Under your (and their) view you have no hope of ever answering the eternal questions that give meaning to a man's life, to his very existence. That's because man wasn't around when all that happened. One can NEVER reach eternal truth by starting with finite man.
AMEN! Beautifully said.
That's one reason I really enjoy Van Til. Through the Scriptures, he kept stepping back farther and farther as he contemplated the sovereignty of God. Yes, creation is by God. Yes, all life is by God. Yes, breathing is by God. Yes, thinking is by God. Yes, believing is by God. Until he came to the realization that everything is by and for and through the eternal Triune God. We think God's thoughts after Him. This life which appears rational and ordered to our temporal minds is so much less than we imagine while the spiritual realm is so much greater than we can ever know.
Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." -- James 4:13-14"Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:
Sometimes it takes a radical discontinuity to really impress us with the precariousness of this earthly life and how much we depend on God for everything. We were in a bad earthquake a few years ago and our house was destroyed. Just before dawn the earth shook and the walls of our home began to collapse onto my family; I thought we were all dead.
I had never experienced that feeling before; it was unlike anything else. Though it lasted for only seconds, it was pure dread. It was black and hopeless and final. And most of all, it was a feeling of fragility. Everything I knew and was supported by and lived through evaporated in an instant. Life became almost brittle at that moment, sucked dry of everything I thought sustained me. Instead, life was about to shatter into a million pieces under the weight of cement and concrete and wood and plaster, and my family and I were about to be extinguished.
It happened so quickly, you didn't even have time to think about God or Christ or faith or predestination or any of the things you think will fortify you in times of trouble. It was almost existential. It was a flash of instantaneous terror with just enough time to understand you were about to die, and everything about us would be finished forever.
By the grace of God, we were alright and we got through it. For months afterward, I could conjure up that dark feeling again by just putting my head in that momentary place of dread. It was a very physical recollection and it was like experiencing the quake all over again. And every time I remembered that moment, I was then overcome with awe that we had survived, and gratitude for our second chance.
I assumed I would always be able to recall that same feeling, but I was wrong. The ability to re-experience that moment faded until now, I can't do it at all. I can intellectually remember the event; but I cannot work up that feeling of death and finality and fragility.
But I've come to realize those 20 seconds of utter helplessness in the face of black death was more "real" than anything I experience on a daily basis. Our physical lives are a shadow-play, ephemeral and fleeting. We live by the will of another. And everything physical surrounding that one monumental fact is a parade of smoke and vapour and illusions and pretense and our own vain strivings.
We live and breath and have our being by and for and through Jesus Christ. We are spiritual beings, temporarily taking up residence on earth.
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." -- 2 Corinthians 4:16-18"For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
We are certain of this fact by the word of God, confirmed by the Holy Spirit who attests to this "other" reality in our hearts and minds. Therefore, James concludes...
"For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that." -- James 4:15
Or not. It is all of Him.
6,586!?!
“We are spiritual beings, temporarily taking up residence on earth.”
Many times I’ve heard preachers make this observation. It is, post salvation, perhaps the most important reminder we who are in Christ need. For we cannot keep our focus on “whatsover things be of good report” if our focus is on this soon-to-be-destroyed temporal globe.
A.W. Tozer said that a man’s view of God determines how the man lives his life. A man who lives for the world and what it has to offer has the world for his god.
Truly everything in life - both the things which are pleasant to us as well as the things which cause us pain - all work together for the good for we love God and have been called according to His purpose.
Amen, and thank you for your testimony. I can't imagine what a terrifying experience that must have been like, or the sense of loss afterward. I hope you were able to salvage many of the irreplaceables. Thank God that you had Him to lean on. I don't know how lost people get through situations like that. Those experiences really do put our perspectives right, just like you said.