What’s the point of it all? The inquiry does not relent. Resist it for a time — fill your days with noise, stare hard at the patch of life before you — but you cannot always avoid the silence, cannot always avoid looking up.

The question catches up to most of us halfway to the grave. What else is a midlife crisis? When nests begin to empty, the chirping quiets and memories take their place, her interrogation loudens. Contemplation stares from the corner of the room. We can hurry off to a new distraction, or stare back.

Midlife. Halfway to somewhere, but to where? Away. To death — and to more — to whatever lies beyond, to that “undiscovered country” that

puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of. (Hamlet, 3.1.87–90)

Half of your life (at best) is gone. You map where you have been, where you are now, and the limits you can yet travel. You begin to feel the gravity of time. You look back. The distance behind is greater than the distance left ahead, and the rapids seem to quicken toward the falls. But to what end? Anxieties paw within, looking for an escape.

Young dreams have grown up. Some hopes, along with some friends, have died. Ideals have given way to reality. What ifs have cocooned into What was and What actually is. The butterfly, so perfect in the mind’s eye, is not as beautiful as expected. Regrets mingle with misplaced joys. The questions that youthful optimism brushed off will no longer be dismissed: What was the point of it all?

Unhappy Wisdom

Many today would call midlife reflections of this kind cynical, jaded. Some interpret their intrusion as signs that they haven’t found the spouse, the adventure, the career that they were truly made for. They try another. But the wisest man ever born of men, a man who touched the ends of the earth’s delights, called such contemplations wisdom. Wisdom that agitates our joy. A frustration at the futility we face in this fallen world.

In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

We might imagine a hypothetical alternative: one where Adam and Eve waited to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in God’s timing upon God’s invitation. But the unlawful bites into forbidden knowledge demanded God thrust futility and curse upon the world. We have knowledge of good and evil, but mostly evil.

“Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore.”

So, from the ruins, we pluck the rose of wisdom, and feel her thorns and thistles. We enjoy wisdom, when we enjoy her, wincing. While she must be preferred above all alternatives (Proverbs 3:13–15), she casts a shadow for those inhabiting a world under the sun. She will not flatter us. She lives near reality — too near — and she is too honest. She clarifies and she saddens. She guides and she wounds. She points out many perplexities this side of eternity.

Perennial Pointlessness

What did wisdom reveal to turn the king into the unhappy philosopher we find in the book of Ecclesiastes? She shows him a world full of vanity. A world that cannot bear our deepest hopes, or satisfy our inmost longings, or gratify our great exertions.

A sampling from the first chapter.

Wisdom shows him a meaningless shore where generations come, and generations go, washing back and forth. Wisdom lifts his chin — the sun rises, falls, and hastens to rise again — for what? He begins to notice how the wind can’t make up its mind, blowing north then south only to return to the same place it started (Ecclesiastes 1:4–6). And for man, the hamster wheel spins until the hamster dies, and another scurries in his place. Perennial pointlessness.

He looks out at the calm waters and savors no peace:

All streams run to the sea,      but the sea is not full;to the place where the streams flow,      there they flow again. (Ecclesiastes 1:7)

Where will his soul find fullness? His eyes have seen great things. His ears have heard marvels. He tested his heart with all manner of delight (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He found pleasure in them for a season, yet in the end, he discovered his blisses were not loadbearing.

All things are full of weariness;      a man cannot utter it;the eye is not satisfied with seeing,      nor the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8)

What, then, is the point?

Sad Soliloquy

Through the spectacles of wisdom, he beholds a good world (with beauty and laughter and love), but a cursed world still. He longs for fruit from Eden, and cannot find the like below. As the richest king of Israel, he feasts on the delights we still chase today, yet without finding a way past the fiery sword guarding the tree of life now denied us (Genesis 3:24).

Days begin to blend; routine squeezes the zest from life; wisdom points past the momentary pleasure out into the fog, wondering where this is all going. The sad conclusions begin to mount.

