The life of the unbeliever must be truly depressing.
Oh, I know. They will never confess to it. They will say that is we Christians who are fooling ourselves, who have turned away from reality.
But in fact, life without God is pretty depressing.
Oh, not the day to day existence. That you can get by with well enough. Heavens, there are whole days where even I forget that life can be hard. But then something bad happens. A terrible something, a tragedy.
The believer has ultimate hope in both the sovereignty of God over their lives and the assurance that, ultimately, everything will turn out alright. But what does the non-believer have? Nothing. The stark, howling nothing of a universe that has nothing in it but natural laws.
The unbeliever cannot - really - take refuge in anything have a purpose either. In the naturalist world, there is no purpose. There is no karma, no fate. There is merely the actual hopelessness of accepting that ultimately all this has no purpose - in 100 years after your death, you will not be remembered and for most, their efforts and contributions will have been in vain.
Not surprisingly, the believer attempts to whistle past the graveyard. Confronted with actually tragedy, most seem to try to slide around the enormity of the hollowness (which has always struck me as a little odd for those that present themselves as hard nosed realists).
Somewhat surprisingly, most Christians try to assist them in avoiding the issue.
Life without God should be depressing. We need to be confronted with the hollowness of such a thing. But the point is not to wallow in it; the point is to then point people to the One who can give it meaning.
The night the Holy Spirit manifested itself in me, I was ready to let go of God. I just couldn't see Him in the current world. My mind couldn't grapple with the possibility of His existence. God didn't want that of me though; I was ready to let go of God, but he wasn't ready to let go of me. The things I saw and the things I heard that night made for one life-altering experience! Among the things God showed me was a vision of what life would be without Him. The nearest I can compare it to is having a window seat in a plane landing at night. The plane was dropping through clouds. It then broke through to clear skies, but it was dark. It was lifeless. There was absolutely no light at all. There was nothing. It was a dark so black; like a vacuum that wanted to suck me in. This is what God wanted me to see; the darkness, hollowness and coldness of life without Him. Needless to say, I turned away from the darkness and instead ran towards God's light. My life was changed forever, in the best possible way.
ReplyDeleteLife is still what it is; a struggle. I call mortal life "boot camp for Heaven." The difference now though, is the presence of God's Holy Spirit within me, and the certain knowledge of God's existence!
You hit the nail on the head, TB.
Wow. Thanks for that Pete. I admit that I have had glimmers of a bleakness without end, but nothing like that at all.
DeleteYou can't read minds. You are fooling yourself if you insist that the life of non believers must be depressing because they never confess that that their life is depressing. If they tell you that their lives are not depressing then any good Christian should do the morally decent thing and respect their word as you would expect them to accept that you say you believe in a God that to them is non existent. It's arrogant in the modern use of the word (and it's 'proud' in the biblical sense of the word) for you to NOT believe what they say but to INSIST that their lives MUST be depressing because of YOUR belief and your opinion of their lives. You are so proud that you think YOUR belief is more worthy than their belief. That is so not a Christian thing to do to elevate yourself and your opinion and to put other people down because you think you know best.
ReplyDeleteSo you are correct: I cannot read minds. And my intent was not to elevate myself above others - at least not my stated intent.
DeleteI try not to be proud - perhaps I am more than I think I am - but perhaps my issue is that I have known people who went along as if the context of life in its naturalistic manifestation was all that there is - and then, when something rather awful happens, a gap is revealed. Maybe just blindly accepting all at face value is the thing to do, but if I see what I believe to be a problem is not right to at least wonder?