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The Bible and Life's Big Questions
By Shiao Chong, Christian Reformed Campus Minister
& Director of Leadership, Culture &
Christianity
Serving at York University, Toronto
www.logoscrc.ca |
chaplain@logoscrc.ca
Life is bound to throw us some big or tough
questions sooner or later. Questions like: Who am I? Where are we? What’s wrong
with the world? Does God exist? I call these basic belief questions. They are
basic because the answers you give to them are foundational for how you view the
world, how you see reality, and how you may choose to live your life. They are
belief questions because ultimately I don’t think you can ever prove them
scientifically or even purely on rational grounds. Ultimately, you have to
accept them by faith. And how well these answers guide you through life, and how
well they help you answer other questions that life throws at you, determines if
you keep believing in them or change them or discard them for other answers.
Most religions provide answers to these basic belief questions. The Christian
Bible has some answers too. Here, I want to introduce to you the Bible’s answers
to some of life’s big questions. The following is meant only as an introduction
and not meant to be comprehensive. And please also note that this is my
interpretation of what the Bible’s answers may be, although I believe it is
rather sound.
Who Is God?
The Bible does not ask if God exists. The opening words of the Bible are: “In
the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . . ” (Genesis 1:1.
All Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible).
The Bible assumes that God exists and goes on telling us what this God does and
what God is like. Why? Because to ask “does God exist?” assumes that we can
answer it by our own devices, often by our human reason. That may be typical of
our modern self-confidence but the Bible has a more humble view of human
abilities and of human reason.
For the Bible, God is not a ‘what’ but rather a ‘who’. The Bible primarily sees
God as a personal being. God is not a force, or some kind of energy, or an
impersonal being. God is like a person. We can have a relationship with God.
Remember, God is like a person. We do not know what God actually is.
This is because the Bible also suggests that God is eternal (always existed
without beginning or end), all-powerful, all-knowing and incomprehensible.
Incomprehensible means that God is too ‘big’ for our minds to understand
completely. We cannot know everything about God. We can only know that which God
revealed to us. Because if we can totally understand God with our human reason
and our human language can fully capture what God is, then I doubt if that God
is truly all-powerful or eternal. In short, a God that we can fully know and
fully explain through human language is probably not God at all but merely
something from our imaginations.
The Bible also says that “God is spirit,” (John 4: 24) that is, God is not a
physical being like you and me with physical bodies. The Bible’s emphasis,
however, is on God’s loving character. The Bible says that “God is love” (1 John
4: 8) meaning that being loving is very much part of who God is. In fact, the
whole Bible is like a big story that tells us how much God loves us and cares
for us.
Where Are We?
The Bible says that we live in a reality that is created by God. Everything that
exists, physical or spiritual, exists because God brought it into being. God not
only created all things but also sustains them. This means that the whole world
and universe are in some way dependent on God to continue existing and
functioning. We can say that the world is created as ‘being-in-relationship’
with God. Being somehow related to God is part of the basic make-up of the
world. In fact, all things in creation are ‘beings-in-relationship’ to each
other and to God.
This ‘being-in-relationship’ is not characterized by a fusion or union of
things; it is not as if each individual thing in reality is like a drop of water
in an ocean. Neither is it like a beach with pebbles of sands lying next to each
other; ‘being-in-relationship’ means more than mere proximity.
‘Being-in-relationship’ means that each individual unit in reality is
interdependent on each other and on God (God is the only one not dependent on
anything else). It is like a spider’s web: each strand is uniquely individual
yet all are related to other strands and affects each other.
The Bible also says that the world and everything in it was created good. This
material world we live in, our bodies, our bodily desires and needs, including
the need for sex and food, are good things. These good things in God’s creation
are to be enjoyed and respected. We do not need to shy away from them. It is
wrong to think that any particular thing in creation is purely bad. All things
were good at the beginning when God created them. Nature and the living
environment with all its creatures are good. This physical world, our physical
bodies, is good.
But we see today that many things are wrong with our world: sickness, natural
disasters, the environmental crisis, etc. We will see later what went wrong.
Who Are We?
According to the Bible, human beings were created “in the image of God” (Genesis
1: 27). This means that we are created to have a relationship with God, to love
God. Like the rest of the world, we too are ‘beings-in-relationship’ with God.
