and rising again from the grave in a human body. The great prophets of the world’s religions all have burial sites – only one of those sites is empty.

Only this worldview gives any hope to humanity. Only this gospel is internally consistent, with the ability to withstand any scrutiny. Only this reality sets personal, holy love at the base of everything else, and then gives the power to live in that love with all who will receive it. Only this Biblical worldview explains mankind as it is today – broken and filled with rebellion, not living according to the design of the Creator. Only this message tells us there is real forgiveness, a real way out of despair, and a real hope for a glorious eternal future. There is no other hope but that which is given to us in the Bible, the Word of God, lived out by the Man Jesus Christ, who still lives and who is preparing to return to the earth to take ownership and leadership of the planet and the people He loves.

More later. GW