Hiding Behind Hedonism and Cynicism
Hedonism and cynicism are unbiblical and ineffective ways of dealing with our natural desire for joy. If you pursue joy with reckless abandon, you will end up striving for more and more while never attaining lasting joy. If you give up the pursuit of joy, adopting a morbid expectation about the future and people, you will spend your life experiencing sorrow and grief for events that may never happen or closing yourself off from experiencing true joy.
In my work with pastors and Christian leaders, we talk about all the challenges that come with leading organizations. These discussions usually end up touching on the need for Christians to deal with powerful and conflicting emotions in a godly way. But for many of the men I work with, a basic biblical understanding of emotions is something they’ve never even thought about. So when the topic of emotions comes up, I often get the question, “What are the basic (or core) emotions?” I answer with my working list: fear, loneliness, anger, sadness, hurt, joy, disdain, guilt, and shame. The response to this list is usually, “Well, how can I feel as much joy and as little of the rest of the list as possible?” It is that question that often leads Christians into the despair of hedonism or cynicism.
Definitions of Despair
Hedonism is a philosophy of living—sometimes adopted explicitly and sometimes implicitly—that places the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Because pleasure typically produces (momentary) joy, hedonists think they have found a way to maximize joy. But in the end, this way of living ends in despair.
Researchers have two ways of describing the despair that hedonists eventually experience. The first is hedonic adaptation. This is what hedonists experience when they adapt to their current level of pleasure, resulting in both a malaise and a need to pursue even more pleasure. The cycle is never-ending and ultimately unsatisfying. The second term that describes the eventual despair of the hedonist is anhedonia. This is more of a medical term that describes the apathy and numbness that some hedonists experience after the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. It turns out that God did not design our bodies to experience nonstop worldly pleasure without becoming numb to it.
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Forgiveness and Seeing the Father’s Smile
He purifies you from all unrighteousness. He invests in you—fully. There is no hint of stinginess. We make that move toward the Lord with our confession, and he takes it from there. He is committed to us for the long haul. You are forgiven by a faithful and just God. You are purified by a Father who will not waver in his dedication to making you righteous.
Over the past year, I’ve observed that my son becomes panicky after he asks for forgiveness. If you don’t immediately assure him that you forgive him, he gets upset. He quickly becomes distressed and cries out, “You don’t forgive me!”
I do find it endearing that children are much more open about their emotions compared to adults. When my son feels this hard emotion, he expresses it openly and in an impassioned way. As best as I can put words to the state of his little heart in these moments, his cry is “Are we okay? Are we okay?” When you have sinned and ask for forgiveness, the reality is you are indebted to the other person. The relationship is vulnerable at that moment because of your offense. You are at their mercy. And even at five years old, my son can sense that vulnerability, and he wants reassurance that all is okay between us.
I can certainly relate to the distress he is feeling, though as an adult it doesn’t tumble out of me in a frantic manner. It is an uncomfortable feeling to know you have done harm to a relationship. The time between your confession and the other person extending forgiveness is also quite uncomfortable. And sometimes we do have to wait. Sometimes it’s because the person is not ready to forgive; they explain that they need more time. Sometimes the person might just be so angry that even offering three words of grace, “I forgive you,” is too high of a wall to climb; it just seems impossible given how they’re feeling. Or sometimes someone may even decide to be stingy and withhold forgiveness for longer periods of time. They relish the power that it affords them to keep the other person in their debt.
None of these are advisable responses, of course, and if we were having a conversation together, I’d want to consider how to move toward a gracious response when someone is in your debt! But these reactions are common and don’t surprise us. The problem is that we can start to think that maybe God is like us.
Does God, like us, struggle to extend forgiveness when we ask him?
Does he get caught up in his anger, like we do, and withdraw from us?
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Loneliness, Despair, and the Christian Countermeasure
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, September 4, 2023
The church is the place where people should treat each other as people, not as things, where they freely give of themselves to others because they know that Christ has freely given himself in grace to them. As the church is increasingly marginalized in America, she will become a stronger community. But the danger of marginalized, strong communities is that they become insular and protective.Seven years on from her defeat in the 2016 election, it seems clear that Hillary Clinton has still not come to terms with her loss to Donald Trump. In a recent article for The Atlantic, she now blames the widespread problem of loneliness in America for her failure at the polls. The left’s analysis of 2016 tends to operate with one of two scripts whereby Trump’s supporters were either diabolical scoundrels or stupid dupes.
