The Two Forces Driving Humanity

Ecclesiastes 2:10 NIV

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.  My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.

What Matters Most To You?

This year I have been working as a substitute teacher.  I receive class assignments by going to a website that tracks my workdays on a calendar.  When a teacher makes a substitute teacher request, it pops up on my calendar and then I can decide if I want to accept the assignment or not.  Some are for half a day and other for six full hours.  Sometimes teachers request me personally but usually the assignments go out to all the pool of substitute teachers and the first of us to accept the job for the day gets it.  Recently I accepted a job working in a kindergarten class at a particular school but within an hour, I was removed from the job and the notice came to me that my services were no longer needed.  I was disappointed to hear this as you never know when a job will come available or even if one will.  A week later another kindergarten class assignment from the same school popped up and I quickly accepted the assignment but again, after a few hours, I was notified that my services were no longer needed.  I had heard that sometimes teachers post jobs and then remove them if a favorite substitute of theirs becomes available to take their class and I grew increasingly offended the more I thought about this.  I had never worked at the school that had these kindergarten assignments and so I was pretty certain the teachers there didn’t know me.  Did the teacher pull the assignments from me because I was a man?  It smacked of discrimination to me!  What also bothered me was that once a substitute teacher accepts an assignment for a certain day that person is locked into it and is not notified of other possible assignments for the same day.  One can decide to not take the assignment later but then that person can’t work that day for any other teachers.  If a teacher cancels an assignment too late, the substitute is prevented from accepting another job for the day.  I began to stew over this and I considered sending the teacher that pulled my assignment an email expressing my feelings about her doing so.  It felt like I was rejected and treated unfairly.  I wanted the teacher to know that I was not just a name on a list but a real person who did not like being rejected or considered not good enough for her class.  I counted; my needs were important and I deserved more respect.

Perhaps you too have felt rejected and wanted to make sure others knew you counted, that you ought to be appreciated.  You have been pushed aside or gone unnoticed.  Have you ever wanted to shout, “Look at me”?  “I can do the job!”  “I should get the promotion!”  “Love me too!”  “Pay attention to me!”  “Care about me!”  Maybe you feel that way now; that your hard work and creativity and sacrifice is not given the value it deserves.  You feel frustrated that you might never achieve your goal, never accomplish in life what you think you should.  You are at a dead end and it is maddening to consider that your life is unfulfilled and you may never reach your potential.  What should you do?  How does one respond to feeling boxed into a corner of lost dreams and anonymity?  Should you in some way “fight back” and reclaim your life?

A pillar of modern humanist psychology is the call for “self-realization”.  By humanist, I mean any treatment of psychology that does not view humanity mechanistically as if people are little more than machines.  Nearly everyone who sees people as really free and independent believes that a goal for all of us is “self-realization” or the very similar “self-actualization”.  It is held by nearly all that we ought to make it our goal in life to assert ourselves, to gain our place of prominence among others and fulfil our purpose.  Many Christian teachers believe these strivings are essential to having a good life.  In fact it is assumed by many that self-realization is God’s plan for us.  We do of course see examples of self-realization being practiced in the Bible; it is not just a modern phenomenon…one could say it goes as far back as Adam and Eve.

Let’s consider each of the three strivings that put together are known as self-realization.  The first, the urge to establish one’s worth is illustrated by King Hezekiah’s actions when representatives of the Babylonian government came to visit him.  Hezekiah received the messengers and showed them all that was in his storehouses — the silver, the gold, the spices and the fine oil — his armory and everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them. (2 Kings 20:13 NIV)  Most of us would say that there is nothing wrong with asserting ourselves.  We need to let others know who we are and what we have done.  In Hezekiah’s case, he simply pointed out how productive his work had been and the success he achieved.  Hezekiah extended his own reputation by giving the tour of his possessions but forgot something critical in doing so.  He did not gain his wealth on his own. 

