The Conclusion of The Whole Matter
“We tend to assume that our world is normative until we encounter a society that is fundamentally different.”
- Vishal Mangalwadi,
In his book The book that made your world: How the bible created the soul of Western Civilization. Vishal Mangalwadi describes how in 1976 he and his wife left urban India to live in rural central India. Together they began their service to the poor from their little house outside the village of Gatheora in the Chhatarpur district. There they met a population where many were devoutly religious but their fear of stars and spirits, rivers and mountains, karma and reincarnation, gods and goddesses, made them vulnerable to exploitations and oppression. Their faith bred terror, not adventure. (Mangalwadi, 28)
When Vishal and Ruth, his wife, arrived she decided to visit every family in the village. Every day she would visit new families to find out how they could better serve them. On one of these visits she met Lalta, a ten-year-old girl from a low-caste family. She asked Lalta how many brothers and sisters she had.
“Four… or maybe three,” was Lalta’s reply.
Ruth was curious and asked, “Is it three or four?”
“Well, three. The fourth is almost dead.”
Ruth asked to see the child, who turned out to be an eighteen-moth-old girl named Sheela. Ruth saw a living skeleton lying on a bare string cot, pus oozing from sores covering her body and head, with flies swarming over her because she was too weak to rase her hand to shoo them. Sheela was so weak she could not even cry, she only sighed.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ruth, with tears in her eyes, asked the girl’s mother.
“Oh, she doesn’t eat anything. She throws up whatever we give her.”
“Why don’t you take her to the hospital?”
“How can we afford to see a doctor?”
Ruth was astonished by the extent of their poverty, and offered to pay for the treatment.
“But where is the time to go to the hospital?” The mother replied. “I have three other children and a husband to look after, besides, I can’t find my way around in the hospital.”
“Ask your husband to come with you,” Ruth suggested
“He has no time. He has to look after the cattle and the field.”
“Tell him I will pay for him to accompany you. Many hospital staff members are our friends.”
Finally she agreed to talk to her husband. Ruth was so happy she also talked to her husband Vishal.
That evening Vishal visited the family. They came out to talk to him and some neighbors came to see what has happening. The couple told Vishal they had decided to not to go to the hospital.
“Why?” asked Vishal surprised.
“We don’t have the money.”
“But my wife told you that we wil pay.”
“We don’t want to go into debt.”
“Well. I’ll put it in writing in front of these witnesses.” Vishal said pointing to the neighbors. “I will not ask for the money to be returned to us. It is a gift.”
“We don’t have the time.”
“But my wife told you that we will pay for you to hire a laborer for the day.”
“Why are you bothering us?” The couple was irritated with Vishal and Ruth. “She is our daughter.” They could not understand why Vishal was being so persistent.
Vishal couldn’t believe that the parents were willing to let their daughter die, how could they be so cruel? So he decided to use the pressure of public opinion.
“Are you killing this girl?” He asked raising his voice.
“Of course not! But what can we do if she won’t eat and vomit everything we give her?
“If you can’t do anything for her, then why don’t you let the doctors do something?”
“Because we can’t afford it.” The couple was just as stuborn as Vishal and Ruth.
Vishal threatened to call the police and they finally agreed to take the girl to the hospital. He had expected the neighbors to support him pressuring the Sheelah’s parents. But to his surprise the neighbors looked at him as if he was the fool.
The girl was taken to the hospital and put on intravenous medication, after a week the medical staff was able to start feeding her via nose tube. After another week they were able to take her home and they continued to feed her through he same tube until she was healthy enough to eat on her own. At that point a few young people had joined Vishal and his wife including American students who loved caring for Sheela, which included hand washing her dirty stinky cloth diapers. Sheela responded to the love and cuddles and the medication and food became a delight.
All seemed to be going well until one morning the mother walked in grumbling that the villagers we saying they were corrupting her daughter and polluting their caste, and even worst, Sheela might become a Christian. Ruth assured the mother that she was free to take Sheela home.
A few weeks later Ruth learned that Sheela was back to her previous condition. The whole process was repeated. Persuade the mother, pressure the father, take girl to hospital, pay medical bills, bring her home and care for her, and the mother came again to get her daughter back. Ruth assumed the mother had learned her lesson and would properly care for Sheela. Before Ruth and Vishal knew it, Sheela was dead.
The family already had a daughter to babysit the sons and to clean and cook for the family. A second girl was seen as a liability, an unnecessary burden. They would have to feed her for ten to twelve years than go into debt to find a dowry to marry her off. Her in-laws might torture her to extract more dowry from the parents. Why would the parents take on this lifelong burden even if someone was offering free medical care and milk for a few weeks? (India also deals with female infanticide)
Vishal makes an argument in his book that the worldview of the parents and the community lead them to think of children as assets or liabilities, conveniences or burdens. Vishal and Ruth never expected to gain anything from Sheela. They simply loved God and were compelled to love her and to help the weak, the needy, to feed the hungry and care for the sick.
