This week, as we consider the consequences of worldviews, good and bad, we have considered origin (where did we come from) and meaning (why are we here). Professing atheist author, Aldous Huxley wrote, “I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world … is concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially a liberation, sexual and political.”[1] We sometimes speak of how ideas have consequences. It is also true that motivations can lead to ideas. Huxley desired to live politically and sexually “liberated”, which motivated him to develop a worldview, a set of ideas of how the world works, that would allow him to fulfill these desires. In our day, one popular phrase is “my truth”. A person speaks of living out “my truth”, finding “my truth”, or living authentically according to “my truth”. It is a very strange saying when you give it a second thought. Truth stands outside of my feelings; I cannot personally assert a claim to truth simply because it seems right to me. How I feel about “2+2” doesn’t matter – it is universally equal to 4! We submit to truth or we don’t. To say something is true is to assert it is objectivelytrue.
Contrary to Huxley’s desires, God’s objective truth asserts that life does have meaning and as such how we live is important to him. One of the defining attributes of God is his holiness. It is continually proclaimed around the throne, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty” (Rev 4:8). Soberingly, his call to us is the same, “Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 11:44; 1 Peter 2:15,16). Thankfully, there is more to the Story of Everything!
[1] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means(London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp270, 273
Christ Connection:
Holiness is not something we can achieve in our own strength. But take courage, in Christ, we are made acceptable to God (Ephesians 2) and by the work of his grace in our lives we are being remade into the very image of God – the image we marred with our sin. Praise God!
“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.” (Rom 8:29,30; emphasis added)