The mystery of human creation is a double-edged sword. While everyone knows this, a history teacher thinks of it all the time.
The human mind can create magnificent edifices of cathedrals, skyscrapers, bridges, power plants, rocket ships, ocean liners, flying machines. It can devise economic systems with productivity to feed eight billion people, a smooth-running global supply chain, political systems that, on paper at least, can hold a civilization together.
There is art that inspires, beautiful music, games that entertain, instant communication, fashions, tools, individual and mass transportation, books and photography.
The other side of the sword is also well known: endless wars, tyrannical dictators and kings, nuclear bombs, genocide and inexplicable mass murders, mad scientists, and an incredible tendency towards self-destruction. Humans apply the assets of the good products of human ingenuity in order to destroy.
We easily hate not only our next door neighbor, the rival town and team, but more easily other cultures and countries, whose differences we might not understand and which often look sinister.
But we can also hate ourselves.
We can extol the joy of a baby, but also tear it apart, in numbers so vast as to beggar the imagination. We usually honor our parentage, but increasingly hasten their exit into eternity. In both cases, when children or parents become inconvenient.
Or, find ways to kill ourselves, sparing our descendants any inconvenience or guilt.
These mysteries of human existence find different explanations in the bewildering realm of religion, in the same way that our civilization is a double-edged sword. Religions can provide both comfort and terror. The inescapable instinctive understanding, for most people, is that there is an eternity that awaits us. Some find comfort in denying this and believe that nothingness is the best we can hope for after we die.
Others await a long chain of reincarnation, climbing a ladder of either self-improvement or a descent into temporal miseries, until our spirits figure it out. Their solution is that we must die, and die, and die and die and then … vanish. The gods to worship are indifferent, both destructive and benign, but it is part of the process.
Monotheism, manifested in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, maintains within itself the goal of a temporal peace, but also justifiable war. The ideal of a social construct that can achieve idyllic perfection is not possible until a Final Judgement, when Time disappears and Eternity, the true norm of existence, takes over.
And before this event, each individual has the inescapable truth: death, judgement, heaven or hell.
The God of monotheism is usually understood to be perfect: perfectly good, perfectly powerful, perfectly knowledgeable. He is also all-loving, all-just, all-merciful, and all-present. While we might deceive even ourselves, He can neither deceive nor be deceived.
Christians believe in the seeming impossibility of one God, but three divine Persons. We just celebrated this mystery with an annual sermon that tries to explain the inexplicable. The first premise that must be accepted, for most Christians, is that humanity is on the bottom rung of the immortal totem pole of souls. Whatever colossal accomplishments we have fashioned in 5,000 years of civilization is equivalent to observing an anthill or a beehive. Amazing, yes, but easily consummated at our whim.
If God sees all the good of humanity, he sees all the bad. It is His creation. His patience allows sin to manifest itself because He gave us free will. In the fullness of time, the bad side of humanity will disappear, and two options will remain: either we say to Him, “Thy will be done,” or He will say to us, “THY will be done.”
Atheistic Marxism denies all this, of course, and claims to point to a perfect material world, wrought through the struggles of mass murder, revolution and fire. It cannot tolerate the polluting faith of an invisible existence, since it will perpetuate inequality and human suffering …even while Marxism creates precisely that.
Socialism is never benign. Democratic socialism seems to be a kindly system to liberals, but it always grows into a tyranny. It is a system where everybody tries to live off of everybody else. Its tools are confiscation and redistribution. You are expected to accept this with a smile, please, because “majority rules!” But at gunpoint, if necessary. It leads to taxation, bankruptcy, inflation and confusion.
Its subsequent stage is national socialism, also known as fascism. It is much nastier and claims racial or national superiority. It thinks of itself as the antidote to communism, but it is merely a rival sibling. If private property exists, it is allowable only in service to the state.
And then, there is international socialism, better known as communism, where the fight over race or nationality is transformed to include the entire planet, identifying the villains, not against a neighboring country or race, but against the class and privilege within your own. It unites with your former enemies to create a “worker’s paradise.” While it detests the hierarchy that has existed in all civilizations, it makes yet another.
Hierarchies exist because creation always imitates the reality of the eternal order. Godly hierarchies are selfless and benign; demonic ones are destructive and evil. While human bureaucracies are inefficient and often tyrannical, the heavenly one is perfectly efficient and perfectly benign. Our temporal ones can imitate it, and achieve a certain degree of goodness, but only if tempered by faith. Inevitably, a fallen world succumbs to corruption.
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In the impossible situation that we now face, globally, our Hope can no longer lie with the fallible constructs of society. Indeed, we are lemmings racing towards a cliff. But the brinkmanship of life always allows a branch that sticks out of the cliff, seen in countless cartoons and movies, because that is how a loving God operates.
And the Bible certainly reflects this.
Noah and the Ark. Moses hemmed in at the Red Sea. David and Goliath. Jonah warning Nineveh into repentance. Daniel in the lion’s den. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednago in the furnace.
And the ultimate one: Christ nailed to the Cross. An apparent defeat turned into the greatest of all victories.
The branch is there … but we must choose to grasp it.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
