The Puzzle of Life: How Jesus Makes Sense of Our World
Dad was sitting watching television, when
his little boy came running over. “Daddy, can you play with me?”
Dad enjoys playing with his son, and plans
to give him plenty of time, but not just yet. “Soon, son, soon” says Dad. “When
this program finishes.”
Five minutes later the little boy returns.
“Daddy, can we play now?”
“Soon, son, soon. When this program
finishes.”
Two minutes later the little boy returns
again. “Daddy, is it time to play yet?”
Dad realises he’s not going to get any peace, so he decides to set his son a task that will take some time. He notices a picture of the world on the front page of the newspaper lying in front of him.
He tears the picture out then rips it into small pieces. “Now son, I’ve
got a game for you. Take the pieces of this picture of the world and put them
back together again and then we’ll play together.”
The little boy eagerly takes the pieces
away with him and sets to work. Dad’s relieved he’ll get to see the last half
hour of his TV program. But to his amazement his little boy is back in less
than five minutes. “I’ve finished daddy. Can we play now?”
The father is stunned when he turns around
to see his son holding up the picture of the world, each piece sticky taped
into the right position. Dad begins wondering whether he has a child prodigy on
his hands. “How did you get it done so quickly?” he asks. “That would’ve taken
me a good 20 minutes and I’m an adult.”
“Oh, it was easy daddy. On the back of the
world was a picture of a person, so I put the person together and that’s when
the world came together.”
How do you put the world together? How do
you make sense of your world and find your way through it? Christians find that
Jesus is the face on the other side of the puzzle. He enables us to make sens
eof life and our world and to find a path through it.
Source: unknown
Nietzsche's Madman & The Death of God: A Worldview Crisis
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once
told the following parable to discuss the possibility of belief in God. His
madman echoes the tragedy of a world in which we have lost belief in God but
are unable to find something more worthy to take God’s place, leaving us
orphaned in the universe
Have you not heard of that madman who
lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried
incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who did not believe in
God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. “Has God got
lost?” asked one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” asked another. “Or is he
hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?” Thus they
yelled and laughed
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any
up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel
the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually
closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear
nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we
smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the
murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the
world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this
blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of
atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of
this deed too great for us?
Must we ourselves not become gods simply
to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is
born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history
than all history before.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked
again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in
astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into
pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not
yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet
reached the ears of men.
Lightning and thunder require time; the
light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be
seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant
stars and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the
same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up
his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to
have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are
not the tombs and monuments of God?”
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125
The Map That Changed the World: A Christian Worldview Perspective
Map making goes by the name of cartography.
It may not sound terribly interesting, but in 1815 a cartographer by the name
of William Smith produced a map that changed the world. William Smith was an English
orphan who grew up in poverty.
He became a surveyor and during his time
surveying the countryside he came to realise something very important about the
earth beneath his feet.
First he discovered that rocks could be
dated by the fossils found in them. Find the same type of fossils in two rocks
separated by distance and it’s probably they come from the same era. Second, he
learned that the rock layers tend to be arranged in a consistent pattern. Armed
with that knowledge Smith produced a geological map of England, Scotland and
Wales.
And that map changed the world.
How you might ask? Well for the first time
Smith’s map allowed people to predict what lay beneath the ground. Prior to
Smith’s map if you wanted to find gold or coal or gas or any other natural
resource you had to scout the surface for some sign of them – a glint of gold
or an outcropping of coal.
But with Smith’s map you could look for
particular rock types and know what likely lay beneath them and within them.
His map allowed us to see below the surface and to uncover the depths.
And so the electricity we gain from coal,
the gas that fires our stoves, the gold we wear on chains around our necks, and
much much more are possible because William Smith mad a map in 1815.
Smith’s story reminds us of the need to be
cartographers of life. Before Smith we barely scratched the surface of the
earth, but after Smith we could plumb the depths. Similarly, we could all do
with a life map, a mental map that enables us to do more than scratch the
surface of life, but to experience the depths of human possibility.
For Christians Jesus is the Cartographer of
Life, the one who provides us with a map of realities that we can barely see –
of God, truth and love.
Alternate Application: The Scriptures are a
life-map God has provided for us. They point us to realities about God and life
that we would otherwise not be able to see, and enable us to live life to its
fullest.
Source: William Smith’s story is reported
in Simon Wichester, The Map That Changed the World (HarperCollins,
2001)
Read also: 10 Powerful Stories About Worship, Faith, and Humility