Ecclesiastes 3:11 haunts the human mind that pretends to be secular:
[God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
At first blush, secular answers — that is, those that refuse to acknowledge any religious or spiritual basis for human life and our world — may attract those aching to suppress the truth that God has made plain in his creation (Romans 1:18–20). But soon the sparkle wears off. Secular life does not prove satisfying — emotionally or intellectually. Secular “believers” may enjoy the initial thrill of feeling free from divine oversight and the wages of sin. But the wishful thinking of cosmic rebels proves empty sooner or later. As it always has.
God made us, and made us for himself. The Potter has designs. In our sin, we want to spin away from him. Yet in the very clay of our humanity, we were made for him and cannot get around or beyond his purposes, no matter how much sin pressures us to flee.
While Christians in this generation may feel a new acuteness in secular pressures, the Christian faith has always required the look of faith to the unseen. Some forces seem new; the fundamental realities of the Christian life remain unchanged. Long have we been a people with a different kind of vision, mindset, and joy than our surrounding society.
1. A Different Kind of Vision
First, we have a different kind of vision than our unbelieving age. We live by faith. Believers the world over may dispute or variously read a number of passages, but every stripe of church and tribe of Christians confesses, with Paul, “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
From where does such faith come? “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). And oh how counter-secular are such invisibilities! Against a visibly focused age, our invisible faith — arising in the inner, unseen person — comes from hearing the audible yet invisible word: the good news about Christ. And that through an unseen Helper we call the Holy Spirit (Galatians 3:5).
2. A Different Kind of Mindset
Second, we have a different kind of mindset than our world’s. Faith in the unseen God frees our minds from the prison of “the immanent frame” — that small slice of reality that we can see, hear, touch, taste, and feel. Christian faith liberates us from the earthly mindedness into which we are born as natural humans. As the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us, helps us to see through and behind and beyond the phenomena of our world, he also makes us increasingly spiritually minded.
If we coast, the world will have its way with our minds and their frame. We might still read our Bibles and frequent churches and even speak in pulpits; we might still quote verses and expound Christian doctrines. But from what mindset and to what end? Have our world’s terms and ends infected and seized our minds? Pretending there is no God or unseen, our world can’t help but fill the void with politics, sports, decadence, and trivia. If our own hearts have been captured by this mindset, our dreams and greatest joys will look very much like the world’s, and very little like the different kind of joy on offer in Christ.
3. A Different Kind of Joy
Finally, we have a different kind of joy than the world’s — a joy that flows from our different vision and mindset. As we see the unseen God (vision) and see our world through his eyes (mindset), our joy rises far beyond the joy rooted merely in this world we can see.
Surely, the world has tasted and talks about a kind of “happiness” — one that is fleeting, unpredictable, impulsive, and superficial. And it’s a happiness that dishonors God, diminishes Christ, ignores Scripture, and leads to damnation, not final, eternal bliss. But in Christ, ours is a different sort of happiness — one that is lasting and deep and soul-satisfying. It is rooted in God and expands through loving others and doing them good.
“The end and goal of all things,” says John Piper, “is the glory of God reflected in the gladness of his people in God.” Isaiah spoke of this different kind of joy seven centuries before Christ when he said Christ’s people will “go out in joy and be led forth in peace . . . and it shall make a name for the Lord” (Isaiah 55:12–13). (Mathis)