A second component of self-realization is the push to gain prominence.  We all believe we should be given the opportunity to make something of ourselves and Aaron and Miriam were not exceptions to this.  The two were frustrated that Moses their younger brother, who was charged with leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land was not giving them enough say in the decisions being made.  The nation of Israel needed their leadership they believed and it offended them to not be more involved in how the nation was run.  Miriam and Aaron wanted Moses to show them respect by deferring more to them when he made decisions and directed the people.  Finally their frustration spilled out in the infamous complaint, "Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?" they asked. "Hasn't he also spoken through us?" And the Lord heard this. (Numbers 12:2 NIV)  Is this any different than trying to get a promotion you think you deserve, wanting your husband or wife to respect all you do for the family, being upset that you aren’t recommended for a teacher’s assistant position, getting frustrated for the lack of support you receive in the church motions you present, or being left off a committee because others in the club are move popular?   Who doesn’t want to be known for the good they have done and the insight they have?  The push to gain prominence is natural and normal.

A third component to self-realization is the common goal of wanting to fulfill one’s purpose.  Books have been written on this topic and many have decided this is our most important task in life, fulfilling our purpose.  If we look at Demas from this perspective, we can take exception with the Apostle Paul’s complaint about him.  Paul said of Demas,

“Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.” (2 Timothy 4:9-10 NIV)  No one wants to be accused of desertion but if you take Demas’s position in this, he was simply fulfilling his purpose.  Who knows why he left Paul?  Maybe his family needed him.  Perhaps he wanted to take up leadership in a church where his talents could be put to better use.  It might be that he had always wanted to be a lawyer and so he was following his dream.  Can we really fault Demas for wanting a change?  Perhaps Demas really did know what was best and he was upgrading the quality of his life.  Can that be criticized?

In every example described we have self-realization exhibited in real lives.  None of these people thought that what they were doing was wrong.  They in fact probably were congratulated by friends and perhaps also family members for making tough decisions to put their lives together.  Self-realization is reasonable and even celebrated yet it is not Christian and not even possible.  For those who decide to build their lives without God, self-realization is normal and natural.  The belief that we stand alone in a world that is sometimes for us and other times against us is growing in popularity but irrational.  The push for self-realization rests upon the belief that in the end it is just me and just you who must decide how we are to live and what we will do about the direction of our lives.  But what if we aren’t alone in this?  What if each of us is more than just one?

There is a declaration the Apostle Paul makes that is rarely taken as seriously as its importance to humanity warrants.  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NIV)  This conclusion that Paul draws and that we must consider if we are to fully think through who we are and what we are doing with our lives is that each of us is never independent.  Job, despite his misery, realized not pessimistically but realistically the part God plays in each life. Man's days are determined; you (God) have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed. (Job 14:5 NIV)  It is impossible to be in charge of what we do with ourselves if God decides how long we shall live and what will come of our accomplishments.  The prophet Daniel told the Babylonian king Belshazzar that it did not matter what he hoped to get done, the Lord would not let him live until morning and the kingdom he so proudly ruled and worked to preserve would be pulled apart.  “…God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end…Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."  (Daniel 5:26-28 NIV)  The prophet Isaiah quoted God when he declared the situation each person faces, For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him?  His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?  (Isaiah 14:27 NIV)

Whatever we have planned or look forward to getting done must take into account that how long we live is determined by God.  The writer of Ecclesiastes, whose wisdom is unmatched by those not named Christ or Paul, pointed out that no matter what we accomplish or how close we come to reaching our potential, the entirety of our accomplishments slip from our hands in the end and all we will be left with is our souls, the fate of which is determined by our Creator.  The myth of self-realization is as ludicrous as the belief that the moon is made of green cheese.  Every decision we make must take into account God and what He is doing with us.  The thought that is the most reasonable and rational at any moment is the one Paul offers.  “I am not my own.  I am bought with a price.”  Because this is so, self-realization is impossible.  As we shall see, God not only determines what will be the outcome of our lives, He is a part of every action we take and every thought we generate.  We don’t exist as just self.  There is more to us than that.  And we might add, “Thank God it is so!”

Certainty

2 Timothy 1:12

Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.

How Do You Know That You Know?

