Why doesn't my life make sense?

Wanna play a game?

It works like this: I'm going to list a series of facts, at first blush it's going to look like a random collection of thoughts, history, theology, and plain old nonsense. But every one of the facts has an underlying cause. When you understand the cause, you'll have what you need to understand the book of Revelation. Ready?

1) I once taught a lesson where I started by listing a group of well known Bible scholars. I don't want to post their names on the net, but let's just say that each one of them has written a number of books that you might find in the average Christian book store. Then I asked, "at the height of their ministries, what did each of these men do?" I got some pretty fair guesses, "they all started radio programs." "They all rededicated their lives to Christ," etc. Then I told them the answer -- "They all got divorced."

In spite of professing belief in a book that says "I hate divorce", a book which claims to contain the key for success in personal relationships (Agape love), Christians get divorced just about as frequently as non-Christians.

2) Suicide is a leading cause of death among the young people of today. But go back a hundred years and it's barely even mentioned. Go back two hundred and it's miraculously rare. Any time before Shakespeare's Hamlet and its non-existent in written literature.

The whole existential breakdown bit is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sure, suicides took place to avoid capture at the hands of an enemy, or to avoid an even worse death from something like starvation, but that's not what I'm talking about. The fact is, when it comes to the kind of malaise that surrounds today's youth, the "There's no point to any of this $%&! anyway," mindset, it's a product of the modern age.

It doesn't exist in earlier times. It's like the thought just never occurred to them.

3) Scholars have long questioned whether or not the book of Jonah is a fragment of a longer work. The reason is that the conflict between Jonah and God never gets resolved. Jonah runs, then does what he's supposed to, then sulks about it. God asks him a question about his attitude, and then... nothing. What was his answer? What happened to him after being sent to Nineveh? Where's the ending of the story?

4) The book of Job is just plain weird. In it, Job loses everything over some sort of bar room bet God has with Satan. Job's family is killed, his wealth and reputation lost, his health deteriorates until he just lays in a pile of ashes all day, his skin covered in sores. The only thing he gets to keep through all this is a nagging wife and three "friends" that try and convince him all this is really his own fault.

At the end of all this Job has the gall to question God's goodness. That's it. Nothing more. He doesn't even say, "This proves there is no good God in the universe." He just thinks that maybe God owes him an explanation or something. That little bit of skepticism earns him a spotlight-in-the-face interrogation session from his creator. And from that one might conclude that Job has been terribly wrong about something, and three "friends" who have been debating with him over his attitude toward God might be right. Except that God never says that Job was wrong. On top of that, he demands that the three friends have Job pray on their behalf for God to forgive them (thus placing them under Job's spiritual authority).

Like I said, weird.

5) Most, if not all Christians go through a time when their lives just don't make sense. One moment everything seems so clear; we can see what God is doing and all our choices appear obvious. Then all of the sudden the path disappears. We stop, look behind us, and say to ourselves, "It was here just a minute ago". We begin to question the choices that seemed so clear to us only a short time before.

We think, "I must have sinned," and then we wait and pray and wonder why God is so silent.


So there you have it. Five facts that all have a common cause. Think you know the answer? I'll give you a hint: it's got nothing to do with sin. Well, not directly anyway.

The answer comes in the next post, along with the answer to why the book of Jonah ends the way it does.