Being related to God is part and parcel of who we are, of our basic make-up as
human beings. If our relationship to God is distorted, our humanity is
distorted. Like an image in a mirror, that image will only continue to exist if
the mirror stands in a proper relation to the object it is reflecting. If the
mirror turns either away or to a different angle other than directly facing the
object, the image in the reflection will either be distorted or disappear. Thus,
being created “in the image of God”, humanity’s relationship to God is closely
tied to humanity’s existence and nature.
We are not only called to have a relationship with God, God also calls us to
take care of the world and to cultivate it. In the Bible’s creation narrative,
when God created the first man, Adam, God “took the man and put him in the
garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2: 15). Just as parents should
try to help their children develop to their full potential, we are called by God
to help God’s creation develop to its fullest potential. We try to help creation
bear its potential ‘fruits’. Because, in doing so, we also develop our own
potential as humans in God’s image.
We are intrinsically related to creation or the environment—according to the
Bible, God created Adam out of the dust of the earth. So, just as a distortion
in our relation to God will affect our humanity, a distortion in our relation to
creation will affect our humanity too. Although we are beings-in-relationship
with both God and creation, our relationship to God is the first and foremost
link. Our relation to God is the basis for our relation to creation, as it is
God who created both us and creation and established that bond between the two
of us. Unlike creation, God does not need us. God can sever ties with both
creation and us and still be perfectly God. But neither creation nor us can
disrupt our relationships to God or to each other without dismantling what makes
us human or creature.
Secondly, we are subordinate to God but in relation to creation God placed us in
a position of authority. God commanded us to “have dominion” over creation
(Genesis 1: 28). But many Christians have misunderstood ‘dominion’ to mean that
we can exploit creation any way we like. Rather, ‘dominion’ means we have a duty
to explore, develop and enjoy nature’s potentials in kind, responsible and
loving ways. All our relationships are defined by love, a love that privileges
the interests of others over self-interest. Thus, just as God exercises his
authority over us in love, we exercise our authority over creation in loving
ways.
God created us to find our fulfillment in loving communion with him, with each
other, and with creation. To be truly human is to have harmonious being-with
God, humans and creation. We are not merely human beings. More accurately, we
are human co-beings. We are not autonomous, independent of others. Neither are
we dependent on others to the point that our individuality is an illusion. We
are interdependent creatures made for loving relational existence.
What’s Wrong with the World?
According to the Bible, what went wrong with God’s good creation was that human
beings did not want to love God, and did not obey God’s call to love and care
for the world or for each other. Humanity decided to be their own god: we decide
what we can or cannot do. We, the human race, wanted to be autonomous, to be
independent of God, to decide for ourselves what is good and evil, rather than
relying on God’s parameters for good and evil (Genesis 3). Like the ripples in a
pond caused by a thrown stone, human rebellion affected all of creation: nature,
the animal kingdom, and the environment. Everything in God’s good creation was
tainted by this rebellion. Remember the mirror image? We can say that what
happened was that instead of being turned towards God, the mirror (us) has
turned away from God.
Because of this turning away from God, evil came into the world. Because our
relation to God is the ultimate relationship that links us to creation and to
ourselves, the world’s perfect communion, perfect co-being, is now distorted or
twisted. And each human generation continues to live in rebellion and
independence of God.
We, humanity, turned against God’s creation. We tyrannize and exploit it to our
own ends. In turn, creation turned against us. Hostility and violence, not love,
marked the relationship between humans and nature. ‘Thorns’, not ‘fruits’, is
now the dominating image of humanity’s relationship to creation (see Genesis 3:
17-18).
We turned against each other. We have gender conflicts, racial and ethnic
conflicts, class conflicts and ideological conflicts. Like a spider’s web that
begins to unravel when the strands begin to break and untangle from each other,
we have begun the process of unraveling the fabric of our own lives and reality
when we said “No” to God, the crucial thread that holds all together.
We have brought evil and pain upon ourselves. We
the human race are killing and destroying ourselves, by destroying the
relationships that sustain our co-being, our very existence as humanity.
What’s the Solution?
Just as sick persons with heart problems cannot perform by-pass heart surgery on
themselves, we cannot cure the evils and pains we have caused to ourselves.