Twenty five years ago our family packed up all we had and moved from New Orleans to

Northern California.  It was a dreadfully long trip but on the way we decided to take some educational side trips.  One of our stops was at the world famous Carlsbad Caverns.  As a child I had looked seen pictures of it in National Geographic and had dreamed of one day going to it.  I had been to a number of caves before; seen stalactites and stalagmites, explored creepy caves and stood in caves with all the lights out deep below the earth.  What intrigued me most about the Carlsbad Caverns were the stories I had read of all the bats in the cave.  I had seen pictures of bats flooding out of the cave but I couldn’t imagine so many bats coming all at once.  When we had the opportunity to stand at the entrance to the cave when the bats all came out to feed in the evening, I was not prepared for what took place.  As if shot from a cannon, just as the sun was setting, without warning, millions of bats in a great cloud of flapping fury exploded out of the cave, covering the sky as if a thunderstorm had come upon us.  For several minutes it was nothing but bats whizzing past until the great host was gone.  It was far more bats than I imagined existed in the entire world came out of that cave and I was struck by how inadequate were the descriptions I had read of the bat exodus from Carlsbad Cavern.  The experience of it went far beyond my imagining.  I was no longer a “doubting Thomas” that something so spectacular was possible as millions of bats flooding out of a cave all at once was possible.

Have you ever had a hard time believing something you were told could be true?  Perhaps a movie everyone is talking about can’t possibly be as good as they say.  Maybe a book your friend is raving about won’t live up to the expectations.  It could be a TV show that you have been told is “so funny” won’t be.  A speaker you have been told to catch on a podcast won’t keep your attention.  A college that has been recommended to you is not going to be as good as you have been told.  It could be that someone told you to move to a certain town because it is such a wonderful place but you don’t think you will like living there.  Maybe you don’t believe that someone’s story about what they did is true.  Have you been skeptical of the hype about a political candidate or of a religious teacher or perhaps all that is promised about Christianity?  Do you have some doubts about what you believe?

Of all the people described in the Old Testament, I am most intrigued by Moses.  He was one of only two people who met with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and he is known by many as the “Great Deliverer” because of his role in Israel being freed from slavery.  He was a man of great passions and yet described as a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3 NIV)  He most likely had a troubled marriage, was a bit self-righteous and like many of us, blamed others for some of his biggest mistakes.  Most importantly, for the sake of our discussion, Moses was not always certain he could trust God.

We are not sure how he came to this conclusion but Moses at some point, before he turned forty, believed God would use him to help his fellow Israelites escape the bondage they were under in Egypt.  His childhood was unusual.  He was born during a tempestuous time in his nation’s history.  The Israelites had settled in Egypt some four hundred years earlier and now were a persecuted people in their adopted land. The king of Egypt became afraid the Israelites would revolt if they continued to increase in number so he ordered that all male Israelite babies be killed.  Moses’s mother put her baby boy in a water-tight basket to try and keep him from being discovered by the Egyptian soldiers and the daughter of the king of Egypt found him floating in the Nile River while she was bathing.  As soon as she saw baby Moses, the Egyptian princess decided to adopt the boy, thus saving him.  Now was this a coincidence that Moses survived the pogrom of Hebrew babies this way?   Was it just luck Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses floating in the basket and when she saw him, loved him and wanted to save him, raising him in her own house and making sure he was educated by the best teachers of the land?  Or was this a miracle and it was God who saved him through Pharaoh’s daughter?  Your interpretation of this fortunate circumstance depends on your point of view.  Those who don’t believe in God would call it a random fluke of life; those who believe in a personal God who operates within our world might say it was God who rescued Moses and prepared him for leadership. 

Certainly Moses had decided something about his survival as a baby and how it came about and by the time he was forty, he had an opinion about God’s existence.  We know he believed God was working through people in normal circumstances of life because when he was forty he was convinced that God wanted him to kill an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite.  The prophet Stephen, in his last sermon lets us in on Moses’s thinking when he came upon the maltreatment of the Israelite.  "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.  He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.  Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. (Acts 7:23-26 NIV)  It did not turn out well for Moses though.  The Israelites did not rally to Moses as their deliverer; in fact they rejected him and it was reported to Pharaoh what he had done.  Pharaoh was furious and word got back to Moses that he would be executed for his crime.  Moses escaped to Midian where he lived forty years as a fugitive.

