Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 8, 2009

John Calvin turned 500 this year. This October, I have five articles to write for the paper, which works out to one per century in honor of Calvin’s legacy. I trust this sounds as reasonable to you as it does to me.

Last week, we examined the claim that Calvin had Servetus burned in Geneva. This week, I want to take you into the beginning pages of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first sentence is well-known: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess…consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”

In order to possess wisdom, one must know God and know oneself. The two are intertwined. The more we know God, the better we know ourselves. The more we know ourselves, the better we know God. Unfortunately, our world is adept at inventing ways to eliminate God from the equation of true knowledge.

The problem however is that when one tries to understand life apart from God, that person lives a life of fiction. It may seem real, but it is an illusion that leads ultimately to despair. If God is the creator, and if we are made in his image, then life can only make sense in relation to him.

In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling is on a search for meaning. He talks about his vertical search, his search to understand God. After reading a chemistry book, he felt that there was no longer any need to consider God’s hand in the world. The natural world explained itself.

“The only difficulty,” Binx concluded, “was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next.” With knowledge of God no longer certain or necessary, one is hard pressed to explain why he should take another breath. Life is leftover and empty.

This emptiness manifests itself continually in our world. People shop to forge new identities. We divert ourselves from the despair within through leisure and entertainment. As Binx Bolling put it, “Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” Devoid of meaning, we take our wandering seriously indeed.

If we seek to know ourselves apart from knowing God, we are left with a false view of ourselves. We’re looking in a mirror but seeing a cartoon staring back at us. There is a reason why we feel despair and unhappiness. It’s residual knowledge of who we were really meant to be by the grace of God. Calvin helps us see this truth even today.