Because of our rebellion, humanity is dying a slow and painful death. Witness
how we kill each other in wars, how we disseminate hate against each other, how
we treat each other as objects, how our social institutions de-humanize us, how
our tyranny of creation has caused an environmental crisis that can ultimately
destroy humanity. Our history is a history mostly of violence and oppression.
But God did not give up on us. God chose to save us by entering our pain, by
entering into human history. God became a human being to suffer along with us,
to truly feel our pain, and to die our death in order to heal us. The Bible says
that a first century Jew, Jesus Christ, was God in the flesh. A teacher,
prophet, and miraculous healer, he befriended the poor, outcast, sick, oppressed
and marginalized. And though he was innocent, he was unjustly condemned,
tortured and executed on a cross (an ancient Roman method of execution called
crucifixion). Through Jesus, God felt and endured our pains, our sufferings and
our deaths. But God also made Jesus alive again, raised him up from the dead. In
this way, God provided a way out of our spiritual death. Our slow death is no
longer the final word.
Jesus maintained perfect relations with God, with humanity and with creation.
Yet, he was destroyed. Yet, his perfect communion with God was broken. On the
cross, he was alienated from God, so much so that Jesus cried out, “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 46) On the cross, people alienated
themselves from him, mocking him, killing him, exploiting him, denying him, and
cursing him. On the cross, Jesus was alienated from creation, lifted up from the
earth, his head crowned by thorns, thorns that symbolize the conflict between
creation and humanity after the first rebellion. On the cross, Jesus finished
for us, completed for us, the self-destruction that we began. Jesus said on the
cross, “It is finished” (John 19: 30). We would have (metaphorically) ended up
on the cross ourselves if we, humanity, continued down the path of our slow,
self-destructing deaths. But God pre-empted us in order to save us. God went
there first, in Jesus Christ. God entered the place of our ultimate alienation
(from God, from humanity and from creation), so that by bringing Jesus
miraculously back from that point of no return, he carved a way out of that path
of self-destruction. God went to and suffered our ultimate deaths, so that we
don’t have to.
The Bible says that God intends to heal the world by restoring it back to its
original good state before our rebellion, by turning the mirror back to God, so
to speak, back to ‘being-in-relationship’ with God. If we trust in Jesus (God),
believe in him and love him, we identify ourselves with Jesus and begin a
relationship with him. And since Jesus is God in the flesh, we are also
restoring our relationship with God. Through Jesus, God restores humanity’s
relationship with God. Through Jesus, God restores our relationship with each
other. Through Jesus, God restores our relationship with creation. Through Jesus
Christ “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or
in heaven, by making peace through the blood of [Jesus’] cross” (Colossians 1:
20).
The Bible ends with the promise that in the future, all these will be fulfilled,
symbolized by God’s bringing a heavenly city to the earth, a perfect communion
of spiritual and physical, a perfect being-in-relationship of God, humanity and
the world (see Revelation 21). This restoration of the world does not mean that
we will return to a “primitive” state before the advance of science and
technology. The Bible started with the story of the Garden of Eden (paradise)
but it ends with a vision of the heavenly city called the New Jerusalem. It
begins with a garden but ends with a city. The relationships will be restored
but the good developments in humanity and creation will be preserved.
Until then, we are caught in a world pulled in two opposing directions. There
are two choices, two paths. The way of life (to be-with and commune with God,
humans and creation) or the way of death (to deny communion). The way of love—to
care, protect and nurture each other—or the way of hate—to oppress, marginalize
and exploit others for oneself. These two directions are in tension in every
aspect of life and reality. In choosing the way of Christ, we are heeding the
call of God, the call of love and life. In choosing to follow this way in all
areas of life, we reflect in the here and now the fulfillment of that promise of
perfect communion to come. This way, the way of Christ, should be tried.
If You Want to Know More . . .
Please feel free to ask your Christian friends. You can use this as a discussion
tool with them. Or you can contact me, Shiao Chong via email:
chaplain@logoscrc.ca
Copyright © Shiao C. Chong 2007
This article can be copied and distributed freely provided its content has not
been changed. This resource cannot be sold or distributed for financial gain. It
must be free. And it must be unedited. Otherwise, the author reserves all rights
to the resource.
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