Do you ever read anything that disagrees with your belief? I do. Sometimes I learn some truth they discover but maybe don’t fully recognize; sometimes the futility of their thinking sharpens my own perspective. Take Bertrand Russell for example. The acclaimed anti-Christian believed there is no God, just physical matter. His beliefs as he stated them:
“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins. . . . Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built“(Why I Am Not a Christian, editor Paul Edwards [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957], p. 107).
Only on the foundation of unyielding despair?! Is that how you would like to build your life, on hopelessness and despair? You might as well accept the motto: “Life is hard and then you die.” But we have a quite different conviction. As John Piper shares:
“The vision of life revealed in the Bible explains more of what we experience than the materialism of Bertrand Russell. It makes more sense out of the material and immaterial, the impersonal and the personal, and puts a solid foundation under the soaring eloquence of Russell’s contradictory despair.
Yes, we die. And there is darkness and sorrow. For those who see only that, there will be something much worse than Russell’s “extinction in the vast death of the solar system.” That is not what hell is.
But for believers, the despair and futility are swept away in the dawn of Easter Sunday.” John Piper, Strange Collocation, October 2009.
What is the foundation on which you base your life? I mean your daily life. What is the firm foundation that holds you safe no matter what storms rage around you?
“Nevertheless, God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness.”” 2 Timothy 2:19