Those who endure to the end will be saved … –
Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth
(Image credit – Pinterest)
As we navigate the uncharted cultural, social, economic, and political waters we are now in, it is harder than ever to find truth. Despite our lip-service to liberal democracy, there is little for public input at any level of government. Climate alarmism trumps policy, as we now see in living technicolor with the totally artificially generated energy crisis while an incredibly energy rich nation like Canada turns a deliberate blind eye and deaf ear, even to the interests of its own citizens. Misinformation, disinformation, deliberate obfuscation and falsification predominate in the public forum. The screamology of extremism drowns out reason and rational discussion of almost any subject of significance.
As mentioned in a previous post, ideology trumps fact in the name of saving the planet and even having a future for the human race. Actual reality versus virtual reality is more and more confused in people’s minds. Rumor and inuendo take the place of investigation and verification. Doctor Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin would have been thrilled to have had the means to mold the popular psyche now available. Foucault and the progenitors of postmodernism can be proud of their achievement in creating universal doubt in the possibility of knowing anything for sure. Accept, by faith, the chosen “truth” of your ideological dogma.
Ordinary folks do not, of course, consciously and constantly live with this awareness. Life interferes; the pressure of “getting through” blocks out most of the big questions most of the time. There is a gnawing, deep-seated sense of gloom and perhaps even dread that, perhaps, all our bickering, striving, and quarreling is futile in the long run. The best we can do is make the best life we can now and for our children and grandchildren in the near to mid-term. After that, all bets are off, especially if the various doom-scenarios which gather so much attention are correct. Choose your doom; there are plenty of candidates out there from climate catastrophe to nuclear holocaust, or even a meteoric extinction event as per the dinosaur era long ago. Fantasy and post-apocalyptic science-fiction sell big.
As in every era of history, the ultra-privileged classes at the top, live in the illusion of their safety while the rest can all suffer so they can keep their privileges and their hold on the leavers of power. They cannot fathom that the increasingly alienated and desperate under-classes may just be being driven to a level of desperation that will actually hold them to account and overthrow them. If this is no longer possible within a rigged system, history teaches that violence will be the last resort.
Most of us struggle to find hope. We don’t often say it out loud, but the question of hope is constant beneath and behind much of what we do, especially as life moves us from adolescence to young adulthood and to the inevitable “mid-life crisis”. I meet more and more couples who have chosen or are choosing not to have children – many more than the occasional ones I met 40-50 years ago. (I betray my age.)
As for you, what do you hope in? and why?
Do you hope for some sort of life after death? Or is your hope solely aimed at something for this world’s sojourn for what remains of it for yourself, and, if you have any, your descendants?
These are not, of course, new questions. As long as humans have consciously considered their own existence, most have hoped that death is not the end. But most of the scenarios for something beyond the grave were not attractive as something to be desired, unless it was just as a hope to escape total oblivion.
For we moderns and post-moderns with our scientific approach to almost every problem, there is no way to validate any such hope. The best that can be said about any and every answer to the big questions that science cannot and will never be able to answer is that it boils down to faith. And faith, in its simplest terms, is a matter of trust. Thus, as you ponder your own answer to the ultimate nature of reality and your own existence, you must recognize that, whatever answer you choose, it is the one you have chosen because you trust it is the truest, based on some sort of evidence that you trust. What you believe reflects the nature of reality as you experience it and what you’ve been taught about its meaning. You interpret it according to that experience and that of other people whose input you find trustworthy.
Everyone who lives to the age of Reason and Accountability adopts basic beliefs based on trust, based on faith. There are no exceptions; the Noble Prize Winner and the humblest unknown labourer are on exactly the same footing in this. The politicians running your governments and the ultra-rich tycoons are the same as the factory workers and computer geeks.
Our faith convictions determine the kinds of choices we make, especially on the most important decisions, both individually, as in the choice of career and life-partner, having children or preferring a dog, and as social influencers and directors, as in the kinds of rules for society are to be set, and the limits to be placed on dissenting groups.
