Thinking-Christianly

Relativism maintains that truth is not objective. It is not the same thing for everyone. Because each of us lives in slightly different circumstances, and has a background unlike others, we are free to interpret reality around us and make moral decisions based on what works for us. My response to a situation may be different from yours because you and I are unique individuals. And even if the decisions are similar, they are never totally identical.

For example, I may choose not to tell the truth to my boss about a project I’m working on. He wouldn’t understand the reasons why I’m behind the preferred schedule. You might tell your boss, but you have a different boss, and work for a different department in the company. The factors in your life are different from me, as is your personality. Even time makes a difference. If he asks me on a Friday when the office is in an uproar, I might respond differently than I would on a Tuesday. So the morality of my response is relative to my unique situation. There is no objective standard.

While relativism correctly understands the uniqueness of every person and every situation, it destroys all common ground. For any life situation there can be an infinite number of legitimate responses, some of which may be contradictory to others. Carried to its logical conclusion, relativism produces moral chaos. We each justify our own choices as correct.

Such thinking, unfortunately, has crept into the church today. In an age of increasing biblical illiteracy we commonly hear one another justify our decisions and our priorities based on our personal conclusions. “I believe this is what God wants me to do” becomes a statement everyone is afraid to assess. We can unwittingly play the God-card and wrap our action in religious language to remove it beyond scrutiny.

Sometimes this is blatant, as when religious liberalism ignores rules of grammar and history and insists on farfetched conclusions from the biblical text. More often it’s our personal attempts to pass off our reason or common sense as equivalent to the wisdom of God. (When I find myself doing this, it’s usually because I’m lazy or because I don’t want God’s truth to interfere with my desires.) In either case, we substitute our subjective assessment for God’s objective revelation.

This kind of thinking is not new. In the days of Jeremiah the prophet the spiritual leaders of Judah took a similar approach. Instead of reflecting the truth that God had spoken to them and their forefathers, they passed off their own views as authoritative. And everyone had a different message for the culture. But most of these words of advice and counsel had little to do with God’s perspective of the moral compromise that had the Jewish nation on the road to judgment. Jeremiah says, “Every man’s own word becomes his oracle and so you distort the words of the living God.” (See Jeremiah 23:36.)

Our pleasure with our technological wisdom and our educational advancements blinds us to the pride that creeps into our thinking. We easily conclude that we can figure out life on our own—even as participants in the church of Christ—and we supplant God’s revelation with our own “sanctified conclusions.” Our goal is not evil, but the result is. We substitute our own ideas about faith, church, evangelism, family, and truth for God’s. Scouring the word of God and becoming dependent in prayer takes too long. It’s too slow. And we have thousands of books that can help us if we get stuck. And so the authority of God’s word silently fades in our minds as we trade ideas with one another in the hectic days of life on earth. We don’t realize that something invaluable disappears in the process. The voice of God changes from the roar of the lion of Judah to a murmur lost in the crowd. We become subjective without being aware of it. Worse, we take ourselves and Christ’s church off the trail of truth and into the wilderness without realizing what is taking place.

The gaze of modern man is fixed on the world around us. And as we look around, there is much we see that is amazing.

We see buildings of glass and steel rise from the earth and create a skyline that never existed before. From the observation deck of buildings like the Sears Tower (renamed the Willis Tower in 2009) tourists can enjoy a breathtaking view of greater Chicago. We visit with expectant parents who show pictures of their unborn daughter. The full-color image is the byproduct of incredible technology that seems to improve every month. Scientific devices have enabled us to understand and manipulate the created order in ways that were impossible a generation ago. The speculation of those who wrote for Popular Science in the 1980s is reality in our own day.

Those with curious minds can spend their entire lives concentrating on this horizontal view of the created order and not begin to exhaust all there is to see or know. But when our gaze becomes exclusively horizontal, our thinking becomes distorted. We start making decisions limited to the here and now. Our perspective shrinks to the cause and effect relationships in the material world around us. The overriding values that shaped much of Western thinking after the Reformation are absent from our minds. I must deal with personal or social injustice as I see fit. I must derive value from relationships and things according to my own set of values. The only consequences that matter are those that happen to people between birth and death.

