I’m generally impulsive when it comes to books. Someone says, “Hey, I like this one,” and I’m quite likely to get right on it. I just finished Children of God, Mary Doria Russell’s follow-up to The Sparrow, and I liked it nearly as much – and all on my sister’s recommendation a couple of months ago.
I also just read The Goldfinch by Donna Tart on my niece’s recommendation (I didn’t catch that mother and daughter each recommended a bird book to me until halfway through Goldfinch) and liked it even more.
But the thing is, impulse can get you shelves of unread books. This happened to me especially (virtually) on my Kindle. I was following a guy’s blog and he would recommend all of these books that were on sale and so of course I felt compelled to pick them up, thinking I’d get to them eventually, and having to get them while they were still on sale.
Libby and a library card helped cure me of that. I read both The Sparrow and Children of God on my Kindle, and listened to the audio version of The Goldfinch (very well read by David Pittu) – and all courtesy of my DoD library. I can’t recommend the Libby app enough – and of course, patronizing your local library (even if through Libby) is well worth it. They need you now more than ever.
I bring this all up because of that word, “impulse” again. I seldom buy books anymore, but sometimes I have no choice but to go with the hard copy. This was the case with my latest actual hardcover book purchase – The Wonderful Works of God by Herman Bavinck, a Dutch theologian whom I hear is phenomenal but highly underrated. I certainly had never heard of him. So I let impulse rule here…because, of course, I love a good book.
And it appears, after reading only the first chapter – “Man’s Highest Good” – I won’t be disappointed.
It was in that chapter that a few quotes caught my eye, so I may as well give you my thoughts to go with them:
“This desiderium aeternitatis, this yearning for an eternal order, which God has planted in the heart of man, in the inmost recesses of his being, in the core of his personality, is the cause of the indisputable fact that everything which belongs to the temporal order cannot satisfy man. His is a sensuous, earthly, limited, and mortal being, and yet he is attracted to the eternal and is destined for it. It is of no profit to a man that he should gain wife and children, houses and fields, treasures and property, or, indeed, the whole world, if in the gaining, his soul should suffer loss (Matt. 16:26).”
Page 3
Seldom do I hear anyone saying with an absolute degree of certainty and sincerity that “this is all there is.” I mean, if people really thought that, don’t you think there’d be a whole lot of open hedonism going on? (I should be careful here – many would say there is). I think people like to think they’re acting so nicely to their fellow humans because they’re just that good, but still, something has to be there, even if it’s buried deep within, that acknowledges a certain mortality of the body but a lingering of the soul. Morality itself, in a completely atheistic world (that is, a world without some kind of objective moral standard by which we live), is a mirage.
This isn’t just about consequence – “I’m good because if I’m not God’ll punish me.” That’s a misconception particularly aimed at Christian goodness – that a Christian acts out of fear of going to hell. No, it’s just that without an objective moral standard, there is no way really, at the heart of it, that anyone can say “This is good and that is bad.” Sure, these days it does seem like a crap shoot. But we can all generally agree that Hitler did some really bad stuff. And yet, a lot of Germans knew what was going on but did nothing – some even condoning his actions wholeheartedly. If we base our morality on whatever society thinks, then the Germans were right at that time and place, because their society dictated as much.
But of course, that’s bunk.
In Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes, he says so wonderfully, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (3:11 NIV). We all long for the eternal and the God who comes with it. Some of us just don’t realize that.
“But what the Scriptures require is a knowledge which has the fear of God as its beginning (Prov. 1:7). When it severs its connection with that principle it may still, under false pretenses, bear the name of knowledge, but it will gradually degenerate into a worldly wisdom which is foolishness with God. Any science, philosophy, or knowledge which supposes that it can stand on its own pretension, and can leave God out of its assumptions, becomes its own opposite, and disillusions everyone who builds his expectations on it.”
Page 4
Here, we must be careful. Because Christians have been called “anti-science” so much (despite the fact that many of the earliest names in science were Christians who did their science to better understand God’s world). It’s clear that Christian anti-scientism is a phenomenon born not of reason, but of ignorance and fear. We should follow the science. We should not be afraid of it…but, as Bevinck says, it must be done with a healthy respect of God (which is what Proverbs 1:7 is asking). I liken it to this – if I give you detailed directions to a place, but you are starting from the wrong point of departure, you will still end up lost even if you follow the directions exactly.
What I have really learned is that there are some wonderful things science can do to teach us of the wonders of God. The “Big Bang,” for example, sounds tremendously like the first verse of Genesis (just imagine the theory’s catalyst being God’s Word, speaking it all suddenly into existence). DNA is a genetic code that uniquely determines the development and growth of every one of us – and it screams of a creative intelligence. Laws of physics and chemical compositions seem to point to the same rather than the development of it all by accident. The examples of the fine-tuning of the universe are far too complex to go into here, but I can recommend a great, and very readable book on it if you wish.
But it all begins with a healthy and realistic acknowledgment of God.
“For knowledge without virtue, without a moral basis, becomes an instrument in the hands of sin for conceiving and executing greater evil, and then the head that is filled with knowledge enters into the service of a depraved heart.”
Page 5
This is an important quote when stacked up with the others I list here. It’s not just about knowledge of God in our thoughts, it’s about action that arises from the knowledge of God as truth. In this case then, to which I’d alluded just above, arriving at the wrong destination is the result of actions of the heart without God (the wrong point of departure).
“In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8).”
Pages 6 and 7
We are conflicted in so many ways. As Paul says himself in his letter to the Romans, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (7:19 ESV). And this is Paul. If our hearts are merely in service to our own desires, then (despite the fact that a true atheist cannot call his own actions “good” and expect others to agree), we drift even further from what is truly “good” (going back to Proverbs 1:7 again). If our starting point is not God, then we can really know nothing of truth. We’re distracted and torn. We drift and wander, grasping for the next “best” thing, but we are never satisfied.
We’ll all have to confront our mortality someday. I feel it myself, with my 60th birthday coming in only a few months. There are no thoughts of living another 60 years – and that thought was so far-fetched 30 years ago, I never considered it then either. Now, I’m thinking 20, maybe 30 (or perhaps far less – it’s really not up to me) before the words from Hebrews come to pass – “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” (9:27 ESV).
I’m not worried about this. As Andy Mineo says so well – “If I die tonight, man, I’m ready for tomorrow.” I hope you are too…