That Clinton herself might have alienated support by insulting a large portion of the American people, or simply did not offer anything in the way of an attractive vision of what her presidency might look like, would seem to be questions she should at least find worth asking. But no. Once again Trump is the fault of deep sickness in American society, not her own policies or campaign strategy.
Nevertheless, in highlighting loneliness she may be excusing, rather than explaining her loss, but she is still touching on something of importance. All the evidence does suggest that America, and perhaps the West in general, is moving into an era where loneliness and isolation might well be the norm for more and more people.
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The Greater Lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan
Eternal life on our own merits is impossible for a people who by nature hate God and neighbor. Salvation is brought to us by a Good Samaritan who showed us mercy and promises to return for us to take us into eternal life. We demonstrate that we are right with God not in trying to justify ourselves but when we love God and neighbor with this kind of humility, recognizing with great awe that we were the ones beaten up and left for dead because of sin, and that it was Jesus himself who crossed the road from heaven to save us.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is generally understood to be an ethical teaching of Jesus that challenges us to love our neighbor better. Most teachings on the parable are moralistic, leaving the impression that the imperative to “go and do likewise” is the sole aim of what Jesus is attempting to accomplish in telling the story.
But have we missed the greater lesson of what Jesus is impressing upon the hearer in this well-known story? Is the parable simply intended to press upon us the responsibility to love better? To answer this question, there is required a careful reflection of the context into which this parable comes. The parable is a surprising response to someone who understood well the demand of the law to love, but had failed to see how far he missed the mark of love in his own life.
The lawyer, seeking to justify himself, bypassed the question of his own need for deliverance.
Luke 10:25-37 records for us that a certain lawyer approaches Jesus to test him about how one can obtain eternal life. The lawyer specifically asks Jesus what he must “do to inherit eternal life.” When Jesus answers specific questions posed to him in the synoptic gospels, it is important to reflect carefully on the question that is being asked of Jesus. If the question being posed is not understood, the exegesis that follows will be faulty.
In this case, the lawyer asks the very same question of the rich young ruler, “what must I do to inherit eternal life”—two verbs. This is an entirely different question than those who asked Jesus for mercy, as with blind Bartimaeus or others who, as in the book of Acts, asked what they must do to be saved. Humble approaches to Jesus by those who asked for mercy and deliverance from sin received compassionate responses. This lawyer, however, is asking Jesus how, through his own efforts, he could achieve eternal life, not salvation.
Any attempt to justify ourselves is immediately met with the full weight of the laws demands.
The lawyer bypasses the question of his own need for deliverance, a detail that is obviously so important to Luke that he adds, for proper interpretive purposes, that the lawyer was “attempting to justify (δικαιῶσαι) himself” (Luke 10:29). As he stands before the only one who supplies the righteousness that comes from God, the lawyer’s attempt to justify himself is immediately met with the full weight of the laws demands.
Upon asking for eternal life, Jesus poses as question of his own: “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The lawyer responds by citing Deuteronomy 6:5, the great Shema, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart will all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus responds from Leviticus 18:5 with a perennial blow that should have made any Israelite tremble: “Do this and you will live.”
Jesus’ use of Leviticus 18:5 in this context is a direct response to the lawyer attempting to justify himself in asking Jesus for eternal life based his own merits. This demonstrates that any attempt to self-justify oneself before God to achieve eternal life is always met with the divine standard of perfect and complete obedience. Jesus does not mince words. He answers the lawyer by saying “if you do this, you will have the eternal life that you are seeking.”
Jesus tells a story to explain what it means to fulfill the intent of the law.
The glaring omission in the dialogue, unlike that of the rich young ruler who openly said he obeyed the law, is the silence of the lawyer with regard to his own performance of love. The problem, as much of the rabbinic tradition evidences, is that a neighbor was only understood to be a fellow Jew. The question is whether Leviticus 19:8, in its command to love one’s neighbor, only intended love to be exercised for a fellow Israelite, as the Rabbinic writings indicate, or did it demand love for all peoples.
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