Chess, Spider Solitaire and the Rubix Cube, or Deep thoughts on the meaning of the universe.

 

In this blog post I am going to digress, for a moment, from a pursuit of the meaning of my life in order to pursue the meaning of the universe.

 

I realize that's quite a leap--one might even say a significant one--but I can't help but feel there might be a connection between the two in the end. 

 

My pursuit of the meaning of the universe came about the other day while I was pondering the meaning of my life and playing spider solitaire while I waited for inspiration.  I began to ask myself, "What do chess, spider solitaire and the Rubix cube have in common?" 

 

There might be several things those games have in common, but the one that struck me is that they are all concerned with putting things in their proper places--getting things to their perfect final homes.  Finding meaning, order and purpose, you might say.

 

But even more than the pursuit of that ultimate goal, the solutions in all of these puzzles require--yes, require--that things be put in wrong positions before they can work their way toward the proper places. And this is a great frustration.

 

It is very hard for me to deliberately put things where they don't belong. I am so impatient.  When I see a Ten of Clubs that can easily be placed on a Jack of the same suit, my fingers immediately want to put it there. 

 

Never mind that the card has to be placed on a Jack of Diamonds temporarily in order to uncover an Ace of Spades, so the Ace of Spades can be put on the Two of Spades, in order to open up a vacancy in the piles of cards that will give me more maneuverability, which will, in turn, eventually allow me to get that Ten of Clubs on the Jack of Clubs where it belongs.

 

I have to commit what feels like intellectual suicide to move a bishop next to a powerful knight, even though I know it will be safe there, because the rules of the game won't allow the knight to pounce in that direction.

 

And the Rubix cube.  Don't even make me go there.  The mess I have to make in order to put the colors together in the end drives me crazy. I don't do Rubix for that reason. It's not worth the mental anguish in my well-ordered mind.

 

But it has occurred to me that these games, and the strategies necessary to win them, are great metaphors for the complex development of human history. For reasons too numerous to recount here, I am convinced of the existence of a "Grand Chess Player" who not only stands outside the universe, but who created it in the first place.

 

It makes a strange kind of sense to me that this Grand Master is playing the game, according to precise rules He has also created, not only for His pleasure, but also for ours--for the pleasure of us creatures who have been created, in another strange sense, in His image.  

 

In other words, He has planned and created it all for a purpose.  

What if we have been created for pleasure? 

For our pleasure and for His. 

For the pleasure of playing the game, but more importantly, for the pleasure of the fellowship--the companionship that we experience during the playing.

 

This is wonderfully mind-blowing: to see human history as one giant chess game, played out on the board of planet earth, in which an innumerable number of moves have been, and are being made by each of the billions of humans who have lived here over the centuries, in concert with counter-moves being played by the Creator, who sees every possible iteration and knows how the game will finally be won, by Him, for the benefit of everyone who chooses to play the game in partnership with Him.

 

An even more mind-blowing idea, however, is that the Creator of the game, the board, and the humans, chose to make those humans free agents, capable of choosing what moves they want to make, with no regard for, or awareness of, the Grand Design--humans who once were clued into the Grand Design but lost their understanding when they decided they would rather play by their own rules instead of the rules of the Grand Designer.

 

Well, we have not quite lost all of that awareness. Humans do still have some idea of the Grand Design.  They see it in the stars, in the intricate interactions between genes and cells and chemicals and Carbon that make up an infinite variety of life forms living on the great game board, which in itself exhibits order and design.  We see the design, but not the purpose.

 

Well, not quite again. There are useful hints as to the purpose, if not in the miracles of the natural world, then in the supernatural miracles, one of which is the miraculous preservation, in words, of the revelation of purpose--the rules of the game, so to speak--that we call the Bible.

 

This Book is amazing.  I've spent almost 70 years reading and studying it and I still can't get enough. It's as if the words are alive and speaking aloud into my spirit.

 

At the same time the meaning is often elusive, which only drives me to dig deeper. It's like scuba diving in the tropics. You want to go as far as your equipment and your body will allow, even as you realize there are depths you will not be physically able to discover.

 

A superficial reading of this Great Book is deceptive. At first read, the stories and teachings and insights just don't make sense. It's as if you have to layer some of them over others, where they obviously don't belong, in order to uncover clues to greater understanding.

 

Much of the Book is simply an historical narrative--a history of the human race.  As such, it, too, doesn't seem to make sense.  Everything humans have put anywhere seems always to end up in the wrong place. 

 

How can anyone make any sense of David, the great Jewish King and biblical song writer, committing the worst kind of sin imaginable, and then--wait for it--being forgiven when he is repentant? 

 

Or King Saul, David's predecessor, who was put on the throne by the Grand Master, then deposed almost immediately, simply for the error of being too impatient with the time it was taking his opponent--the Great Master, Himself--to make His next move?

 

Mystery beyond mystery.  No wonder the Book is often abandoned by bewildered readers before they even get a start on plumbing its depths. We are too impatient to look behind the confusing, often irrational moves of the players for an underlying strategy. 

 

And we are offended when the strategy sometimes requires pawns to be sacrificed in order to achieve the final victory.  

(Why do I have to give up my dreams in order to fulfill dreams the Creator has for me?)

 

Why do knights need to be placed uncomfortably close to bishops on their way to the front?

(Why do I have to put up with that annoying co-worker, or that annoying spouse?)

 

Why do queens have to fall because they have inadvertently been moved into the line of fire of a forgotten rook or, even more frustrating, been placed in a position that allows them to be eliminated by a pawn in a simple one-space move?

(Why can't you always rescue me from the consequences of my worst stupid mistakes?)

 

But those are the rules, and we are taught that they have to be obeyed if the whole game is to make any sense at all in the end.

 

And what if, from high enough above the chessboard, with a bird's eye view, the whole thing actually does make sense? 

 

In school we learn history taught by human historians. It's a two-dimensional understanding of the narrative. The story is recorded in documents that have been compiled from a few primary, and a lot of secondary, sources, analyzed and interpreted and constantly revised by many human minds over the centuries in an attempt to make some sense of the meaning of it all.

 

But what if the Bible gives us a three-dimensional view of human history? What if it adds another layer of meaning? What if, as it claims to do, the Bible gives us the Creator's perspective on human history and the meaning of the universe? 

 

If there's even a chance that it does, it would make sense to pay more careful attention to the Book, wouldn't it?

 

Because if the Bible really is what it claims to be--the Creator's revelation of Himself to the human beings He has created in His image--then nothing--absolutely nothing--could be a more important intellectual pursuit than this one.