What is intriguing about this biographical account is the shift in Moses’s thinking about God and God’s presence in the world.  We can understand how Moses could have thought God wanted him to kill the Egyptian.  It was just as sensible for Moses to think the Lord wanted to use him to lead a rebellion against Egyptian domination as it was for him to decide that God saved him as a baby from the fate suffered by other baby boys of his generation.  An atheist might come to another conclusion.  The fact that Moses lived when other’s died was just a quirk of chance and his belief that he was to lead Israel was something he concocted himself or through the influence of friends or family members but there was no God involved in any of it.  This may very well have been the evolution of Moses’s thinking as he developed a new life far from his fellow Israelites and the Egyptian oppressors.   He fell into a very ordinary existence.  He got married.  He had children.  He raised sheep.  He watched his children move through the normal stages of growth.  He looked for watering spots for his sheep and fought off bears or lions that tried to attack the flock.  Moses kept moving his flocks about in search of pastures.  He fought with his wife and made love to her, had interesting conversations with his father-in-law and the other men of the village.  Slowly he gave up on the idea that God wanted him to help rescue his fellow Israelites from slavery.  Thoughts of God may have continued and he might have even led his family in prayers but any vibrant expectancy that the Lord was personally involved in his life gradually faded.  He had bills to pay and mouths to feed and you can’t look to God to do those things for you.  Forty years without any sign of God makes you more of an atheist than you might care to admit.  Not all atheism is created equal.  Some forms of it are casual and incidental; not a well thought through view of life…more a developed disregard for anything personal about God.  Atheism can be a way of life; it doesn’t have to be a philosophy.

As the silence of God continues, our faith in Him wanes and we pay less attention to Him operating in our world.  Disappointment may be the biggest cause of atheism.  Why didn’t God help me with this problem?  How come God doesn’t change my circumstances?  I thought God would get me a job, make my daughter well, save my marriage, stop me from drinking, grant me a pardon.  We don’t intend to stop believing in God.  It just happens as our disappointments and busy lifestyles deconstruct our faith in a personal and interactive Lord.  I am pretty certain it happened with Moses.  His reaction to the burning bush is a snapshot of practical atheism.  God let him down back in Egypt, why should he trust the Lord now forty years later when God clearly was meeting him out in the hills of Midian.

Imagine if Moses continued to sulk when he met God at the burning bush.  What if he had turned around and walked away when the first sign of God appeared to him?  How different our history would be.  How different would have been everything for Moses?  It is a most amazing moment when God comes to us and it really is God.  We can’t perhaps put our finger on how we are so certain it is God but it is God and the moment we know it is God we are either going to respond with anger and disgust over all the wrong we feel He has done us or we are going to awaken, like a child opening her eyes to the morning light, and recognize the love in His call to us.

The Lord told us to watch for Him to come to us.  He means for us to be ready to see Him.  He won’t prepare us for His entrance.  There will be no trumpets blaring to warn us He is near.  He will simply come.  And when He comes it will be as certain to you as a friend entering into your house that He is there.  His entrance may not be logical…it may make no sense to you at all but He will be with you and you will know He is with you and nothing will be the same from then onward.  Micah the prophet recognized that no one else may watch and wait for the Lord to come to them but he would.  But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.  Do not gloat over me, my enemy!  Though I have fallen, I will rise.  Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. (Micah 7: 7-8 NIV) When the Lord comes, you will be surprised by Him and you won’t be prepared for what He does next with you.  He might speak through you or love someone through you or heal through you.  His presence will be most wonderful and although you may have fallen, like Micah, you will rise.  You will rise above your sin and rise above your hurt and rise above your disappointment and rise above your failure and the Great God of All will be there with you.  Nothing can stop the Lord from coming to you.  You will be amazed and in your heart cry, “That is the Lord.”  Watch for Him!  Look for Him.  Listen for Him.  The Lord will come to you.  Be prepared to meet Him!