In a horizontal world, we become accountable to no one but ourselves. And we become the measure of all things. Perhaps that’s why Omar Thornton justified pulling guns out of his lunch box and killing eight people at his workplace in Manchester, Connecticut after he was forced to resign for theft. In his own mind, he had to set things straight. He had to even whatever imbalance he felt was shaping the circumstances around him.

Omar’s response is more extreme than most. But the thinking behind it is a reflection of a culture where horizontal thinking prevails. When we don’t have a vertical glance, we assume the responsibility to draw conclusions and take actions based on our personal perspective of life.

The prophet Jeremiah gave his culture a healthier perspective. Through him God said, “My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, not is their sin concealed from my eyes.” (See Jeremiah 16:17.) Without this perspective, and this accountability, we act on the basis of sideways glances. We ignore the vertical. So we play God with one another and assume an authority that doesn’t belong to us. In extreme cases, like Omar’s, it justifies taking a life. In more typical cases it involves ‘fixing’ the problems and problem people around us by using wealth and power in ways we deem useful. Our intentions may be benevolent, but there is a lack of divine accountability in our thinking that distorts what we think and do. There is no counterbalance to our egos as we make suggestions, coerce, manipulate, direct, compel, organize, and influence others in our effort to bring what we consider balance and equity to our world.

The vision of a holy God to whom we are all accountable brings an essential vertical perspective to the way we look at life and the way we make choices. It’s only then that we serve a higher purpose and discard our ambitions to behave like a god in shaping the world into the mold of our preferences. When we look up we are forced to return to the role of creature, and submit our wayward egos to an agenda that is higher and holier than our own.

Different world views handle the contrast between good and bad in different ways.

In Chinese philosophy the polar and contrary forces that are interconnected and interdependent are pictured as the yin and the yang. This is part of the Taoist world view that views all that exists as natural and complementary.

Buddhism, for example, is world-denying in relation to evil. This approach was imperfectly popularized in George Lucas’ Star Wars movies as a force that had a good side and a dark side. To accommodate Western values, the good side was supposed to win in the end. Victory of good over evil is not essential to classical Buddhism, however.

In Buddhist thought, both evil and good are inherently part of reality. Both are ultimately of little importance. Attaining a personal state of perfection supersedes them both. The personal goal is not to fight for any kind of moral good, but to shed all desire and attain a state of Nirvana, where even the self eventually disappears like a droplet in an ocean.

Christians sometimes unwittingly incorporate bits and pieces of Eastern thought into their understanding of good and evil. We can question whether the words themselves are artificial and unnecessary. We might be tempted to discount the use of the word evil. We may even view attempts to fight evil as foolish. If evil as an essential part of reality, perhaps opposing it is as foolish as attempting to fight gravity or declaring war on the color blue. How dare we criticize anyone’s moral choices? Maybe genocide and the degradation of women is right for another culture.

Some in our culture seek to hold to a difference between good and evil, but reduce the conflicts to a small of a scope as possible. Some of the zeal to redefine most behavior as legitimate follows this line of thinking. If there are few things that are truly wrong or immoral, then the conflict between good and evil is less of an issue. Legalizing drugs, removing speed limits, lowering the drinking age, legitimizing all kinds of sexual relationships, and erasing as may restrictions on personal choice as possible becomes attractive. The battle with evil is easier because there is now less to fight. And the island of non-compromise loses more and more real estate to the waves of relativism with each passing day.

The Bible insists that evil is not a natural part of the world. It is a consequence of the historic fall and a broken relationship between God and man. Human rebellion not only impacted the personal relationship between God and the human race that was created in his image, but it also changed the order of the created universe. Romans 8:22 states, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth together until now.” The fall thus brought mankind and the physical world into an unnatural state.

From a biblical perspective, evil is not an essential part of reality, but an intruder. Therefore we have good reasons to resist it, combat it, and deal with those who would perpetuate it. And because of the revelation of God we can understand the trans-cultural principles that define God’s prescriptive moral decrees. We are not to accommodate evil as one would adapt to less oxygen in a city 6,000 feet above sea level. We have a mandate and an obligation to fight the flawed ideas, values and practices that devalue and damage the human race and the world in which we live.

Last night I caught pieces of a Nova program about the Bible. The photography and graphics were well done. It was a very polished presentation in many ways. One of the underlying assumptions in the narrative of the program related to history and myth.

