Wisdom for the Young (Part One)

For the past sixty years, America has been dominated by one particular generation of its citizens, the many millions born just after World War II, also known as the "Baby Boomers." Unfortunately, among the Boomers' most dominant attitudes has been a kind of narcissism, an over-indulged self-love. Their narcissism, however, comes with a twist in that it seems to be focused specifically on their collective youth. For example, they have convinced most of the nation that the decades of the 1950s and ‘60s—when they were young and made their early mark on society—were America's Golden Age. In trying to recapture that Golden Age, they have created and sustained what sociologists call a "youth culture," which is a society that caters to, panders to, overprotects, and essentially worships its young people.

The main objection to the youth culture is that it teaches wrong principles to children. It gives them bad ideas, chiefly to have a "me first" attitude, passing narcissism on to the next generation. It also preaches that youth is a time of carefree fun because others are supporting them—because parents, the school, and the community are doing the heavy lifting. Young people are encouraged to "live it up" while they are young because adulthood is serious, full of trouble and work, and boring. So they hear, "Sow your wild oats while you're young," and "Extend your youth as long as possible, for you'll never pass this way again."

Despite being considered conventional wisdom in our culture, this is a huge serving of baloney! From a biblical perspective, it is utter nonsense, though it contains just enough truth to make people believe it and swallow the lie. However, youth should not be a time of wild abandon. It is not a stage of life to be prolonged because adulthood is so dreary. It is not an inconsequential period of irresponsibility. It is in reality a very critical time that sets the stage for the rest of life!

Wise Solomon was interested in the questions of life. He had a great thirst for understanding the reasons behind people's actions—what made them tick, as it were—and from his conclusions he would fashion pearls of wisdom that are still valuable today. Notice Ecclesiastes 11:9-10; 12:1, which is aimed at young people:

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 these things God will bring you into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh, for childhood and youth are vanity. Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come. . . .

Halfway through verse 9, we could have argued that Solomon was an early advocate for the youth culture, promoting the idea that young people should be happy-go-lucky and do whatever their hearts desire. But Solomon was much wiser than the modern supporters of the youth culture. In the last half of the verse and the next, he adds the proper countering wisdom. Yes, Solomon does say, "Have fun. Enjoy your youth. Pursue your desires,"but he adds three major qualifications to what may seem at first blush to encourage self-gratification. These qualifications take the form of warnings and provide the proper perspective.

The first warning is be aware that God is watching, and He will surely bring us into account for our sins. This greatly modifies his admonition to pursue joy and cheer. There is good amusement and sinful excess. The good times Solomon tells the young to seek must be proper fun, enjoyment that is wholesome and productive. He wants them to be happy and find worthwhile pleasures but not the kind that will return upon them with some sort of penalty later.

The second caution, which appears at the end of verse 10, is to remember that childhood and youth are vanity. The years up to adulthood pass like a snap of the fingers. Yet, this is not all that Solomon means. It can mean that, not only do the years fly by, but that they are also, in most people's cases, useless, futile, unsatisfying, or unproductive. In other words, our early years are not the most important of our lives. It is an interesting way of looking at our young years. If all we do is have fun, then our lives will indeed be futile, unproductive, unsatisfying, useless. However, if we use our youth in the right way, then those years become meaningful and productive. Something good will transfer from our immaturity to enhance our adult years.

Notice that Solomon prefaces his conclusion that youth is vanity by saying, "Remove sorrow from your heart." To us that means, "Let's party!" but that is not what he means. More exactly, he instructs us to get rid of those things that will cause us sorrow, the urges and desires that will trip us up and produce grief later. In other words, he advises us to use our younger years to learn how to avoid and rise above heartache-producing lusts. That is a tall order!

He parallels this with "Put away evil from your flesh." This defines what he means by "remov[ing] sorrow from your heart." Solomon, however, first approaches the problem on the level of the heart, one's mind and emotions—character—where the removal of wrong desires must begin. Once we set our minds to do what is right, evils of the flesh are more easily controlled.

