My wife and I just binged the Netflix series Travelers. It's a different kind of time travel show. Using historical records, a mysterious director in the future sends the consciousness of volunteers into the bodies of people who are about to die. By using the extra life they have given these bodies, the travelers from the future try to change their past, which is our present. It turns out that in the 21st century everything went so wrong that the future is hellish, with people living in underground bunkers to protect them from nuclear winter and without any of the foods we have today. Each team of travelers consists of an historian, a medic, an engineer, a tactician and a leader. They follow a list of protocols that are calculated not to cause too many changes other than the big ones that will enable humanity to survive. Of course, this is difficult for them to do and remain unnoticed by the families and friends of the people whose bodies they have taken over. Towards the end of the series, a man who has fallen in love with a traveler asks the team why they don't simply tell the world what is wrong with it and how to fix it. They explain that most of the people in the world know both what is wrong with it and what they should do to fix it. The implication is that people just don't want to make the necessary sacrifices to change the way things are.
There are religions and philosophies which hold that all the problems in the world stem from our ignorance of certain truths. If people just knew the truth, they would change the way they lived. But it doesn't take much reflection to realize that folks don't always react to knowledge that way. When I was in a skid row ministry in college, I thought the key to helping the people we were encountering was to first get them to acknowledge that they were alcoholics. So I was shocked to discover that they readily admitted that they were. But what they took from that knowledge was that their situation was hopeless and so they just leaned into their addiction.
Today most of us now know that our world is heating up because we are burning fossil fuels. We know that nuclear war is a stupid and self-destructive option for anyone to attempt. We know that life expectancy is better than ever because of things like vaccines and modern medicine. We know that huge inequalities in income undermine stable societies. We know that mindlessly following all-powerful rulers leads to authoritarian governments that oppress people. We, like the travelers, are living with the consequences of our past. But we don't want to make the changes necessary to avoid repeating history.
Knowledge is not enough. For instance, putting the Ten Commandments into classrooms will not stop school shootings. The problem isn't that somehow violent people have never learned that the Bible says “Thou shalt not kill.” It's that they don't care. It's that in their hearts they think their feelings of insignificance or anger or despair or self-righteousness are more important than the lives of others. And it doesn't help that “follow your heart” is the message most often expressed in our culture, from self-help books to Disney movies.
In fact you could create an alternate version of the Ten Commandments that express our true values, the ones we don't always say aloud.
It would go something like this: “You are the master of your own life. You shall have no priorities higher than your own desires and comfort.
“You shall make idols out of anything you wish. You shall be free to make gods in your own image. You shall worship and follow your idols no matter how damaging this is for you or other people.
“You shall freely use God's name to justify whatever you want, even if it directly contradicts what God or Jesus explicitly said.
“You shall work continuously without rest and make those under you do likewise. You shall not set aside time to think about and reorient yourself to anything or anyone greater than yourself.
“You shall blame all of your problems on your genetics and upbringing, excusing yourself from making any changes in the way you act and ignoring those who managed to become better people in spite of what they were working with.
“You shall demonize and dehumanize and diminish and even take the lives of those you don't like.
“You shall do whatever you desire sexually, without regard to whether it harms others.
“You shall take whatever you want by whatever means you can get away with.
“You shall not let truth get in the way of what you want to say, even if it harms others.
“You shall not let the fact that what you want belongs to someone else stop you from pursuing it.” (Compare this with Exodus 20:1-17)
The problem in following your heart is that the heart doesn't always want what's good for it or for you, much less what's good for others. As it says in Jeremiah, “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurably sick—who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) As Jesus said, “For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, arrogance and foolishness.” (Mark 7:21-22)
This is something the travelers in the TV series come up against. It turns out that other people in the future have lost faith in the director's great plan and have come back to our time to sabotage it and take control for themselves. And when the existence of the travelers comes to the attention of the governments of the present day world, they are distrusted. Some wish to get their hands on the future technology for the benefit of their own governments instead of sharing it with the world. The biggest problem the travelers encounter is not ignorance but human nature, including their own.
Knowledge is good but knowledge alone is not sufficient to solve our problems. Knowledge must be coupled with wisdom, which is about understanding the human heart and understanding what is truly valuable in life. For example, the Nazis had some of the best scientists and some of the best generals of that time. The problem was in the ways they used their knowledge of chemistry and rocketry and warfare. In fact the British called off their plans to assassinate Hitler when they realized that he was overruling his generals and redirecting the scientists' work according to his own desires. He thought he knew better than the experts. The British realized that by letting Hitler continue to direct his country's war effort, he would lose the war. Hitler's evil heart would bring about his own defeat.
