Don't Escape Your Futility

Yeah, it's been a month. Sorry.

As kids, we were told at one point or another that we were special. This is not a wholly false statement, but it may depending on what exactly it is you mean. That sounds confusing, so let me explain some other stuff and then come back.

To have intrinsic value means that something has value just because it 'is.' For instance, dollar bills are not intrinsically worth a dollar; they are a nearly worthless piece of paper. However, a dollar bill is worth a dollar because we say it is, assuming that somewhere there is a piece of gold that backs up the value written on it. That's why bills are called bills, or legal tender, or bank notes. A piece of gold worth a dollar is worth a dollar. There is nothing the gold represents; it is the 'end' of the transaction.

So, when I say that it may be false to say that you and I are special, I mean to say that it depends on what you mean by special: are people valuable just because they 'are,' or because they are assigned value by something outside of themselves? I think, then, that the real question is this: what actually matters?

My contention is that money, food, comfort, education, nature, rocks, planets, and, yes, even people do not intrinsically matter. Not in some weird Fight Club sense where people should live in a fully socialist/anarchist society, but in the sense of actual existence. Have you ever thought about why we think we are valuable? I think that the answer here is that we vitally misunderstand who God is and who we are.

James 4 says this:

^"1 What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? ² You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.⁴ You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: “He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us”? ⁶ But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” ⁷ Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.⁹ Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.¹⁰ Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

¹¹ Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it. ¹² There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor?

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” ¹⁴ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” ¹⁶ But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin."

Too often we trade a correct view of who God is for idols of many varieties, especially ourselves. What about us is pleasing to God? What can a mortal man do that would add to or benefit God or His actions? The short answer is that there is nothing intrinsically in us that we have to offer God. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, when James talks about how our lives are vapors, he is referring to Ecclesiastes  wherein Solomon declares that "all is futility, a striving after wind." (Ecc. 1)

Here are some true things about us and about God:

1. People have no worth if God does not give them worth. Clearly God, the only entity that intrinsically matters in all of reality, finds us valuable: He paid for us with his own life.

2. People have no righteousness if God does not give them His righteousness. I think fully going into this point would require six years of writing, but I'm assuming that it isn't a stretch to claim that God is fully righteous and we are not, thereby making Him separate (qodesh, or holy) from us.

3. God can only be pleased with perfect righteousness, and can therefore only please himself. See verse 5 above or Phil. 2:13.

4. It is good that a person remember their intrinsic value and assigned value before God, who is not some plush doll in the clouds, but in fact the most terrifying and most delightful entity that exists. 

Need a dose of humility? Take a second to actually meditate on the ridiculous idea of who we think we are in the scope of who God is.