Archaeologist had discovered a stone in a rather remote area in western Israel that contained a primitive Hebrew alphabet. It appears to be around the time of 1,000 B.C. The experts noted that according to the Bible, David ruled the united kingdom around that time. Because they found evidence of Hebrew writing in that general period, the writers of the show concluded that it was possible that David was an historic figure. He may really have existed. There were some scholars who doubted that King David ever lived, but to their credit the producers opened the door to the possibility that he was a real person.

Unfortunately, they dismissed most of the history before 1,000 B.C. as myth and legend. And the reason for their doing so is that they do not possess significant amounts of written evidence (outside of the Bible) about earlier events, especially those of Genesis. This dismissal of the early parts of scripture rests on two unfounded assumptions. First, it assumes that biblical texts are fraudulent until ‘proven’ otherwise. One would wonder if they would bring the same level of skepticism to documents from other cultures. Some historians might. But the presumption of deliberate error and historic misrepresentation in the Hebrew texts does not prove anything. It’s an arbitrary assumption that is neither scientific nor scholarly.

For example, my grandmother told a story about her childhood and life in the great depression. The story, that includes details about several neighbors and family members, is not recorded in any surviving newspapers of the day. That generation is now deceased. I can presume that the story is completely fiction and that it never happened because I have no external evidence. And there is always the possibility that grandma was making up things to amuse the grandchildren. But she did not share the story as anything but fact, and her character was such that her words were extremely reliable.

In a similar way, the Old Testament has consistently demonstrated its reliability in accurately describing the history of Israel from 1,000 B.C. onward. Archaeological finds and records in Egypt, Babylon and other ancient cultures echo much of the same historical accounts we find in the pages of the Old Testament.

We don’t find stories of dragons giving birth to island nations, a pantheon of deities interacting with humans in sexual ways, or directions to worship inanimate parts of the cosmos (like the sun). Instead, we see a simple account of the origin of the race of man as a special creation of a personal God. Our modern troubles are explained because we learn that we are indeed a race in rebellion against a perfect and loving God. The central struggle we face is our broken moral nature, not anything physical. We have an immaterial part that will continue after our physical demise. These core realities are disclosed in the context of the Genesis narrative so that we understand where we came from and the nature of our primary struggles in life. The account explains who we are.

More than that, the New Testament goes on to describe the future we can enjoy. By voluntarily returning to our role as subjects of God who accept his sacrifice in Christ to reconcile us to him, we can experience harmony and life, both now and after our death. If we choose to stay in our state of alienation and reject his provision of forgiveness and mercy, we will remain separate forever. We have value and purpose. We have hope.

Weak religions cannot handle the marketplace of ideas. Because they fear the open and honest exchange of ideas, they often suppress the expression of competing notions in the public square. This past week, for example, Afghan authorities suspended two Christian foreign aid groups on the suspicion that they may have attempted to win converts to Christianity. The deputy director of the Afghan government admitted that they did not have evidence of any proselytizing. But the charge in itself was sufficient for action.

When Christianity is practiced in accordance with the moral and ethical principles of the New Testament, it does not fear pluralism or competition for the hearts and souls of men. One of the wonderful byproducts of biblical Christian thought in the life of a nation is the freedom of religious dialogue. When the foundational concepts of Christianity are applied to their logical ends, freedom of speech and freedom of religious belief are encouraged. This includes the freedom to reject or accept the teachings of the Bible about the person and work of Christ.

In the early church there was a robust presentation of the claims of Christ in a culture that did not always welcome this message. Despite opposition and death—including such notable early leaders as Stephen and James—the members of the early church put forth their claims about Christ for others to consider. (See Acts 12.) Because the church had no power, there was no coercion.

Unfortunately, when later generations drifted from their biblical roots, they eventually became as oppressive as some Islamic states are today. Biblical Christianity slowly morphed into a faith built on power rather than truth.

The situation progressed in the fourth century, when the church became entangled in the state after Constantine. Abandoning a biblical worldview, the growing Roman Catholic Church traded truth for political power and lost its spiritual moorings. It became powerful, but largely functioned as a secular institution rather than a reflection of the teachings of Christ.