But knowledge and wisdom are still not enough. For people to use their knowledge of God and his commandments wisely, they need a change of heart. In Ezekiel, God says of his people, “I will give them one heart and will put a new spirit within them; I will remove the hearts of stone from their bodies and I will give them tender hearts, so that they may follow my statutes and observe my regulations and carry them out. Then they will be my people, and I will be their God.” Ezekiel 11:19-20) Likewise in Jeremiah God speaks of a new covenant in which “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds. I will be their God and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33) Jesus came to inaugurate that new covenant and to give us a new heart and a new Spirit. (Luke 22:20; John 14:15-17)
In this day and age, there is very little in the way of essential knowledge for living that we do not already have. What we lack is the motivation to put that knowledge to use wisely. As a nurse, I have taken care of patients with conditions that they fully understood and I watched them ignore their doctors' orders because it would go against their desires. I have seen patients with emphysema continue to smoke. One even managed to get about 25 feet of tubing for her nasal cannula so she could stand outside her door and smoke while hooked up to the oxygen tank back inside her room. She didn't want to die instantly by blowing herself up while smoking next to the oxygen tank, but apparently she had no objection to killing herself slowly with tobacco. Another patient, a brittle diabetic, was secretly eating sweets his wife brought him, sending his blood sugar soaring. And he was a retired nurse! They knew what would save them but their hearts were not in it.
When a person's physical heart is incurably failing, we call it congestive heart failure. Their heart can no longer do its job properly and so they are slowly dying. It is possible these days to replace it with a donor's heart. Of course the donor must die so that the heart's recipient can live. One way you can think of what Jesus did is that he died so that we might have a change of heart: his heart. He gave his life that we might have life. As Paul put it, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
For a patient to receive a new heart they have to trust a surgeon to cut them open, break their sternum, take out the bad heart and then transplant into them the healthy heart. It is difficult and the patient can expect to have some pain afterwards. They must do physical therapy to regain strength and mobility. They will have to take their medicine so they don't get an infection or reject the heart. And they will also have to change their diet to stay healthy.
To get a change of heart spiritually, we have to trust God to open up our life, get inside us, and change out our corrupt heart for the heart of Jesus. Afterwards we may feel the pain of leaving behind the stuff we desired but which was bad for us. We have to work with his Spirit as he helps us gain spiritual strength and the ability to walk with God. We need to avoid those things that will infect our hearts with unhealthy desires and habits and cause us to reject Jesus' way. So we need to change what we consume mentally and spiritually.
One of the things I hate in TV shows and movies is when the hero wakes up in a hospital bed, rips out his IV, tears off the leads to the heart monitor, gets up and leaves the hospital to get the bad guys. It is very dramatic but it is also unrealistic because anyone in that bad a shape is in no condition to do anything by themselves. (Not to mention the fact that pulling out an IV and not applying a pressure bandage will cause him to bleed profusely. Instead of walking out, he'd most likely pass out and possibly bleed out.)
We cannot radically change our life without help. That's why Jesus gives us his Spirit to comfort, strengthen, guide and encourage us. (John 14:26) The Holy Spirit gives us the ability to trust God, to turn our life around (ie, repent), to pray, to love God and to love other people, including our enemies. The Spirit of God gives us gifts and abilities for us to demonstrate that love. (1 Corinthians 12:4-6; Romans 12:6-8) The Spirit produces in us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) We need the Spirit of Christ in us because otherwise we cannot change in the ways we must in order to become new creations in Christ. (Romans 8:9; 2 Corinthians 5:17)
In the TV show Travelers we see a countdown of the seconds before each person faces death. Then they start to show pain as the new person's consciousness takes over. In real life making a change can be similar. As a nurse I have seen that often people will not make major changes in their lives until it becomes too painful to continue living in the same unhealthy ways. It took a near-fatal heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery for my father-in-law to change his lifestyle, like to stop eating fatty Polish foods and start exercising. It wasn't that he didn't know that he should do those things. But it took the pain of his desperately sick heart to make him realize that he must change or die.
It is wiser, of course, not to wait until the last second to change. After all, every second of this life is a second chance to change what we are doing. At any moment, we can decide to turn from the desires and fears that actually rule our lives and turn to God. We can let him take over and bring us back to the path we should be traveling—back to the One who is the source of healing and forgiveness and growth and love.
No comments:
Post a Comment