Underneath all of that, there is the issue of God. Everyone in all the categories we have mentioned and any others you care to consider sooner or later wonders whether the Cosmos came from nothing for no reason, or from the action of a Being, a Power who/which willed it into existence and imbued it with all the properties we have since been striving to understand.
When it comes to ultimate hope, there are really only two relevant answers: God made it, or it just happened somehow, sometime, we know not how or why. All protestations and appeals to the scientific arguments about the Big Bang and inevitable evolution aside, both positions are really and truly faith-based. The Big-Banger deftly dancing past and around the questions of WHY? and HOW? must know that their firm insistence that no Deity is necessary really means “No God is wanted or need apply. Some day we’ll find the magic bullet, the one original micro-particle that, somehow, jumped out of nothing and started everything.” Even such a particle appearing out of nothing just begs the question, “But what made it appear?”
To reconnect all this to the question of Hope versus Futility seems fairly obvious. If God did it, (S)He would have a reason. We, by extension as reasoning beings coming from His/Her creative hand, should be able to discover some part of that reason. And, even more hopefully, some of our kind and species have already made some progress on that front.
On the other hand, if no Creator is responsible, there is ultimately no reason, despite all the illusion of design and purpose. The only purpose in biological Evolution is survival. But if all is ultimately just heading for extinction after however many eons shall pass until entropy extinguishes it, or cosmic implosion annihilates it, then futility is your hopeless answer.
Where does that leave the Theists?
Christians recall what Jesus declares in our opening citation: “Those who endure to the end will be rescued/saved.” Hope is in His faithfulness, which is certified by His resurrection from the dead, and His followers are assured they will likewise rise transformed for life eternal.
For Muslims, hope in Allah’s mercy and your efforts to live by Muhammad’s revelations to get you admitted to Paradise.
For Jews, hope in Yahweh’s mercy and favour, and perhaps to some degree, your efforts will make the world a better place. Anything beyond that remains to be seen.
For Hindus, keep on trying as you go round the cycle of existence until you graduate to nirvana because your good karma has finally erased your bad karma. Buddhists have a similar view with slight nuances.
But for atheists, hope is an illusion, except, as we said above, to leave something positive for the future, as far as there may be one.
While science tends to negate “faith” as a religious notion, it holds fast to its own creed, with little beyond affirmation that its methodology will someday solve all the mysteries – even the ultimate ones. If that is not as great a religious faith as the Theist’s, I don’t know what is! But as to hope for something beyond the here and now, it will all be futile in the end.
Christianity offers the hard evidence of thousands of years of results in changing lives, making great advances in improving the human condition, and providing the hopeless with hope and comfort. The wrongs done by people using Jesus’ name does not and cannot cancel its legacy of making the present better for billions, and offering a brilliant future to all who apply to Jesus. As its foundation, it points to this Jesus, a man who lived and died in history and convinced thousands of people of his own time that he was not just a “mere” man, but the embodiment in flesh and blood of the eternal Creator Himself. To seal the deal, He came alive three days after his murder-execution in a renewed physical form which can no longer die. He thus confirmed that there is a real, living hope that the Creator loves the Creation and chooses to save it, to rescue it, from the futility of death and meaninglessness. And we humans, who can know this loving Creator, can enter into this eternal, deathless, and absolutely purposeful ultimate reality through Jesus.
Enduring to the end means two things: (1) the end of your sojourn on earth in this age, and (2) the chosen time of Jesus’ return to transform the mortal and time-limited Cosmos into a sublime, immortal one which Creator is preparing for us right now.
If you are a follower of Jesus, be of good hope; He will be true to His promise. If not, consider the source of your hope and whether it can endure to the end and rescue you from futility.
For, in the end, Cold Love will be annihilated in the light and flame of God’s all-consuming agape.
World.V.You 