Why It Does Not Seem Relevant
Why do I have to learn this?” “What good is this going to do me in
life?” are common complaints heard in
school. We have all probably said
something similar several times. “I am
going to be an artist. Why do I have to
learn algebra?” “What good does Latin
do for a working man?” So it goes.
We often hear the same thing in church. “Our minister just isn’t relevant.” “The church does not meet the needs of the
people.”
Honeybees will drive intruders from the hive, and
men are willing to expel whatever they cannot fit into their world. The reason
things do not make sense to us is often because they do not fit into the world
as we see it. Our world is not large
enough to encompass many of the things our elders thought were good for
us.
“It must be relevant,” intones the educator, the
politician, and the theologian, often without the foggiest idea of what
“relevant” is. Therein lies the
problem. It might very well be that the
most relevant things seem to be intruders into our world. What a strange man Noah was, building a
boat out on the dry land. How strange
was John the Baptist!
How can I know what is relevant? For the men of Noah’s day to see the
relevance of what Noah was doing, there would have to be an expansion of their
world. They would have to accept the
idea of a God who exercises authority over the world, and Who holds men accountable
for what they do. This would have involved
the story of Creation and the Fall—stories that by then were probably
considered dim and ancient myths that only a few strange fellows like
Methuselah, Noah, and Enoch believed. (Can you hear the sophisticate saying,
“Whatever happened to that funny guy Enoch?
Nobody pays any attention to the things he talked about anymore. Talk about being irrelevant. The economy is good and, besides, we have a
party to attend this evening”?)
If your world is only large enough to including
eating and drinking, marriage and giving in marriage, it may be very difficult
to make sense of a man like Noah.
Our fundamental problem is not meaninglessness, but
sin. Everything done by Noah, John the
Baptist, and others like him makes sense if we know one thing: the Bible is
true and the God of the Bible is the only living God. Once we accept that fundamental truth, the Bible becomes very
relevant and meaningful.
Rationalism does not provide such meaning, for man
is more than a rational animal. In
rationalistic ages satire and absurdity dominate literature and the arts, for
people do not live by the rational measures and provide much grist for the
mills of the bitter.
The modern answer is to confront meaninglessness
with irrationality. “The universe
seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such
puny creatures as we,” wrote Carl Sagan in Cosmos. There is no meaning, no sense, in
anything. Seinfeld, the most popular
comedy of the nineties, is a sitcom about nothing; about pathetic losers who
lie, cheat, fornicate, and giggle uncomfortably through their pathetic little
world.