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.