Solomon's third admonition appears in Ecclesiastes 12:1: Seek God early, and life will be so much better. He counsels young people to use their youthful energy, ambition, and mental acuity in His service, in doing what is right, before the human machine starts to wear down and lose its idealism, vigor, and zeal. Because of life's experiences, people become tired and jaded as the years progress. If we seek God when young, it is often easier to embrace Him with our whole being. And when those darker days come, we will have the strength to bear them.

He urges young people to seek God before experiencing the world—and accumulating the baggage and penalties of sin and flawed character. It is far easier not to get into a bad habit in the first place than to have to overcome one. So, he says, "Don't even go there!" Many adults in God's church would give anything not to have lived so long in the world because, despite their later conversion, they still suffer the consequences of sins they committed in it. Never going out into the world at all can save many tears.

For some people, having seen the world, they are so disgusted by it that their revulsion to it acts to keep them from it, but it does not work that way for most people. Once people "enjoy" the lusts of the flesh and the eye and the pride of life (I John 2:16), they are more easily drawn back into them. Solomon asserts that by seeking God when young, a person will avoid many troubles and live a more fulfilling life.

Solomon will tell us more about seeking God when young in Part Two.

Big-Picture Thinking

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It has become traditional as we flip our Gregorian calendars from December to January each year to assess the old year and resolve to amend our faults and shortcomings in the new. Unfortunately, the assessing has devolved into a series of meaningless "Best of" and "Worst of" lists, while the amending of our ways chiefly concerns foods we love to eat, liquids we like to drink, weight we need to lose, and exercise we ought to do. As for real soul-searching and determination to improve one's character, for most that has passed from the scene with the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

In the church, we often relegate these exercises to the run-up to Passover, as we follow the dictate in II Corinthians 13:5 to examine ourselves. We consider our spiritual growth over the past year—or lack thereof—and resolve to pursue real change with zeal and humility. This is all to the good. As anyone who has ever tackled a long-term project knows, frequent evaluation and subsequent course-correction help to keep the project on track and focused on the goal. The process we are involved with in cooperation with the God of the universe is essentially the same with the exception that it is far more important.

Most of us, it seems, tend to approach this annual self-evaluation from a micro rather than macro perspective. In other words, we ignore the big questions of life to focus on the details of our personal circumstances. Instead of stepping back and trying to see how the whole fits together, we stoop down to examine the minutest pieces individually and separately. As Jesus instructed on an entirely different topic, "These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone" (Matthew 23:23).

This oft-repeated tendency is not surprising, since the world routinely takes the same path. It is, frankly, an offshoot of the selfishness, the self-centeredness, of human nature. We are so often involved in our own thoughts and feelings—all of the time, really—that we naturally gravitate toward I, me, and mine to the nth degree. And I, me, and mine so interest us that we are likely to pursue what we think is best for them with such attention and devotion that all else is diminished, ignored, or even forgotten as of little account. Thus, our age is marked with the stain of narcissism, and its blot has bled through into God’s church to no small extent.

A few decades ago, the church was frequently reminded of some of the big issues of life through the preaching of Herbert W. Armstrong. Each holy day, or at least each Feast of Tabernacles, he would force us to ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" He meant, not just "Why are we celebrating this holy time?" but also "Why do we exist?" "Why has God called us?" "Why have the events of our lives, ordained and manipulated by our sovereign God, brought us to this point?" "Where are we headed?" "Where does God want us to go, and what is He doing to get us there?" Too often, having heard the sermon many times before, we listened politely but took little of it to heart.

How true is the saying, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else"! Pursuing the answers to the big questions should determine the goal. If we fail to revisit the overarching principles from time to time, we are liable to stray from the most direct course toward their achievement. Once we begin to wander from the path, sin—missing the mark—enters into the picture.

In Old Testament times, God commanded Israel to do certain things so that they would remember that they were part of a people who had made a covenant with God and that this agreement constrained them to live differently than all other peoples on earth. For instance, God ordered the people to wear tassels on the corners of their garments to remember who they were, how they were to behave, and who was their God:

Speak to the children of Israel: Tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a blue thread in the tassels of the corners. And you shall have the tassel, that you may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and that you may not follow the harlotry to which your own heart and your own eyes are inclined, and that you may remember and do all My commandments, and be holy for your God. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God. (Numbers 15:38-41)

Under the New Covenant, Christians are not required to do this, but the principle it expresses is still apropos. We need to be reminded frequently to take a step back, to remember our place and mission before God, and to evaluate how well we have followed His lead. This points out the tragedy in the loss of the Sabbath in the Christianity of this world, for though Christians do not have to wear tassels, the fourth commandment reads, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exodus 20:8). The Sabbath day is a weekly reminder of God, His creation (both the physical creation and the ongoing spiritual creation), His holiness, and our participation with Him in His plan. These are all big-picture items.