Skeptics of modern Christianity—and of modern evangelicalism in particular—sometimes condemn the children for the sins of the father. One of the challenges of Christ-followers today is to demonstrate that we are not oriented around power but around truth. In a representative republic like America we ought to speak out and argue for biblical morality, but our primary objective must be the declaration of the truth rather than the pursuit of power.

We can compete in the marketplace of ideas, as the church did in the first century, because the truth has a compelling attraction of its own. There is no need to dress it up, apologize for it, or infuse it with politically correct jargon. Theological liberalism attempts to shape the message of scripture after the culture of the day. Such efforts succeed in making the message irrelevant, since it only echoes the culture and does not reflect the unique worldview found in the teachings of Christ. Evangelical accommodation can make the same mistake. It can give the farm away in smaller pieces, but in the end, there is nothing left.

Paul understood this temptation. He wrote, “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (See 1 Corinthians 1:23.) The biblical message is true, though it contains much that people from any culture can object to. It’s blunt about issues like sin, personal responsibility, the call to holiness, and the summons to supreme loyalty to Christ. But he continued to share the unvarnished truth around the Mediterranean to all who would listen.

If the truth of the New Testament message is what Jesus called it to be, we don’t need to reformulate it to make it impactful. To share it with love and live it with integrity is all that is called for.

Secular thought seeks to drive any religious beliefs from the public square, especially when government policy is concerned. It argues that this is done in line with the constitution to provide a separation of church and state. The argument ignores the historical reality that the founders were attempting to keep the state out of the church—not to neutralize the influence of the church upon the state. The European roots of the American Colony point back to an age where kings dictated religious policies. They controlled the religious affiliation and practices of their subjects. Unfortunately, we are seeing some movement in that same direction, with taxation and regulation are the instruments of conformity rather than the decrees of a royal ruler.

It does not look like there will be much sympathy for the evangelical world view from the Supreme Court in the future. If Elena Kagan is confirmed to replace John Paul Stevens, it will mark the first time in the history of the court that no Protestants sit on the bench. I’m not for quotas based on race, gender, or religion, but the historic shift is nevertheless significant. It means that no one with a reformation world view is part of that elite judicial process. Some judges who have worn the ‘Protestant” label did not bring any reformation values to their role, so the term itself guarantees nothing. But the potential absence of any who identify, even minimally, with that outlook suggests that a view of reality reflected by the Reformation understanding of life and God will be less evident in the immediate future.

None of this nullifies the ability of Christ followers to be the salt and light Jesus says we are. It does not excuse us from the call to express our faith and present our world view in the market place of ideas. It may make the task more cumbersome at times, but history reminds us that the expansion of the gospel is not conditioned on the blessing of the secular rulers of the day. Christ followers have the privilege and honor of declaring the wonder of Christ and his teaching in any social environment, and to point people to the unchanging realities that make life really work. In Acts 4:20, the disciples respond to their leaders by announcing, “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

The Associated Press reported today that the Supreme Court will look into a dispute between a Christian group and the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. A student group called the Christian Legal Society was denied official recognition by the college. Anyone can attend its meetings. But those who wish to join must sign a statement affirming their adherence to the moral standards of the Bible. Those standards include the conviction that Christians should not engage in sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. The college calls such a belief discriminatory and will not recognize the group for that reason.

The only action the Christian Legal Society needs to take to receive recognition is to abandon the historic understanding of Christian behavior as taught by the Bible. They are not free to embrace their religious beliefs and participate on an equal level with other campus groups.

The stance of the college is another example of how unwelcome a Christian world view can be in a place where open-mindedness and a generous liberal spirit of inquiry and learning are supposed to prevail. It unmasks the intolerance that masquerades as academic fairness and mandates that the values chosen and blessed by the current leadership of the institution trump all others. Oddly enough, the beliefs of the Christian Legal Society are in accord with the theological consensus in 1878 when Hastings College was founded. In the hubris of modern academic thought, however, the enlightened view of 2010 can have no competition. Such archaic ideas as those held by the CLS must be marginalized or driven from the campus. The prevailing view must be enforced.