In his book The Book that Made Your World, Vishal also describes how he was jailed for trying to provide humanitarian aid to poor villagers affected by a hail storm, because the political leaders feared he was making a political maneuver to gain popularity, influence, and power. They could not understand that he and his wife had moved there just to help them, and that others who came and stayed them for periods of time also came simply to help those in need. The local leaders feared political interference, they could not conceive that he was doing good and not expecting personal gain in return.
Their worldview caused them to see themselves as stuck in their caste, trapped inescapably in the clutches of poverty. They held to traditional Hindu fatalism. They did not believe they could change history. (Mangalwadi, 64)
Worldview
In this post, I will be exploring the concept of a biblical worldview.
According to Merriam-Webster a worldview is a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint — called also weltanschauung.
When I say biblical worldview I mean the way I interact with all reality, visible and invisible, is shaped by what the bible says about reality.
Why a biblical worldview?
I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I also believe that once you remove the Bible from your worldview you have no way of escaping the pessimism of nihilism. In other words, when the biblical worldview is rejected we seem to also lose all hope for meaning and even finding objective truth.
In this discussion, I find the book of Ecclesiastes useful since it deals with the meaning of life.
Ecclesiastes
ECCLESIASTES, or the book of (קֺהֶלֶת) qoheleth, is an Old Testament book that presents the wisdom teachings of an individual identified as Qoheleth (one who presides over an assembly, that is, a preacher or teacher). Traditionally Solomon has been identified as the author of Ecclesiastes.
In a nutshell, the book of Ecclesiastes presents the wisdom teachings of an individual identified as Qoheleth (1:1). Qoheleth examines various areas of life as he attempts to determine what has lasting value for humanity. He begins with his decision that “all is (הֶבֶל) hevel” (1:2)—a term often translated as “vanity” that Qoheleth uses to indicate the senselessness or absurdity of life “under the sun.” Qoheleth refers to the limitation of humanity in several ways:
1. Human achievement is not lasting and is forgotten by later generations (Ecclesiastes 1:11).
2. Human wisdom is limited, but it does guarantee the wise a better fate than the foolish (Ecclesiastes 1:12–18; 9:13–18).
3. Injustice and wickedness are prevalent and often appear to go unpunished (Ecclesiastes 3:16).
Out of profound disillusionment over humanity’s limitation, the author points to the need to be satisfied with “our portion.” The book concludes with the admonition to “fear God and keep his commands” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). (The Lexham Bible Dictionary)
Meaningless?
Probably no biblical book is so dominated by one leading theme as is Ecclesiastes. In 1:2 the author declares that “everything is meaningless” (NIV) or better, “vanity” (KJV, NRSV, NASB, NKJV, ASV). The Hebrew word translated “meaningless” or “vanity” is hebel (literally, “breath”), the key word in the book. Here it occurs 38 times, roughly half of its appearances in the OT. In Ecclesiastes hebel primarily seems to denote items (approximately two dozen) that are fleeting as breath (6:12; 7:15; 9:9; 11:10), senseless (4:7–8; 5:7, 10; 7:6), or like breath have no substance or lasting value (2:1, 11). At first glance the declaration that “all is vanity” (1:2) seems negative, but the phrase in the following verse (1:3), “under the sun” (only in Ecclesiastes in the Bible, 29 times), clarifies the author’s perspective. The meaning is that earthly existence is brief and mere worldly accomplishments are of no eternal worth. (Stephen R. Miller, “Ecclesiastes, Book Of,” ed. Chad Brand et al., Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 454.
My understanding of the message of Ecclesiastes is that once you remove the biblical concept of God from your worldview nothing has any true or lasting meaning or value. It seems to me that Solomon experimented with existentialism and nihilism, and even what we call postmodernism, and realized the problems with those philosophies.
The Parable of The Madman
I hope to make this clearer with the following quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, (from the Parable of the Madman)
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
Greece may seem like an example of how philosophy can develop and even thrive without God. It may seem like the Greeks were able to define/discover what is good and noble using only logic and philosophy. However, upon closer inspection, you will notice that education, philosophy, and science declined in Greece. Eventually philosophy, logic, and reason reach a point where they must admit their inability to find satisfying ultimate answers. Eventually, you reach nihilism and that leads to escapism, which is not conducive to a meaningful enjoyable, and happy life, after all, there is no meaning to life once the biblical God is removed. As Nietzsche pointed out, we end up having to become God and come up with a meaning for our own lives.
Richard Rorty ( 1931–2007) argues in What’s the Use of Truth, that the traditional distinctions between true and false must be abandoned since we can only speak in terms of webs of language that display greater or lesser degrees of “smoothness” or homogeneity. For Rorty every assertion of truth is only provisional, at its very core a form of make-believe — because language itself is merely a product of human society. He seems to believe that reality is a linguistically constructed, self-referential human social reality. (Mangalwadi, V. (2011). The book that made your world: How the bible created the soul of Western Civilization. Thomas Nelson. (XIV-XV)
Western Philosophy has essentially lost all hope of finding truth. You may think I am exaggerating but think about your recent interactions with people who have different political views, or different views regarding science and health. It can be quite frustrating to the point that many just throw up their hands and decide that you live your truth and I’ll live my truth.