Nothing is new; only hand-me-downs passed down the generations. What came before, came and went; what we know as the momentary now will pass, soon to be forgotten. The historic present falls with the consequence of a snowflake — dazzling, glittering, melting. Death comes for the wise and the foolish alike (Ecclesiastes 1:9–11). The walls were closing in.

“I hated life. . . . I hated all my labor,” the wise man sighs (see Ecclesiastes 2:17–18). His was a sad soliloquy. He turns to us, the audience of his one-man play,

A bird within a shallow cage,Ink written on a burning page,Calloused hands without a wage,The musing of a dying sage.

With eyes not to be satisfied,I saw all is absurdity.My heart was never gratified,For what could fill eternity?

Banquets of laughter, food, and drink,Feasts of different women’s thrills,Life caressing Canaan’s brink,Streams to seas that never fill.

At midlife (for some before, some after), we taste a piece of the Preacher’s grief. Vanity of vanities! An unhappy business. A striving after the wind. Life under the curse.

Recalculating Midlife

Demons hatch when good is god,When life is sought in tombs of men.When Joy is taught as a facade.And death is thought to be the end.

Midlife crisis, for anyone feeling its stress, is not really midlife at all. It lands us (should the Lord provide another half) mid-page in the mere preface of life. The first chapter of eternity has not yet begun. We are all immortal beings, babies even on our deathbeds.

Yet life after this life, in answer to the question of futility, does not render earth’s life span of little consequence. This life ripples into forever, and this truth returns to our Preacher some clarity, some sanity. He concludes,

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14)

Life extends beyond the grave, as the ocean extends beyond the shore. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die” — and a time to rise again and face our God (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2).

Fly away to God

To the next world we go. To God we go. To Jesus Christ — a Savior, a Lord, a Judge. A God whose justice will publish our story’s destiny — eternal life or eternal death. Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.

I wonder if the Preacher’s hundred perplexities would have been assuaged by testing his heart one more time with one true glimpse of Jesus Christ on the cross. Would the eternity in his heart not burst with praise? It did for Charles Spurgeon as he quotes:

The cords that bound my heart to earthAre broken by his hand;Before his cross I find myself,A stranger in the land.

My heart is with him on his throne,And ill can brook delay;Each moment listening for the voice,“Make haste, and come away.”(cited in Alas for Us, If Thou Were All)

“Our whole duty in this life, is to fear him, obey him, and if we may add his greatest command, love him.”

The Point of it All, our Wisdom, took on human flesh and dwelt with us under the sun — to live, to teach, and (beyond belief) to die, that he might redeem us from the curse by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). Labor, life, wisdom, death — the rising and setting of the sun — find their purpose in him. Where streams empty into our insatiable seas, he cries out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37).

Passing Shadows and Forever Beauty

While Christ is our all in all, our Bread of Life, our Joy eternal, we are still perplexed in seasons, even as believers (2 Corinthians 4:8). We “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” still groan inwardly — but not nihilistically — since we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons. And creation still pants “in the pains of childbirth,” having been subjected to vanity, not willingly, but in hope by its Creator. We know that the bondage of corruption shall yet be finally broken when all becomes new, when the sons and daughters of God are revealed (Romans 8:18–25).

For those in Christ, all futility, all senseless wonder, all burdensome enigmas in a fallen world will be finally, utterly “swallowed up by life” in the resurrection and the coming of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:4). Until then, we may become distressed in our waiting, yet acknowledge with Samwise that “in the end the shadow was just a small and passing thing. There is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach” (The Return of the King, 186). Midlife is midway home.

Nine-year-olds tell it straight. A boy in my morning class once asked me, “Miss, why do you look like you just woke up?” Another day he walked in sighing and clutching his chest. “I’m just so glad you aren’t wearing a wig again today!” The wig? My new bangs, hidden behind a headband.

Unlike adults, most kids don’t have a category for off-limit topics regarding appearance. While most adults would cry conversational foul play, bad haircuts, weight gain, and receding hairlines are all fair game for fourth graders. Why do kids feel free to describe beauty in both its presence and its absence?