Once each year is not enough to evaluate our course. God provides us an opportunity once each week to do some big-picture thinking, to take a measurement and re-orient our prow toward the one point on the horizon that will bring us to our predetermined destination, the Kingdom of God.

What Is the Pope Up To?

Pope Benedict XVI, the German-born former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is the leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide and presides over a multi-billion dollar empire of land holdings, churches and cathedrals, companies, universities, institutions, hospitals, etc. His representatives, official and otherwise, are in every nation on the globe, influencing policy to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Church. He has hundreds of advisors and assistants, many of whom are among the most learned men on earth. He sits atop an organization that wields power and influence far beyond the confines of tiny Vatican City in Rome.

If he has all this wealth, knowledge, and authority behind him, why did he make such a colossal blunder in his comments at Regensburg University in Germany on September 12? Did he not know that even quoting a fourteenth-century Christian emperor's anti-Islamic remark would ignite protests and perhaps violence as well across the Muslim world?

Without a doubt.

The Pope, who turned 79 in April 2006, has observed the world long enough to be able to predict accurately just how his audiences will react to his ideas. The Vatican, long steeped in both politics and cultural sensitivity, understands the hair-trigger reactions of Islamic fundamentalists to anything even remotely offensive to "the religion of peace" or its prophet, Muhammad—remember that the furor over the Danish cartoons erupted just months ago. If his words, then, were not a thoughtless blunder, what were they designed to do? Why did he intentionally make them? What is the Pope up to?

There are probably at least two answers to these questions. The first is contained in the public response to Muslim demands of the Pope to apologize to the faithful for his "outrageous slander" of Muhammad. In his remarks to invitees to a meeting at his summer residence near Rome on September 25, the Pope regretted that his comments offended Muslims, yet he went on to explain briefly that Christians and Muslims "must learn to work together . . . to guard against all forms of intolerance and to oppose all manifestations of violence."

A reading of his Regensburg speech makes it plain that this was his intention all along. Notice this passage:

The [Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologos II, a Christian] must have known that Sura 2,256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." . . . But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Quran, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, . . . he addresses his interlocutor . . . on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death. . . ."

Here he introduces his real subject, the relationship of reason and faith in religion. Muslim extremists—and frankly most Muslims period—have abandoned reason in their wholehearted devotion to Islam, and the result has been conflict, destruction, and death. On the other side, Western Christianity has rejected faith in favor of rationalism, producing cultural relativism and an essentially godless society. Benedict's speech was designed to steer a course toward the future between the two extremes.

At this point, the second answer to the why of the Pope's intentions comes to the fore. Upon ascending to the pontificate, Benedict dedicated himself to returning Europe to fundamental Christian values in response to increasing secularization. In a May 1996 address titled "Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today," he noted, presaging his papal theme:

Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego.

To counter this creeping narcissism, he recommends Europe's re-Christianization, urging Europeans "to open ourselves to this friendship with God . . . speaking to him as to a friend, the only One who can make the world both good and happy. . ." ("St. Josemaría: God Is Very Much at Work in Our World Today," L'Osservatore Romano, October 9, 2002). In early 2006, this theme still on his mind, he reiterated, "It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians . . ." ("Friendship with God," Zenit News, February 7, 2006).

In this light, his remarks at Regensburg were a rallying cry to Europe to reject the fanatical, violent faith of its burgeoning Muslim minority as well as the sterile, empty secularism of modern society—and to embrace the reasonable, traditional, and beneficial faith of Christianity. By doing so, he sets up himself and the Roman Catholic Church as sound-minded bastions of European solidarity and strength.

Despite the violence his remarks caused, he has calculated that they were worth the turmoil so that he could gauge, not the Muslim reaction, which was predictable, but the European response. He is hoping to see a shift in attitudes toward the Catholic Church and the papacy to defend Christendom from the ongoing Islamic assault. So far—and granted, his remarks still echo across the Continent—he has seen nothing from secular Europe to give him hope.

