Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves,
And in their blood an ancient evil dies –
The action of incorrigible tragedy.
And you, my semblables, behold in blindness
That a new glory of new men assembles.
–Dutch Graves in Bucks County, Wallace Stevens
Summer is the best time for thinking about one’s ultimate purpose. Although winter is the only time I normally do this in earnest, that is only because I am forced to by the bleakness and defeat that comes to the forefront in the world around me. It is preferable to take advantage of a time when the grass is green and the sun is shining, browsing through the pages of the book of my life while there is light to see by.
Toward this end I have been meandering along so far this summer with varying results, but last Sunday’s sermon helped me gain some ground on it. The statement Paul made, that he would never again eat meat (not just meat sacrificed to idols but any meat at all) if it would cause his brother to stumble, was quite a shock to me. In good Reformed fashion Christian freedom is something I have given a lot of thought to. Balancing what is permitted morally with what may rightly be enjoyed, there is a fairly well-defined list of things I would like to do with my life from a strictly experiential point of view: enjoy my marriage, work hard, learn to love Jesus more, raise a family, achieve success, finish my Master’s degree, read great literature, run a marathon, ride my motorcycle, write, drink good wine, eat good food, shepherd the Church, enjoy my friends, learn Chopin’s Nocturnes, take in all the sunrises and sunsets I can, become a C-level executive, finish building my chopper, run my farm, look at great art, love my kids well, travel the world, gaze at the stars, meet new people – I could go on interminably, but there is not time to list all the things I am interested in, let alone do them. The ancients used to have a saying that expressed this well: Vita brevis, et artis longae. There is simply not time to do even a fraction of everything we want to.
The impact of this reality can be properly experienced if you think about it in the right way. All the things on my list, albeit so short as almost not to be properly representative, are important! God made me a sentient being with an immortal soul, conscious of the eternity that was put in my heart, desirous in my redeemed nature to go out (masculine as I am) into the vastness of the universe and bring it all under the dominion of the kingdom of God. In my personality I have an unusual amount of energy and curiosity, and sometimes this feels like a curse because it only serves to remind me how finite I am in the light of all the opportunity I am faced with. If what I am interested in is so important, it feels like a tragedy to know that I will never get to do 99.999% of it.
But this is where the Gospel begins to speak into the question. My interests are important, not on a basis of whether I will get to experience them or not, but because they are part of God’s purpose in creating me. These seem like contradictory statements but let us press on. God never said that the purpose of my life was to realize everything about the way in which he created me. On the contrary, Jesus told us that life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. If this is true, we may begin to see a rather unnerving truth: that just as there are vessels of mercy and vessels of wrath, so there may also be perfectly viable hopes and dreams within our hearts that need to die in order for us to lay hold of our eternal destiny in Christ? This sounds a death knell in our hearts, and to a point rightly so. We were not created to die. But I think there is more of a connection in Genesis than we suppose. In the Garden of Eden, surrounded by all the new beauty and purpose and meaning and opportunity God could muster in his handiwork, all things being Yea and Amen for humanity so far as the eye could see, was a single quiet No. Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they were not to eat. This seeming needless act of casuistry, this vestigiality in the midst of all the verdance surrounding it, strikes us as blindly despotic as it did Adam and Eve. Rankling we gaze at it, and gazing we muse that such power could be ours, and musing we begin to hear an ancient whisper in our ear, as old as sin itself: Did God really say… It is a story that we tell over again every time we fall prey to discontent, turning aside from a universe of delight to dwell on the one thing God told us we could not have.
We do this because it is our heritage and we were born into it, but we also do it because we do not trust God. If he put us in a world full of things that were good for us, and which we were supposed to enjoy not primarily because they were good but primarily because he gave them, does it not also follow that to teach the opposite side of the principle God would find it necessary to put something in there that was not good for us in some imperceptible way and which we were supposed to shun simply because he said so? For at that point obedience becomes more than self-love or even self-protection. It becomes, as every other part of our lives was meant to, an act of worship.
Here we must return to Paul, patiently waiting for us with his annoying statement about the Christian’s position on freedom. I am an avowed omnivore and have no intention of giving up eating meat, bolstered as my position is both by my personal preference and by Genesis 9:3 (you may judge for yourself which is the truer reason why I do it). But because I believe I am not my own and was bought at a price, if God asked me to lay steak and hamburger at Jason’s house as a sacrifice on the altar of a brother’s soul, I hope I would answer “Yes, Lord” and throw the veggies on the grill. I am an avowed capitalist and love making money, and have no intention of forswearing my rights as a citizen of this country to strive for financial success. But because I know that God does all things well, if he ever looked at me with love and asked me to give all I have to the poor and follow him, I hope I would answer “Lord, to whom else shall I go? You have the words of life” and go put everything on Ebay. I think God’s requests would probably have to come in the form of a plane flying across the sky trailing a banner before I would acknowledge them, and there would be fleeces laying all over my yard for a week, but I know the Spirit would be faithful to lead me where I do not want to go. Knowing God as I have come to, I think the things he will ask of me will not be that drastic but will be every bit as important. And I know that would be life for me.
The purpose of my life is not something I am going to figure out with a lifetime to think about it, let alone encapsulate with the ruminations from one sermon. What I saw this week is that the purpose of my life is far more than the pursuit of my interests and enjoyments, and thus than all the check marks I will have put on the list by the end of my journey. It is better approximated by the understanding that what I walk away from in this life can be just as important as what I pursue; that is to say, that things we love yet are willing to give up can be a really good indicator of what we truly love. And at this thought I tremble, for I do not yet love as I ought to love. I do not yet know the depth of what Paul felt for his fellow Israelites: heirs of the covenant, recipients of the Law, chosen of God, claimants of the promises as they were. I do not know how his heart grieved when they would not loosen their grip on what God had given them in Moses so that they might receive a greater thing from Moses’ Lord. I do not know how Paul unhesitatingly laid on the altar the thing dearest to him in all the world for the sake of the ones he loved: For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. But I know that the same One who led Paul into true freedom – indistinguishable as it is from true love – is leading me too, and I know that in him the Word of God has not failed. In his blood alone the ancient evil dies, and in his likeness there is a new glory among men. And from that ground there shall blossom red, life that shall endless be.
Author: Jeremy Vogan
My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV