Dear Alumni,
Most folk probably associate the Rolling Stones more with
“Sympathy for the Devil” than with historic Christianity, and
few of us would expect to learn any theology from them, but I
noticed recently that in “Ventilator Blues,” Mick and the lads
hit a strong Calvinist note:
Ev'rybody walking 'round, ev'rybody
trying to step on their Creator. Don't matter where you are,
ev'rybody, ev'rybody gonna need some kind of ventilator
(“Ventilator Blues,” Jagger/Richards/Taylor; 1972)
According to the writer of Ecclesiastes, who calls himself
Qoheleth (the title of the convener of the covenant assembly),
the Rolling Stones got it right.
Then I considered all that my hands
had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold,
all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing
to be gained under the sun (Eccl 2:11).
In Southern California, as in other parts of the world, the
freeways are full of fast-moving cars carrying successful people
to important jobs and places. My gym is full of middle-aged folk
(of which I am one) huffing and puffing trying to mitigate the
effects of the fall. The media buzz of email, phone calls, and
television is unending. In the end, however, Qoheleth says that
it is all wind-chasing and vanity. However fast we live, drive,
and exercise, most of us will “need some kind of ventilator”
(cf. Eccl 9:5).
For what happens to the children of
man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so
dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no
advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity (Eccl 3:19).
As Qoheleth makes clear, in contrast to what we do, what God
does endures (Eccl 3:14) and that there will be an end to every
life (Eccl 8:8).
Nor is it difficult to find evidence of continual defiance of
the Creator. As the song says, everyone is trying to “step on
their Creator.” We know the source of this problem. Contrary to
Rome, which teaches that Adam was created with the inclination
to sin and that inclination was restrained by a “super added
gift” of grace so that Adam’s was fall from grace, Scripture
teaches and we confess that God made Adam “good” (Gen 1:31).
Rome teaches that Adam was not just to be glorified, i.e., to
live with God in eternal blessedness, but rather they teach that
he was to be “divinized” (Catechism of the Catholic Church
§398). We confess, however, that before the fall, Adam was not
defective or inclined to sin in any way. This is why we say that
God created man
good and after His own image, that
is, in righteousness and true holiness; that he might rightly
know God his Creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in
eternal blessedness, to praise and glorify Him (Heidelberg
Catechism Q. 6)
God made Adam to know his Creator, to obey him, and having
passed the test set before him, to be glorified, not divinized.
Our problem has never been lack of deity. It was disobedience.
In that covenant of life or works or nature (our theologians
have used all three to mean the same thing), God established the
law: love God with all your faculties and love your neighbor as
yourself. He summarized the law in one command: “…of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” and attached
to it a certain penalty for its violation: “for in the day that
you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:17).
By virtue of his good creation, his righteousness, Adam had
within him the power to obey the law. So Heidelberg Catechism
Q. 9 says, “…God so made man that he could perform it; but man,
through the instigation of the devil, by willful disobedience
deprived himself and all his descendants of this power.” Until
the last century or so, this is how most of our Reformed
forebears understood Adam’s condition before the fall and the
mystery of the fall.
As God threatened, by our law-breaking we earned corruption
and death. What had been a matter of freedom and joy became evil
and hard (Gen 3:17). We began to return to dust (Gen 3:19).
Before long, rebellion against God was so widespread that we
brought upon ourselves a cataclysmic judgment (Gen 6-9). In our
sin, we rebelled against God and sought to replace him and his
law with ourselves and our own law. We tried to become
autonomous.
We once mourned the existence of sin and death, we recognized
that humans are rebels and sinners in need of grace and
salvation. We recognized our need to be justified and sanctified
because we recognized that there is a Creator who has revealed a
universally binding law: Do and live (Luke 10:28). We used to
describe the Christian life as “mortification,” the “dying of
the old man, and the making alive of the new” (Heidelberg
Catechism, 88).
By contrast, today our rebellion against God and its
consequences seem to be universally celebrated. We no longer
worry about sin and salvation. The mirror no longer frightens
and disgusts us. Thomas de Zengotita is certainly right when he
says that, like Narcissus, we are so infatuated with what we see
that we have decided to clone it! For Moderns, sin is no longer
the problem; the law is the problem. If we move the markers, no
one ever goes out of bounds. Children no longer lose at games
and everyone goes home a winner. We have declared that there is
nothing wrong with us that a little therapy can’t fix.
As I have already suggested, there is nothing really new
about the Modern impulse to deify ourselves. This is what Adam
attempted, what Rome teaches, and this has been our natural
inclination since. In the pre-modern world, however, there was
at least some shame attached to sin. In Modernity, however, the
entire enterprise has been to do away with God. Hence the German
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) declared the death
of God long before Time Magazine found out about it in 1967. In
his place we have endeavored mightily to put ourselves. Before
Modernity, our philosophers and theologians, however errant they
may have been in other ways, began with God as their starting
point. There were great debates about what he had said, but
there was no question that he had revealed himself.
In the Modern period, that certainty was shattered by a deep
and fundamental doubt about whether God has really revealed
himself. It has been replaced by another “certainty,” that God
is not (Prov 14:1) or at least he is not such that we must begin
with his authority and revelation. The French philosopher Rene
Descartes said, “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Descartes
effectively re-wrote Scripture: “In the beginning I created
reality and formed God from my imagination.” Since the
eighteenth century, most of Modern philosophy and theology, even
those who call themselves “postmodern,” has traded Moses for
Descartes. “Trying to step on their Creator” indeed.