Something Is Wrong

I recently experienced another birthday (making me as old as Jack Benny always claimed to be—really!), and in looking back at the last nearly four decades, I was struck with how different the world is today. By the time I became aware of current events and circumstances, American culture had already moved past its peak, sliding down what appears from this angle to have been a precipitous slope—and it has not yet reached bottom. However, the consequences of our cultural descent are becoming evident; we see them in our newspapers and news programs with discouraging regularity.

Perhaps most appalling is the number of pundits and persons of influence who not only apologize for the pollution of our popular culture, but also support and applaud it for its "edginess," "realism," and "honesty." These champions of the tawdry, tacky, and inferior continually urge the American people, particularly those who produce such garbage, to take cultural change even farther—not just being satisfied with living on the cutting-edge or even the bleeding-edge, but to hurtle recklessly past the edge altogether into the realm of the untried and unimagined. With the hubris that comes from money, power, and boredom, Americans are trying to outdo the ancient Romans for spectacle and perversion.

In addition, Americans of all ages have forgotten or were never taught to apply the principle of cause-and-effect—every action produces a consequence. This is partly due to the fact that Americans tend to have short attention spans, historically speaking. For too many, "just a few years ago" is ancient history, and, they whine, who needs to be bothered by all that worthless information, since it has no relevance today? The obvious result is that Americans tend to ignore the lessons of history and fail to see that past actions have produced penalties that we are only now just observing. We are reaping what was sowed in past decades (Galatians 6:7).

As an exercise, then, the following list will give us a push toward finding solutions to our culture's downward spiral by making us face up to the consequences and work backward to the cause.

Something is wrong when . . .

. . . the most popular television shows and movies make fun of others' misfortunes. Human nature always wants to laugh at the foibles of weak people, but today it has moved on to utter exploitation of the unfortunate. We do this because it makes us feel better about ourselves by comparison, yet in reality, it exposes an attitude of contempt and pride. It is a product of individualism taken to an extreme—to the point of disdainful unconcern for fellow man.

. . . homosexuals comprise only 1-3% of the American population, yet they hold a disproportionate share of positions of power in government, education, and entertainment, influencing the course of American life. While this hints at grand conspiracy, such a thing would not have happened except the majority had simply capitulated to all—or nearly all—of their strategically brazen demands. This capitulation has been marketed as enlightened tolerance, but it is really abject fear: fear of retribution, fear of disease, fear of losing their own cherished rights to practice their personal perversities.

. . . young girls and women of all ages seem to take delight in exposing themselves in public. It used to be that women upheld decency standards far longer than men, but today's women appear to be leading the pack in matters of peddling flesh. Today, it is no longer just a matter of high hemlines and deep-cut necklines, but of leaving virtually nothing to the imagination. This public undressing of American women stems, paradoxically, from the over-emphasis on self-esteem in homes and classrooms across the nation. Because this indoctrination has been done at the expense of teaching propriety, standards, and self-discipline, it has produced the opposite of its intended effect.

. . . an increasing number of young men refuse to grow up and take on the responsibilities of adulthood. Sowing one's wild oats used to be over by the time a man graduated from college, but today it drags on into the thirties. Such "old adolescents" live for parties, sports, women, drugs—good times, by their reckoning—and abhor the thought of becoming contributing members of society. This avoidance of maturity has its source in a failure to instill discipline and proper ambition in boys, allowing them to play all the time.

. . . more than a million mothers agree to let a doctor kill their unborn babies each year. The obvious catalyst of this ongoing tragedy is Roe v. Wade in 1973, but overturning this colossally and criminally idiotic Supreme Court decision is a red herring. It should be done, but the underlying causes are more fundamental and moral. At its base is a diminished respect for life and a hyper-selfishness akin to extreme narcissism.

These examples are just a handful of things that are wrong with our society. They are happening for a reason, and with a little thought, we can trace them back to their causes. Ultimately, they all go back to forsaking the universally applicable principles of God's Word. As Jesus says, "If you know these things, happy are you if you do them" (John 13:17).