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What Shall We Choose: Despair or Faith?

by Thom Smith
February 10, 2008

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Our fears and anxieties come from our sense that we do not or cannot control our present circumstances. This is altogether human and may have just a smidgen of the Divine about it. It is God who orders the chaos of the primeval creation. And it is God's will that man, the first gardener, should order the primeval paradise. But, with the Fall the original creation is disordered and the door to the garden is shut. Disorder and chaos become the rule, not the exception, and man's attempts to order life become subject to toil, tears, and sweat. And fear and anxiety.

In the face of fear and worry the need to order to control can become obsessive and even manic. This appears to be the motivating force behind the building of the tower of Babel. As such, this ill-fated attempt to control things is an expression of autonomy rather than faith.

It is a common experience of children in insecure and abusive families to carve out for themselves private spaces that are characterized by an almost excessive and obsessive order. Their insecurity and unhappiness within the family are ameliorated and "put on hold" for a time, the time spent in the private, ordered world. One of things that encourages me about the emotional health of my own children is the fact that their rooms are a disaster zone.

As Christians, we are faced with a fallen world, a world where Murphy's Law seems more at work than the Providence of God. Our plans come to nothing, our dreams dry up, our hopes are deferred, and chaos threatens at every turn.

Prudent and energetic action are appropriate and necessary responses to such a world. They are expressions of the God-given image of our Maker. They are essential for our survival.

But, in the final analysis, they cannot save us from the inevitable and eventual setbacks and failures that mar all human lives. And they cannot save us from the Great Inevitability and Eventuality that all human beings must face-death itself. This is what the Existentialists understood so well.

So what are we to do?

We can plunge on headlong into life. Sometimes this plunge is fueled by the anger that such fatalism evokes. Sometimes the plunge is made bearable by the dulling effects of alcohol or drugs. Sometimes the pleasures of sex or compulsive spending make it possible for us to continue. For others compulsive work habits keep the sense of despair at bay. For others, and some of the Existentialists practiced what they preached, it all becomes too much, and suicide becomes the charming exit.

None of these can for very long satisfy the Christian heart. For though the Christian may be as sensitive as anyone else to the chaotic nature of life, he is sensitive to something else. The Christian is sensitive to the truth claims of the Gospel. These truth claims tell him that there is purpose in history, there is meaning to daily life and events, and there is hope in the face of despair. This because the Creator God has Himself become at creature, has lived and struggled in the fallen, chaotic creation, and has limited Himself to the same resources available to us-no more and no less. Indeed, He has faced the same eventualities and inevitabilities that we face, including death itself. He has experienced and endured all this with the same questions, fears, and anxieties, and, finally, the same sense of forsakenness that we feel.

And through it all, His greatest temptation is to make his own way, to invent an alternative to the suffering. His temptation is, if not to build a tower, to leap from a tower and in doing so, to end the pain, the doubt, the fear in a triumphal landing on angels' wings.

Instead of this, the True God who has become the True Man chooses the higher, harder way. He believes. He trusts. And out of His firm trust in His God and Father, He plunges ahead in submission and obedience, a submission and obedience that embraces even the cross and its desolation. And even in the experience of in extremis, He is trusting and believing: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?" This is the language of the covenant. But more, it is the prayer-language of the covenant partner feeling forsaken but not forsaking His covenant God. Overwhelmed by fear, by anxiety, and by unutterable anguish, He cries to God in trust. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that His cries were heard because of His piety. That they were heard is affirmed, joyously affirmed by His resurrection from the dead.

This resonates within the Christian heart. In the presence of chaos and the threat of life, with fear and dread filling his mind, and with no hope of controlling or changing his circumstances, the Christian says, "I will trust in Him."

It is just at this point that we begin to recognize other traits in the dark face of human life. Life threatens to undo us, to unmake us- and all that we love. Life, as such, discovers our weakness and impotence and, with grace, opens the door of hope and faith. For us, the last word is not chaos, nor fear, nor even death. For the Christian, the last word is the first word of a new world, a new order, a new creation. That word is "resurrection."