At least in part, kids talk about appearance because, in their eyes, it’s just that. When students tell me how I look, that’s exactly what they’re doing — telling me how I look. They make no claims about who I am. If my ponytail looks “super weird today,” they say so — because my hairstyle does not undermine my identity as their beloved teacher.

Too often, however, we invest physical beauty with far more significance. We treat beauty as a means to self-worth: how we look is who we are. But if we would only gaze upon God’s word with the eyes of a child, we might unlatch beauty from its worldly contortions and fasten it instead to the God who is Beauty himself.

Beauty by the World

Left to our own devices, we define beauty a lot like the Evil Queen. We stand enraptured before the mirror, waiting for it to tell us how our appearance measures up to others across the land. In sin-twisted kingdoms, to be beautiful is to be attractive to as many human eyes as possible.

“We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).”

But beneath those eyes lie hearts whose visual appetite is insatiable. They flit from post to post, screen to screen, trend to trend — idol to idol — waiting to be satisfied. Nothing will do. That’s why an attractive-and-therefore-beautiful appearance, both as a personal possession and cultural definition, expires. We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).

While describing my teenage years to a group of girls, I mentioned how “thin and lanky” I was. They looked at me in horror. Cutting me off, one student exclaimed, “Miss, you are not thin! You’re perfect.” The other girls agreed. “Yeah, miss! Don’t say that. You are not thin. You’re beautiful.” Their words struck me silent. The teenage me had lived in a world where beauty required thinness; in their world, beauty required not thinness. I heard in their words not a compliment, but a truth claim: worldly beauty is fickle.

God warned us. Thousands of years ago, he said, “Beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) — or according to some translations, “fleeting” (NIV). The adjective’s literal meaning packs the greatest punch, as the Hebrew word heḇel denotes “breath.” From the perspective of an eternal God, beauty vanishes with the rise and fall of a chest. If we put our hope in beauty, it will betray us — and quickly.

Does that mean God wants Christian women to toss out the mascara and throw in the washcloth? No makeup, no dyed hair, no new clothes, no gym membership — nothing? Shall we consign ourselves to a life of bedhead, wigs, and super weird ponytails? These aren’t bad questions, but they are the wrong ones. Instead we should ask, How does God’s definition of beauty change our pursuit of beauty?

Beauty from God

In God’s economy, beauty does not fret over itself, or talk about itself, or make purchases for itself, or dawdle over pictures of itself. For God-defined beauty cannot be seen in a mirror. Rather, it pulses: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Beauty flows from a heart that beats with moral goodness — love for, delight in, and submission to God (Acts 13:22).

Unlike our pursuit of physical beauty, we cannot fret, talk, purchase, or edit our way to heart-level beauty. The Beauty — with a capital B — for which we ought to exert the most energy, the Beauty on which we ought to spend the most time and resources, is one we cannot powder onto our faces. It is a Person we must pursue.

This Person is Jesus, the only man whose heart sought God perfectly for a lifetime. In him we find, and from him we receive, true Beauty. And it is not the beauty of appearance:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by men,     a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;and as one from whom men hide their faces     he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:2–3)

Rather, it is the Beauty that loves and sacrifices itself for others, in which God delights:

He was pierced for our transgressions;     he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,     and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

This is the Beauty that does not perish upon makeup removal or spoil from one trend to the next. It is the Beauty that endures with laughter the aging process and the innocent comments of children (Proverbs 31:25). For regardless of appearance, its identity is secure: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Beauty as Possession and Pursuit

Dear women: If we call the beloved Son “Savior” and “Lord” (Romans 10:9), we possess this Beauty forevermore. For in God’s sight we have been clothed for all time with Christ’s sacrificial love (Galatians 2:20). There is no need to fuss over becoming and staying beautiful on this earth. Christ is eternal Beauty Himself — and our lives are hidden in him (Colossians 3:3).