Christianity will always be a threat to societies and social engineers. It dares to believe that we are significant moral creatures who were designed by a creator to whom we are accountable. He has revealed truth about our nature and purpose. He defines the parameters for life that produce justice, respect, goodness, loyalty, and honor among men and holiness toward God. All who seek to define the human race according to a blueprint of their own subjective design will rail against the Christian perspective because it challenges our attempts to play God.

The town of Ogi suffered great damage from an earthquake in 2005. A humanitarian group, World Vision, organized an effort to assist victims and channel food and raise the living standards of the people in this desperately poor community. This week 10 militants entered the World Vision offices, sprayed gunfire in every direction, and tossed grenades on the floor before leaving. Six were killed and others injured in this act of senseless brutality.

What can explain this kind of behavior? One minute a group of people seeking to do good and improve the lot of their countrymen were alive, and the next their blood stained the walls and floors of a place that had dispensed hope. Their murder created instant orphans, parents without children, and siblings who had lost brothers and sisters. Those families are changed forever. And the community sinks deeper into fear and suspicion and despair.

What can turn the perpetrators from the kind of behavior that relies on raw power to snuff out lives? What can change the heart of someone who delights in magnifying fear by killing, destroying, and then leaving the scene?

Secular humanism might encourage us to educate the perpetrators. If they only understood their full human potential, if they wrestled through the brokenness of their past through therapy and values clarification, perhaps they would change. Their own brokenness is proof that society has parented them poorly. But as their egos are mended, as they awake to the potential of their true humanity, perhaps they will become healthy life giving human beings.

The problem with the secular models is that they do not have an adequate understanding of evil. Whether it happens in an office in a remote city in Pakistan or to an entire population in Cambodia, the perpetuation of senseless, life-destroying, heartless and unmerciful acts cannot be adequately explained from a secular perspective.

The God of the Bible insists that the moral wreckage of the world begins in the human heart. There is a component in each of us that is warped, twisted, defiled, and dangerous. We can be bitter, unforgiving, illogical, selfish, and merciless. Such tendencies can be exacerbated by events and conditions in our culture, but they do not start there. Such realities emerge from the heart. Jesus said, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.” (See Luke 6:45.) Though our behaviors vary in degree, they all bubble up from the same polluted stream that flows inside all the offspring of Adam and Eve. When we face that reality, we begin to see our need for an outside solution—the supernatural help that God offers through a living relationship with Christ. The ‘bad’ news can lead to a better tomorrow because it points to a transformation that is more substantial than the cosmetic efforts of disciplines like sociology and psychology.

Stories of inhuman brutality and destruction also point to the amazing mercy of God, who does not fry the planet in a second of justifiable disgust, but instead offers the gift of his Son to reconcile millions over the course of history to a restored relationship with himself. In scripture we have both an understanding of the nature of evil and a personal remedy that brings us hope for this world and beyond.

When a shark attacks a swimmer, it generally makes the news. Warnings go out in the area and swimmers and surfers are reminded to be careful and avoid situations where they might be attacked. Any death or life-threatening incident reminds us that the oceans of the world are not 100% safe.

We can adopt two responses to the reality that an environment like the ocean is not guaranteed to be safe. One option is to avoid the ocean—or any part of it that is deep enough for a shark to swim in. (Here in Iowa we don’t have any fear of shark attacks, being about as far away from the ocean as you can in the continental United States.) The other option is to enjoy the benefits of the ocean, but to do so carefully. It means being alert, wise, and responsible when we are in the ocean.

Most of us would deem the second option to be better. It would be a shame to avoid the waters that cover so much of the planet on which we live. Though not safe, the ocean offers majesty, beauty, and opportunity on all kinds of levels.

Another environment that offers promise, but is also dangerous, is the world of men. Jesus told his disciples, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.” (See Matthew 10:16.) Most of us have found the world of man to be much more dangerous than the saltwater beaches of our world. Because of our fallen state, the world of people includes dangers such as betrayal, abuse, deceit, exploitation, anger, animosity, selfishness, theft, revenge, and murder. Our moral brokenness puts sharp edges in our lives that can slice into the lives of those around us. Who of us has not felt the sting of deceit as we have bought into false ideas of those around us about how to make like work, only to discover that these solutions brought new problems into our lives?

Jesus understands the dangers of living in the brokenness of a world such as our own. But he does not call his disciples to retreat from it. In fact, he sends them out into it—out among the sharks. But he gives counsel about how to swim in such places.

