The Realm of Death Pt 5

Futility

  

            Because the realm of death is marked by a perpetual game of performing and hiding, it is also marked by futility. As we have seen, the vacuum we are trying to fill is God-shaped. We are created to experience unconditional and unsurpassable worth. Our innermost being longs for this love. But the worth we receive from our idols is neither unsurpassable nor unconditional. It is limited in depth and duration, and it is conditioned upon whatever we did to acquire it. For this reason, the limited worth we acquire never attaches to our innermost being, our spirit. Instead, it attaches to whatever we did to get it—our performance. It attaches to our doing, not to our being. It thus never satisfies our inner being, which was created to be filled with unconditional and unsurpassable worth.

           Acquiring worth from our self-created idols is like eating a large meal and having every morsel get stuck in our teeth. The meal might taste good, but it won’t nourish us, let alone fill us up. For none of it will reach our stomach. So too we may feast upon the worth our religious or secular idols temporarily give us, but none of it reaches and satisfies our innermost being. It attaches to what we do, not to who we are. It wasn’t given to us for free and thus doesn’t feed our inner being. Once the distraction of the good taste is gone—the best our idols can give us is a nice distraction—we are left with our emptiness once again.

            This is why the hunger that gnaws at our hearts as we live in Adam never fully goes away and why we cannot simply decide to stop feeding ourselves from the idols of this world. Regardless of how successfully we acquire life from our performance, we are simply never satisfied. We are separated from our true source of life, and our spirit continues to starve. So long as our spirit is starving, we cannot help but try to feed it. Yet so long as we persist in the lie that we can satisfy it on our own—if only we can do more, acquire more, perform more good, hide more evil, and so forth—we will continue to starve. We’re caught in a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle of futility.

            The billionaire who continues to work fourteen hours a day to earn more and the religious ascetic who continues to punish his body to get closer to God reveal one and the same disease.

            Only when we yield to God’s Spirit and resolve that Jesus Christ uncovers the true God and true humanity, only to the extent that we crucify the old self and live in faith, and only when we stop eating from the forbidden tree do we begin to experience the fullness of life and love God created us and saved us to have. Only then can we begin to experience freedom from our addiction to idols. Only then is the self-perpetuating cycle of futility broken. Only when our sense of worth, self-esteem, purpose, and life is rooted by faith in who God truly is and who we truly are as revealed in Jesus Christ can we personally experience and overflow with the unsurpassable love that the triune God is.