Danse Macabre

One of the great tragedies for people living out of relationship with God is that so many of them think they are living a decent moral life, yet are in reality living a life of empty pretense. Paul confronted this situation in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verse 19: "If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." and again in verse 32: "What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" (ESV)

The central theme here, of course, is that there is an eternal dimension to our existence, and that our relationship with God, purchased for us by Christ's redemptive sacrifice, will not just be for the duration of our physical bodies. If this were the case, Paul says, if our relationship with God only lasted for the duration of this physical life and "...all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot." (I Cor. 15:19 in Eugene Peterson's translation The Message). Paul's quotation of Isaiah 22:13 in verse 32 "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," must have resonated with his Greek readers, because it seems to sum up the philosophy of the Epicureans who held that pleasure was the ultimate good and so devoted themselves to hedonism as an expression of that good. Paul seems to say, if there is no eternal dimension to our existence, no resurrection, no hope of eternal relationship with God, forget about Christianity and its moral constraints, forget about any greater meaning that your life might have because it doesn't have any meaning; live for the moment, become a hedonist and indulge yourself!

It's true enough that there are many people today who are doing just that, but I submit that most people are doing something different. They are playing a game, trying to pretend that their lives do have meaning and moral decency, while, in the ultimate tragic irony, they deny the very source of that meaning and are cut off the basis of all moral truth--which is, of course, God.

There's a good reason so many play this game. It takes some doing to completely abandon meaning and morality; man was created by God to desire meaning and morality, to seek God, to be in relationship with God. In times past we've called this the conscience. C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about it in Mere Christianity calling it the law of human nature, that innate sense of right and wrong that nobody seems to be able to live up to. The Apostle Paul spoke of this in his lecture to the Athenians, "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him..." (Acts 17:26-27 ESV), and again in his letter to the Romans, "When the gentiles, who have no knowledge of the Law, act in accordance with it by the light of nature, they show that they have a law in themselves, for they demonstrate the effect of a law operating in their own hearts. Their own consciences endorse the existence of such a law, for there is something which condemns or excuses their actions," (Romans 2:14-15 Phillips translation).

And this is the dilemma most of humanity finds itself in: people want to think of themselves as fundamentally good, they want to think that their lives have meaning; yet due to the fallen nature of humanity, they do not want to submit themselves to Christ's lordship. Many even deny the existence of God while paradoxically validating at least some of the moral code which only derives its authority from God.

If John Lennon's song Imagine is to be taken seriously, there are apparently some who yearn for a meaningless, moral-free life--"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today ..." --but for the most part I believe this is adolescent self-pity expressing itself in a misguided attempt to be profound. Most people are trapped in the vacuous charade of pretending that their lives are connected to some greater meaning and moral value even as they disavow the origin of their existence, the source of its meaning and the authority of all moral truth, a self-delusional danse macabre that will result in their own eternal separation from God.