I may not have all the answers. I may not understand everything. But when I feel like just giving up I turn to the Bible and to God and direct my paths accordingly. I do not feel the burden to make everyone believe what I believe, but I do feel a burden to have a coherent and consistent worldview so that I can live my life. I find that worldview in the Bible. I am still learning, maturing, and growing, but I consider everything that I learn in light of what the Bible has to say about it.
Making it practical
Rejoice, O young man, in your youth,
And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth;
Walk in the ways of your heart,
And in the sight of your eyes;
But know that for all these
God will bring you into judgment.
- Ecclesiastes 11:9 NKJV
In life, I believe you should pursue your dreams, follow your passion, and go on adventures, but never forget that God holds you accountable. In your joy and adventures don’t forget to be honest (Proverbs 12:22), to be kind (Galatians 6:9), to work hard (Proverbs 14:23), be willing to forgive (Ephesians 4:32).
A biblical worldview does not limit the joy you can experience in life, it multiplies it!
A biblical worldview goes beyond guidelines for behavior, it also includes universal truths that have practical implications for our lives.
Some examples include
The world was created by a powerful God - Genesis 1-2, John 1
God loves me - John 3:16
God will never leave nor forsake me - Deuteronomy 4:31
God is in control - Colossians 1:17
I do not have to be afraid - Isaiah 41:10
Jesus is coming soon - John 14:1-3; Revelation 22:12-13
But this does not mean that everything will be easy. There is a battle going on between good and evil.
There is an enemy at work - Matthew 13:24-30; Ephesians 6:12
The Devil promotes murder and lies - John 8:44
But Satan’s days are numbered - Romans 16:20
We are called to help the needy - Deuteronomy 15:11; Acts 20:35
There is much more to this. I am still learning about how all of this plays out. But I hope this is enough to give you some ideas about the biblical worldview. The more we read and study the Bible the clearer the worldview becomes. It is simple in some ways, God is in control and ultimate victory belongs to Him. But it is also incredibly complex in other ways, what our role is in all of this, and how this battle between Christ and Satan plays a role in world events and our personal lives.
We never stop learning and maturing, but this growth takes place under the guidance of God and His word, the Bible.
Here is some evidence I have witnessed recently.
Pathfinder Club
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a ministry called Pathfinder Club which falls under Club Ministries. My wife and I are heavily involved, we have experience with Adventurer, Pathfinder, and Master Guides. We are not paid for this, this is all volunteer. We do it because we believe it helps kids, families, and communities.
Recently we attended a big event called a Division Camporee where Pathfinders from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska came. We had over one thousand Pathfinders participate! (Not bad after the shutdowns due to COVID in the last couple of years.)
We drove 10 hours to spend 5 days sleeping in tents in Kalispell, Montana. Many clubs traveled from much further. All volunteers except for a few key organizers. All these clubs, kids, parents, and staff, all voluntarily camping, facing cold and rain to participate in this ministry that seeks to encourage and challenge kids to grow in all areas of life, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Kids from all walks of life and different faiths are welcome.
Towards the end of the event I was talking to some of the key organizers and they shared how the workers for the fairgrounds where we were camping were amazed at our group. They were surprised at how polite everyone was. They could not believe how clean the area was. Some said the fairgrounds were cleaner now that we were there. They said the only sign that someone was using the bathroom was that they had to replace the paper and take out the trash. They could not believe how neat, clean, polite, and pleasant a group of kids ages 10-16 could be.
I share this because I believe that this is evidence that the Pathfinder ministry is working. The kids are behaving as good citizens. This also encourages me that a biblical worldview shapes us into the best version of ourselves. I am not saying that all the kids are perfect, and I am not saying that being a Pathfinder is an easy task. But I do believe that the evidence points to this ministry being worth the time and effort. Tangible results are evident, good things result from this ministry.
Seventh-day Adventist Schools
You do not have to be a Seventh-day Adventist to attend a Seventh-day Adventist School, anyone can attend. My kids currently attend our local school, Boise Valley Adventist Academy. Last year, in the month of January the kids from the school went to a local mountain to ski. the kids were divided into groups and spent the day learning to ski. This took place one day a week for three consecutive weeks. One of the days, I was there helping the kids and just making sure everything was going smoothly when at the end of the session one of the instructors approached me and asked if I was with the Christian school and I said “yes.” The instructor proceeded to tell me how much he had enjoyed our kids. He said he had been teaching people to ski since he was a young man and continued to do it because he loved it and now some of his grandkids were starting to work there as well. He said it was rare to come across a group as pleasant as the one he had that day He said the kids were kind, polite, friendly, honest, and just a pleasure to be around. He congratulated me and told me to keep doing whatever we were doing.
What I take away from these stories, is that the God of the Bible makes a difference in our lives. As we invite Him into our lives and study the Bible seeking to know Him better, He transforms us into what He means for us to be.
the Conclusion of the Whole Matter
13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man’s all.
14 For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.
- Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 NKJV