We still labor for beauty — but not now for the beauty of appearance. If we possess Beauty in Christ, we will pursue the Beauty of Christ. We will strive, as those who are free from the world’s fickle fashions, to emulate an everlasting Beauty — to live as if God’s glory is real, precious, and worth pursuing, now and always.

Becoming more like-hearted to God’s beloved Son will never go out of vogue. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of Christ’s Beauty, sure that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). When the day ends, we will not crawl into bed with less money and more products. We will drift off radiating God’s Beauty in Christ, satisfied.

Beauty as a Means

As Beauty becomes ours ever more in Christ, beauty — with a lowercase b — will take its rightful place as a God-given, God-exalting gift. God cares about visual beauty because, well, he makes and sustains its every expression. He made us in his image, to image him. For our part, we humbly, happily use what he has made to exalt him who made it (Colossians 1:16).

“If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.”

As with any morally neutral hobby, we seek to use earthly beauty to illumine heavenly realities. As we dab at our faces in the morning hours, we can wonder at the way God paints the sky (Psalm 19:1). We can adopt new styles with hearts enthralled by the God who has provided us with an imperishable garment — the righteousness of Christ (Isaiah 61:10). We can enjoy beauty without self-obsession when we seek to enjoy its Fount.

I’m not saying we have to pair Scripture and meditation to all our beautifying. Many activities whirl past us unexamined. But we all can agree that beauty — like many other endeavors, such as athletics or a career — has great capacity to be self-centered. If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.

As my students discover lip gloss and T-shirt dresses, I pray they learn to use beauty as a means to enjoy and exalt God rather than self. I hope they know the beauty with which God already has created them and the Beauty to which he beckons them. Even so, they cannot learn what Christian women neither understand for themselves nor model for others. Let’s see beauty for what it is, as we lay hold of Beauty for who he is.

Audio Transcript

The apostle Paul, writing in 1 Timothy 1:15, declared himself to be the world’s worst sinner. Is that hyperbole? Or is that apostolic self-deprecation? Or is that true? Was Paul really the world’s worst sinner? You want to know. I want to know. A listener named Joel wants to know. So we ask Pastor John.

Joel writes, “Pastor John, hello to you! Paul makes this claim in 1 Timothy 1:15. ‘The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.’ Foremost? It must be true because this is the authoritative word of God. But is Paul exaggerating his claim here? The context seems to suggest that Paul meant he truly was the worst sinner. He goes on to say in verse 16 that he was saved as an example that if he, the chief of sinners, was saved, then surely others can be saved as well. So was Paul really the world’s worst sinner?”

Paul said,

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15–16)

So the claim really does seem to mean foremost among all sinners, not just a little group, because he is comparing himself with all those whom Christ came to save. He says, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” and among that group, “I am the foremost.” That’s all sinners — at least all at that time.

Foremost Sinner?

The Greek word behind the English word “foremost” is prōtos, which simply means “first.” I’m first. It’s used 155 times in the New Testament, almost always meaning first temporally. Well, Paul doesn’t mean that. He doesn’t mean temporally, as if there were no sinners before him — like, “I’m the first sinner.” He doesn’t mean that. He means first in line, measured on some other scale — not temporally, but some other scale.

So the task is to figure out from the context what scale. How is he the first, the foremost before others? In what way? By what criteria? And Paul gives us three scales, so to speak, in 1 Timothy 1:13: “Formerly I was a [1] blasphemer, [2] persecutor, and [3] insolent opponent.” Let’s just take those one at a time and see how he measures, how he’s thinking about his “firstness.”

Blasphemer

This means he spoke. Blasphemy means something you do with your mouth. He spoke demeaning lies about Jesus, the Son of God. His words directed people away from the truth about Jesus. His words tarred and feathered Jesus with false descriptions. They belittled Jesus and mocked Jesus. His words treated Jesus as a pretender — in effect, a liar.

“The seriousness of the sin rises with the glory and dignity of the person you’re demeaning.”