In Matthew 10:16 Christ adds, “Therefore be as shrewd as snakes.” It’s an odd metaphor for us in our time. We don’t ascribe wisdom to snakes. Our metaphor prefers to think of owls. (Either image is arbitrary, and reinforces the call to wisdom.) Regardless of the animal you pick for your mental image, the point is the same. Those who are Christ followers are called to be shrewd. The word can be translated sensible, thoughtful, or prudent. It means that we are to think as we swim among the human sharks of our world.

This kind of discernment is not self-created. It comes only from the Spirit who lives in the lives of those who belong to Christ. He is eager to give us insight as to how to conduct ourselves so that we are not devoured, and so that we can be effective ambassadors of the savior we serve. The culture rightly mocks many who claim to follow Christ, but who do so without any kind of thoughtfulness. Their lives are full of bizarre, odd, and self-centered behaviors. They contradict the teachings of Jesus more than they reflect them. And their lives can often resemble a soap opera more than echo a picture of divine redemption.

But sometimes those qualities are mirrored in our own lives–when we are self-sufficient, when we mimic the values of our culture, when we are too impatient to cultivate the mind of Christ. Swimming in dangerous waters is part of the call of Christ to all of his followers. But to do so, we must not neglect the cultivation of spiritual wisdom through careful study of the word, prayer, and the tutoring of the Spirit that brings a depth of thoughtfulness seldom seen in this world.

Cultures sometimes act like arrogant teenagers. Impressed with their own virility, they sometimes tackle life as though their understanding outdistances that of every generation that preceded them.

We live in an age where the wisdom of the past is largely regarded as worthless. We regard our forerunners as inferior thinkers because they did not have the technology to create a microchip, laser level, or a vaccine for polio. How could those who lived in an age without plastics, digital media, and cell phones ever be regarded as equivalent to the generations living today? Their understanding of government was primitive. They enacted laws prohibiting business on Sunday, spitting on the sidewalk, and gambling. They had no understanding of the human genome, the science of psychology, or the sociological studies that we have come to accept as the foundation of human behavior. They were oblivious to the environment, chauvinists, and primitive in their understanding of the scope and complexity of the universe.

This kind of assessment fuels the pride of the modern mind and grounds modern thought in a swampland of dangerous assumptions. It assumes that technology is equivalent to wisdom. In reality, technological advancements demonstrate our ability to pragmatically manage the tangible stuff of life—from silicon to blood chemistry. It does not measure our ability to wisely manage ourselves. This thinking also tends to make normative statistical observations about human behavior in the fields of psychology and sociology. Measuring what we tend to do is not the same as determining what we ought to do. That is the classical “Is…ought” logical fallacy. But at the root of this thinking is a rationalism that views mankind thorough a materialistic lens. If people live longer and more comfort, we believe we are making progress. Such thinking ignores questions related to meaning and purpose that have to be answered before we can begin to understand what “progress” really is.

This history of human thought reflects our tendency to enshrine the wisdom of the moment and disregard what has gone on before us. In one of the earliest books of the bible, the book of Job, the central character of the book reflects on wisdom. Job states that wisdom cannot be found in the land of the living. (See Job 28:13.) After describing it as being more valuable than gold or precious stones, Job asks, “Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell?” (Job 18:20) He notes, “God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.” (See Job 28:23-24.)

One advantage of the Christian world view is that it puts us in touch with the living God, who brings into our pursuit of wisdom a perspective we cannot generate ourselves. As creatures created by him for a purpose of his choosing, we have a way to measure progress that is more enduring than the cultural whims that prevail in the days in which we live. We have a standard that wrestles with issues of the heart rather than the superficial stuff that future generations may regard as primitive advancements in human evolution. And we have a perspective that sees us as significant because we are products of God’s design. Why we exist and how we are to function flows from unchanging realities that are hardwired into each of us. Though we deny some of these realities or try to mask them, God knows that any deviation from them is destructive to us—for it undermines the purpose behind our existence.

The wisdom reflected in the Bible is timeless because it connects us with realities that no cultural consensus can trump. Job was right. A life of significance starts and ends with God. His last words in chapter 28 put it bluntly: “The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.”