Of Beatles and Saviours
By Tim Bootsveld
Once upon a time, Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with friends. Hemingway bet his tablemates that he could craft an entire story in six words. Incredulous, the rest of the table assembled their wager. Hemingway put pen to napkin and wrote:
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn"
Only six words, but no one can read them without feeling the tragedy they portray.
In the same way the Beatles speak of a reality that plucks a chord in every human heart. They do not achieve Hemingway’s brevity (It takes the mop tops nine words), but in those nine words they equal his craft. As part of the final medley that ends the Abbey Road B-side, the song Golden Slumbers includes the following:
“Once there was a way to get back home”
Reader do not continue past this point until you feel the weight of the tragedy in those words.
“Ask your neighbours what is wrong with humanity and without exception they will accept your underlying premise.”
The human condition
Ask your neighbours what is wrong with humanity and without exception they will accept your underlying premise. Not one will argue in favour of human perfection. No one will deny that something is wrong with the race. Everybody knows that we are lost. Everybody knows that we have wilfully wandered into the unwelcoming wilderness and our home is far away.
But the Beatles are not just stating that we are lost. Everybody already knows that. They are saying that mankind once knew how to find the road home, that “once there was…”, as though there is now no way back home at all. According to the Beatles, we are utterly lost, with no way home, no way to return. The place where we would be welcomed and loved, the place where we belong, is the one place we can no longer go.
Are we to be in the wilderness forever? Is there no hope of finding home? Most people have not abandoned themselves to lostness as the Beatles did. They still fight to get home. They fight against their lostness in whatever way they can.
The lostness we all know
But where do we go to get home? While your neighbours know that they are lost, they have no clue as to how they got lost, nor how to find the right path to lead them home. This explains one of the greatest difficulties in declaring Christ as Saviour to your neighbours. Jesus ultimately saves us from our sin, from the moral separation from God that we brought on ourselves. Yes, there are corollaries involved in being saved from sin—being saved from sin ultimately means being saved from the effects of sin, from sickness, pain, and death. But these are symptoms of sinfulness, not themselves the root of the problem. Sin is our problem but reminding our neighbours of who they are as sinners is a sure-fire way to lose friends.
Instead of facing moral separation from God as the root of human lostness, people posit many other reasons that do not offend the conscience so deeply. Interestingly, the answers you hear will generally (though not exclusively) align themselves with the three branches of philosophy: epistemological lostness (We’ve forgotten the way home, we don’t know the way home), ontological lostness (We will die before we get home.), and moral lostness (We want to go home, but we keep wandering off the path).
Are we epistemologically lost?
Perhaps we are epistemologically lost—lost because we fail to know. In epistemological lostness, we have either forgotten, or still need to know, how to get home. This is the explanation that many from history give to our lostness. Take the Buddhists for example, who say that we need knowledge of the essential unity of all things. We need to realize that there is no you, and there is no me. We need to see that division and particularity are illusion. There is only One. They say we need enlightenment.
Or take the Gnostics, who say that we need mystic knowledge, knowledge of how to return to the fullness of reality, “the Pleroma”. We are emanations of the Light. We are Light, and we can rejoin the Light if we only learn the way.
But history is not the only place we find people crying out for epistemological salvation. Think of your neighbours who seek salvation through science. Fly to the laboratory! Science will show us the way home! Our experiments will purge our ignorance. Sickness, pain, and even death will bow before our craft. We will know all secrets, and nothing will be hidden from us. We will conquer under the banner of knowledge. And by knowing, we shall be saved.
Are we ontologically lost?
Perhaps we are ontologically lost – lost because of what we are. In ontological lostness, we are either no longer what we once were or what we need to become to find our way home. This view has been surprisingly popular. Take the Mormons, who say we are Gods, but that we have not yet grown up into our Godhood. But if we prune ourselves correctly and grow to our full potential, then we will be Gods who save ourselves. Or take the Platonists, who say we need to shed our bodies and return to the world of ideal forms. Unfortunately, we are chained to materiality, which causes us to suffer the pain of the material world. But if we could shed our materiality, if we could sever ourselves from matter, we would be saved.
But you do not have to be a philosopher to cry out for ontological salvation. Think of your neighbours, who seek salvation through becoming something new on a quite literally new world. Transhumanists and planetary engineers each seek in their own way to bring humanity to new worlds. Fly to the stars! We shall evolve our way home! Be it cyborg or spacemen, we shall exceed our now feeble frames and become more than what we are. Sickness and pain and death are simply software bugs that we can patch, update by update, until their deleterious effects are eliminated. We shall take on strength enough to leap from star to star. Or perhaps we shall upload our minds into machines and be the masters of an incorruptible digital world. We have only to grasp our new form, and we shall be saved.
Are we morally lost?
Finally, some neighbours will insist human beings are morally lost—lost because of what we have done. In this view mankind has done something that separated us—broke us away—from everyone else. Due to moral separation we are in the wilderness, subject to sickness, pain, and death. This is typically a theological answer, because the power to visit sickness, pain, and death upon sinners is found only in the hands of God. Through disobedience we have declared war on our Creator, and he has brought His curse upon us. Human suffering is His good justice against those who have rebelled against Him.