Paul could not argue with any credibility that Jesus did not exist. Good grief — he lived at the same time. So he had to argue that Jesus put himself forward as something he wasn’t. He was a hoax. And when you treat someone that way, the seriousness of the sin rises with the glory and dignity of the person you’re demeaning. So Paul considered his slanderous language about Jesus as the first thing to be mentioned in his unworthiness. So that’s where he starts.

Persecutor

He went way beyond words. Now these are cumulative; he’s mounting things up here, and I guess the third one’s going to be the climax. But here we are at number two. He’s a persecutor. He went way beyond words. He pursued people to prison. He oversaw the murder of Christians. Here’s the way Luke puts it in Acts 9:1–2:

Saul, still breathing out threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way [that’s Christianity], men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

And what would happen there? Perhaps stoning.

In Galatians 1:13–14, he says,

You have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.

So when he connects his aim to destroy the church with his advancing beyond any other zealous peers in Judaism, I think he meant, “Nobody went after the church like I did — nobody. My murderous, imprisoning, persecuting efforts to destroy the church were literally unsurpassed.” I think that’s just literally true. I think Paul said that, meant it, and there’s no reason to think it’s not the case.

Insolent Opponent

Now here’s the third one. He calls himself not only a persecutor and a slanderer of Christ, but an “insolent opponent.” Now the word is in Greek hybristēn, and you can hear in English the word “hubris.” We get “hubris” from it — arrogance, haughtiness, pride. I think this is the key to understanding how literally Paul meant it when he said he was the foremost, the first, of sinners. To be a blasphemer or a slanderer, we can measure that by a person’s words. To be a persecutor, we can measure that by a person’s actions. But how do you measure proud insolence — haughty, arrogant insolence? Only God could see this evil perfectly, and only Paul could feel it existentially. And Paul perhaps knew it and felt it more than all the rest of his sins.

On the Damascus road, the words that Jesus used to convict Paul were these:

“Saul, Saul [that was his Hebrew name], why are you persecuting me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And [Jesus] said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9:4–5)

This put all of Paul’s blasphemy, all his persecution, all his arrogance in a new light. Now Paul had to measure his blasphemy and persecution and arrogance not by itself, but in relation to the one he was sinning against: the risen, living Son of God. And my guess is that this set Paul to thinking not just about the greatness of Christ as the one he was persecuting, but also about the privileges that he was sinning against.

Depth of Paul’s Sin

Just think of it. I think this is what stirred up the sense of the depth of his arrogance. First, he was sinning against his own destiny, because God had set him apart from his mother’s womb to be an apostle (Galatians 1:15). Second, he was sinning against the greatest Bible knowledge of his time. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, he said in Philippians 3:5. That is, he was a great Bible scholar. He was sinning against all that knowledge.

Third, he was sinning against the nearness, the historical nearness of the historical Jesus. Paul was alive when Jesus, the Son of God, was on planet earth. He knew this was not myth. Hundreds of eyewitnesses to the miracles and the words of Jesus existed. Paul was sinning against great evidence. He was sinning against the beautiful love and mercy of martyrs. Paul was there, face to face with Stephen when he was stoned to death. They laid their garments at his feet (Acts 7:58). He heard Stephen say, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. . . . Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:59–60). He saw that beautiful demonstration of Christlike mercy. He was sinning against all that.

“The pride of Paul’s own heart was so terrible in his eyes that he pronounced himself the foremost.”

So when Paul considered all that he was sinning against, and that his blasphemy and his persecution were in the face of all that truth and beauty, the insolence, the arrogance, the pride of his own heart was so terrible in his eyes that he pronounced himself the foremost.

None Beyond His Reach

And if we wonder, “How could he know that no one was worse?” the ultimate answer is, I think, that Jesus revealed this to him. And this seems right, because this very “firstness” in sin was part of the inspired writing with which God intended to encourage others who despaired that they could never be saved because they were that insolent (almost).

So it seems right to say that God would see to it that Paul realized this, felt this about his own arrogant heart. “You, Paul, are the least deserving of my mercy. So I’m going to save you, so that when you write 1 Timothy, no one will ever be able to say, ‘I am too undeserving.’”