So, like the Stones, Qoheleth sang the blues and justifiably
so, but he did more than that. He also sang a sort of shadowy
Gospel song. It begins as a minor theme in the early chapters of
Ecclesiastes. For example he says, “he put eternity into man’s
heart….” (Eccl 3:11). It is sounded again in the middle of the
book (Eccl 8:12) and is made explicit at the end of the book. He
says, “God will bring every deed into judgment, with every
secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl 12:14). The gospel, in
broad terms, as it comes to expression in Ecclesiastes, has to
do with eternal judgment. Some take Ecclesiastes to teach a
non-Christian view of man, heaven, and hell; that this life is
all there is, but such a reading of Ecclesiastes misses the
point of the book. Qoheleth tells us the truth about sin and its
consequences for human existence. It is true that we shall all
die, but that is not all there is to be found in Qoheleth. There
are also the righteous and the unrighteous, there is eternity
and there shall be a day reckoning when the injustices of this
life shall be made right and there is a living God who shall
bring righteousness to pass in history.
As members of the new covenant, as those “upon whom the end
of the ages has come,” (1 Cor 10:11), we can see a little more
clearly than Qoheleth what this means. We know that it is our
Lord Jesus, who was “born under the law,” (Gal 4:4), who obeyed
for us, who was crucified and raised for us (1 Cor 15:1–4). This
Jesus shall return in judgment (2 Thess 1:7–10) to deliver his
people, to consummate his promises, to inaugurate the final
state of existence and the glorification of his people (Rom
8:30). Those who have trusted in Jesus have nothing to fear in
the judgment. Thus, our catechism asks,
Q. 52: What comfort is it to you
that Christ "shall come to judge the living and the dead"?
That in all my sorrows and persecutions, I, with uplifted head,
look for the very One, who offered Himself for me to the
judgment of God, and removed all curse from me, to come as Judge
from heaven, who shall cast all His and my enemies into
everlasting condemnation, but shall take me with all His chosen
ones to Himself into heavenly joy and glory.
Do not overlook the fact that the judgment is described as a
“comfort” to believers. The Heidelberg Catechism uses the
word “comfort” six times and each time it refers to the
assurance of salvation. Just as in Ecclesiastes ours is a life
of sorrows and persecutions, but the entrance of eternity into
history is a blessing for believers, for whom Christ has offered
himself, from whom he has removed the curse and for whom he will
come as a judge and redeemer. For Christians, the return of
Christ is good news.
For us who by faith are united to Christ the end of all
things has begun but we have not yet come into full possession
of eternity. We still have this life to negotiate. Pending
Christ’s return, the day and hour of which only God knows (Mark
13:32) most of us shall find ourselves in an antiseptic hospital
room, suffering the indignities of medical treatment and finally
death. That is sufficient cause to sing the blues. The reality,
however, should also cause us to put our life in proper
perspective.
Our culture promises us satisfaction if we keep the right
diet, drive the right car, sleep in the right bed, make the
right friends, and have the right job. It’s possible to find
satisfaction and even joy in those things, but the Stones still
have a point. These things, however good they may be in
themselves, do not address our most basic need: righteousness
before God and living with him in eternal blessedness. These
good things don’t change the fundamental reality: “Don't matter
where you are, ev'rybody gonna need some kind of ventilator.”
The question is not whether we’re going to die. Rather the
question is how are we going to live in the light of that fact?
The New Testament addressed directly two non-Christian
approaches to life. In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul spoke to the
Athenian Philosophical Society which was composed mainly of
Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans were skeptical about
eternity, heaven, and hell so they organized life around the
quest for refined pleasure. James Bond’s request for a vodka
martini, “shaken, not stirred” is a good example of this
philosophy. The Stoics, on the other hand, organized life around
the quest for contentment gained through reason and aligning
themselves with the nature of things. The popular Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People series is a good example
of the influence of Stoicism in our time.
The Apostle Paul’s first response to these philosophies was
to preach the law, to point out that we all have a true,
non-saving, knowledge of God and his law that leaves us without
excuse (Acts 17:22–31; Rom 1:18–2:16). He preached the coming
judgment of the world and called them all to acknowledge the
greatness of their sin and misery. The second part of his sermon
was to preach the good news of the resurrection of Christ. As
often happens, some of them regarded the resurrection as
foolishness (1 Cor 1:21–25) but some by the grace of God, some
of them put their trust in Christ (Acts 17:32–34).
The cold truth is that most of us shall end up on a
ventilator and die. The proper response, however, is neither
despair nor skepticism, but a sober reckoning with the truth.
The proper response is to sing the blues, to recognize the
greatness of our sin and misery (Heidelberg Catechism Q.
2), to repent of our rebellion and unbelief and then to sing the
gospel song: “O’ Death where is your victory, O’ death where is
your sting?” The proper response is to turn to the Savior who,
by his obedience to the law and death, has earned life for all
who believe. He has removed the sting of sin and death from us
(1 Cor 15:55–56) and given us hope and a reason to live well in
this life. Having sung the blues, that ancient blues man
Qoheleth, looking forward to that day when the tomb would be
found empty (Mark 16:6) also sang, “Remember also your Creator
in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the
years draw near” (Eccl 12:1).
R. Scott Clark
Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology
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