“Guilt from sin is the spot that Lady Macbeth could not wipe away. Guilt is the rock that Sisyphus could not push from his path. Overcoming guilt is something we are powerless to do in ourselves”
This is a hard answer. This is the hardest of the three philosophical answers because, in moral lostness, we cannot strive to fix our condition. If we are epistemologically lost, we can study and meditate, and perhaps we can find the path home. If we are ontologically lost, we can grow, we can recreate ourselves, and, perhaps finally, we become worthy of our home. But under moral lostness, we are simply guilty. Striving against guilt is the ultimate futility. There is nothing a guilty person can do by their own power to assuage their guilt (except, perhaps, to increase their guilt). Guilt from sin is the spot that Lady Macbeth could not wipe away. Guilt is the rock that Sisyphus could not push from his path. Overcoming guilt is something we are powerless to do in ourselves.
Under moral lostness, the only path home is forgiveness. Without forgiveness, we are forced to wander in the wilderness until we receive the finality of the justice we deserve—eternal death, i.e., eternal suffering and separation, a fitting end for a rebel against God. However, justice can also find its fulfillment in forgiveness. But forgiveness is rejected. We choke on seeking forgiveness because we must surrender our fate to the mercy of the offended party.
So what kind of lost are we?
Christian, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you have a hard task ahead of you. If you do your evangelism properly you will likely appear to be insulting the people you are trying to save. You must convince them of their sin and guilt. Worse, you must convince them that they are helpless to appease their guilt. They must be brought to see their utter lack of a moral connection to God, that they have left their true home behind, and that they have done this to themselves. They must see that in their scorn and rebellion they have deliberately rejected their true home. Thanks to their rebellion they have left in their wake a yawning chasm with the only bridge across burned to ash. They are rebels against God, against the God they know exists.
Do you see how the weight of guilt drives people to invent alternate explanations for why human beings are in the wilderness? We relieve our consciences by reimagining our situation; we pretend that we have an epistemological problem. We pretend that our lostness will be solved by simply rediscovering the bridge home. Or we pretend that we have an ontological problem. We pretend that our lostness will be solved by taking on new strength to cross the chasm we left behind.
But deep down we know the truth. We built the bridge into the wilderness, and we built it as an act of rebellion. And once we were across, we burnt the bridge because we were determined to leave our home behind forever. That makes us rebels, traitors to our true home. And now, even if we wanted to, the wilderness leaves us with no way to return.
Our story, out of the mouth of the Master
Like us, the prodigal son rebelled against his home. He took the treasures of his home with him, but he quickly squandered them. In time, he found himself desperately hungry, and so he took on a desperate job. But his job paid so poorly that he still wished to eat the slop he was hired to deliver to the pigs.
Unlike most, the prodigal son came to his senses. He acknowledged his moral lostness. He acknowledged his powerlessness to effect any change in his lostness. All he could do was to return home and submit himself to his Father’s mercy.
God is not ignorant of our actions against Him. He stands opposite the gulf that we crossed, watching us wander in the wilderness of our rebellion. He sees us suffer for having abandoned our home. Indeed, it was He who created the wilderness in the first place. His Justice brought about the sickness and pain and death that we currently experience. He warned us about the land we chose instead of our home. He told us what we would find in the wilderness. Even so, we preferred the wilderness to living under His rule.
“Forgiveness is where the offended party absorbs the offense of the offender. At the cost of His Son’s life, God bridges the gulf that separates us from Him.”
In compassion, God works to redeem those created in His image. Forgiveness is a disbursement of justice, yes, but it is not a painless one. Forgiveness is where the offended party absorbs the offense of the offender. At the cost of His Son’s life, God bridges the gulf that separates us from Him. He provides the bridge back home—a bridge we did nothing to create. But it a bridge that we would rather not cross because of the weight of our guilt. It is a bridge that leads us to recognize our guilt and confront the cost of our sin, and that is a painful bridge to cross.
The Beatles, and where we place our hope
Most of your neighbours are still striving to find their way home. Unlike the Beatles they have not surrendered to the wilderness. They are Buddhists, scientists, the woke—utopians all—still striving to elucidate and educate themselves into a state of knowing how to return home. There are also the Mormons, the Gnostics, the planetary engineers, and the transhumanists, all striving to make themselves more than they are and earn the right to go home. Then there are the Muslims and the Jews attempting the impossible, working to make God view them favourably based on their own merits. But in this they err; sin cannot be erased or forgotten. Sin stains everything we do. Because we are in rebellion, we try to imagine our rebellion is small, a hardly noticeable stain that can be easily papered over. But it never works, sin can only be carried into the grave, either by us or by the one we have offended. If we are truly looking for forgiveness, we must come with no strivings, no claims. We must come bowed, our forehead to the dust, to ask for underserved mercy.
This is the answer to the riddle; the incarnate God, the Lord Jesus, was crucified to carry our sins into the grave, and He raised Himself again to life to proclaim the finality of the deed. Death is dead in the death of Christ, and we can ride his coattails home. He has striven on our behalf, and he has won.
Conclusion
The beauty of the Christian answer, against all other answers, is that Christ is a sure Saviour. The bridge we must cross to get home is painful because it requires us to face the grossness of our sin. But if we return to our senses and allow Christ to bring us home, we get to see the great beauty of the One who awaits us there. Christian, convince your neighbours of their sin. Hammer them with it until they accede to their guilt. But when they yield, hammer no longer, because the law has done its perfect work. Offer them the answer to guilt—the crucified Christ, the true Saviour, the only hope of the world.
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