Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. A few weeks ago, a self-described fitness enthusiast described life today this way: quote, work a desk job, grind nine to six, lift weights to feel something, marry someone beautiful enough, move to suburbs, get a dog, have two kids, drive an American SUV to Costco on weekends, buy a house you'll never finish paying off, call it happiness. Is this the dream? or just the life we were sold.
Well, the responses to his formerly cult tweet were varied. Many responded that he should stop complaining. After all, objectively speaking, the world, especially the western part of it, is way better off than it's ever been. One scientist noted that people used to live an average of 35. Half of all kids died in childhood.
Even minor infections would often lead to death and starving was a common human experience. As my colleague Shane Morris has often observed, just visit any old cemetery. It'll be full of tombstones with only one year inscribed for both the birth and the death year. Though miscarriages are still tragically common, deaths in infancy? They're increasingly rare.
It was just only less than a century ago that nearly everyone would have had one or more siblings die in childhood. Today, our biggest health problems come from obesity, not starvation. Modern medicine, dentistry, technology, indoor plumbing, all kinds of other things prevent and protect us from the diseases, the calamities, the accidents that did end previous generations. On the other hand, a different doom and gloom, the kind that's reflected in the X post above, still resonates with many people. In fact, his post sounded an awful lot like a work of poetry written about 3,000 years ago by a man of wealth and power who also learned that having it all just isn't all it's cracked up to be.
That man's words are still often quoted, perhaps most famously by the Birds and their song Turn, Turn, Turn or the Dave Matthews Band and Tripping Billies. Ecclesiastes is easily the most depressing book in Holy Scripture. The bulk of the text is a meditation on how meaningless life is, and then you die. The first chapter immediately declares that life is pointless, Vanity of vanity, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities.
All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? I've seen everything that's done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity, striving after wind. This preacher has tried a life of wisdom, a life of pleasure, a life of wealth, and none was satisfying. Everyone dies.
All of it seems pointless. Everything we attempt to live for or build our lives around. will eventually turn to dust within just a few generations. and no one will remember our names for very long. With language both stark and hopeless, the preacher sounds like someone who has lost faith in God.
However, his words actually describe life without God. Because all the things he listed, money, pleasure, wisdom, none of these things are bad. They're blessings given by God for our use and even for our joy. But none of these things can bring us the peace, the meaning, and fulfillment for which we long. Much, much later in his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo would describe why.
You've made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless. Till they find their rest in me. You see, when people complain that this world is broken and unfulfilling, they're not wrong, but they are missing that God's good gifts are instead meant to point us to the giver of those gifts. They cannot fulfill the human heart in and of themselves because the hole in our hearts is God-sized, not stuff-sized. We were made for bigger things.
We were, in fact, made for God himself. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you find Breakpoint a helpful part of your daily worldview diet, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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