Things That Matter Most. . . No. 8

WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING?

“See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil” (Dt. 30:15).

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

The year 586 B.C. was dark and dismal for Israel. Ten years before the Babylonian kingdom has attacked Jerusalem and taken Israel’s king captive, along with a number of people. It was the beginning of the end. Other deportations to Babylon followed. The city itself was about to be destroyed.

Jeremiah prophesied during these critical years, and the year 586 found him in prison, rejected by his own people. Famine and pestilence plagued Jerusalem and the Babylonian army was battering its walls. Catastrophe was at the very door. It was midnight for the people of God.

If we could have asked Jeremiah in that disconsolate hour, Is life really worth living?, he would surely have replied with a resounding Yes. And along with it, he would have told us, as he does in his prophecies, why life is worth living. Indeed, it was during Israel’s darkest hours, those days just before the destruction of the city, that Jeremiah writes of hope and comfort. In earlier years his judgments against the people were relentless and devastating. He condemned their sins and exposed their wickedness as no other prophet ever had, and he made it clear to them that their calamities were due to their rebellion against God.

And yet when the hour of despair had come and the moment of truth was upon them it was Jeremiah who spoke of God’s love even for a wayward people and of ultimate victory for His chosen race. In a time of calamity the prophet insisted that the nation would not perish. Furthermore, Israel would someday be God’s source of blessing to many nations, for from her will come the Messiah.

Jeremiah could see what Moses had long before observed, that God places before man “life and good, death and evil.” It is man’s role in the drama of life against death and good against evil that makes life worth living. The prophet’s vision could penetrate the cloud of despair and see the silver lining of hope; amidst defeat he could see God’s purposes unfolding toward ultimate victory. Even though he was a laughing stock to the people and “a reproach and derision all day long,” he could still speak of the coming Messiah as “the Lord our Righteousness” and of a New Covenant to be written upon the human heart rather than upon cold tablets of stone.

Life taught Jeremiah that “to build and to plant,” which was his commission from God, he also had “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow.” This is the very nature of life, and this is what makes life worth living. Building and planting would have no meaning apart from destroying and overthrowing.

It was in such a context that our Lord spoke of the abundant life. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” He pointed out, contracting His mission with that of the hirelings. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” He who lives the abundant life is one who overcomes evil with good. God is at work in him, blessing the world through him. He who is the Author of the abundant life is the One who laid down His life for the sheep. We live abundantly when we allow Him to live within us, using us to the glory of God. But this necessarily brings us into conflict with the evils of the world. Life and death, good and evil are always placed before men. The joys and triumphs of life come as we join battle with the evil forces for God’s sake. Such is the abundant life.

Life is significant only when it is a fight. It is in the heroic struggle with the forces of evil that our existence really has meaning. It may be a struggle for one’s own individuality or personal integrity in a culture that makes either very difficult. It may be a fight to save one’s children from the many hazards they have to face so that they can be instruments in building a better tomorrow. It may be the ordeal of getting an education in the face of poverty or grappling with a health problem, trying to stay well in a world that needs all your energies. It may be the problem of living with and loving difficult people, or trying to unite what has long been divided. It may be the conduct of a war or the struggle for social justice. Or it may be all these things and more. But surely life would have no substance without the drama of good and evil. Life is simply not worth living when one withdraws from the struggle or refuses to enter into it, choosing to be part of the problem rather than part of the answer.

The Quakers speak of the simple life. The Stoics insisted upon the disciplined life. Socrates taught the examined life. Theodore Roosevelt pled for the strenuous life. All of these may well be ingredients of what Jesus called “the abundant life,” for all these were true of His own life. To live simply is to live without pretense and sham. It means to be one’s true self, to live with singleness of purpose, to be pure of heart.

To be disciplined means to let the mind rule the body. It implies self-denial in behalf of noble causes. The examined life is a life of continual self-scrutiny that tends to be more judgmental of self than of others. It is the honest life. The strenuous life is one of urgency, one that accepts the issues of life seriously and gives one’s self to them. Like Paul it is a life that is willing “to spend and be spent for your souls.”

But the word that says most in describing what makes life worth living is precipitousness, a term we borrow from William James, the renowned Harvard psychologist, who used it in dealing with the very question we are asking: What makes life worth living? Prof. James came up with precipitousness as a result of a vacation he spent at the famous resort, Lake Chautauqua. Once at this resort James found himself surrounded with all that men hold dear—success, industry, culture, orderliness, peace, prosperity, cheerfulness. He was entertained by picnics, magnificent music, lectures by distinguished men, the best of company. There was no poverty, no diseases, no drunkenness, no crime, no police, no problems. He enjoyed the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries.

He tells how he was held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything at Chautauqua, a veritable middle-class paradise. After a week of this he came back into the real world, and he surprised himself by thinking: “Ouf. What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage to set the balance straight again.”

And then Prof. James said of his experience: “I soon recognized the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness—the element of precipitousness.”

The professor has pointed to a vital principle of life. Life is made romantic and dramatic by the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness. Resort life as one might experience at Chautauqua may be all right for a vacation but an “ice cream and soda water existence” for the whole of life would be unbearable. The major issue of life is the conflict between good and evil, and life is worth the while to the degree one involves himself in that struggle. The Christian must be too sensitive to ignore evil and too moral to tolerate it.

The Christian’s Mission is conquest. In his own life he conquers sin and carnality by the Spirit that dwells within. He conquers self-will and self-conceit. In the world as a physician, teacher, and farmer he conquers disease, ignorance, and want—all for the sake of God and human dignity. Conquest is God’s work through His children. So Paul says in Rom. 8:37: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

Nowhere is this so beautifully described as in Revelation, which is a book of conflict, depicting war in heaven as well as on earth. It is noteworthy that in all seven of the letters dictated to congregations in Asia in the first three chapters there is a glorious promise given to the conqueror. “To him who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God,” He says to the church at Ephesus.

“He who conquers shall not be hurt by the second death;’ is a promise made to those in Smyrna. To the church at Pergamum He writes: “To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” The one who conquers is further promised power to rule over the nations, white garments, and a place in the temple of God, and even a place beside the Christ on His throne. How glorious! But such promises are for those in conflict with sin and the world, with ignorance and disease, with injustice and oppression.

It is difficult for us to realize that we are at war. We must be in order to be conquerors. We must wage peace in a Christian world that has learned to love division. We must struggle for purity, goodness, and righteousness for a brotherhood that has lost its uniqueness and become like the world about it.

Our Lord “went forth conquering and to conquer.” That is our mission, and that is what makes life worth living. We will surely lose some battles in the conflict, but with the Christ as our Captain we will ultimately win the war.—the Editor