Absolutes…You Can’t Live Without Them

Dear Trekker,
It’s Holy Week. Sunday will be Easter! And in recent days I find myself obsessed, thinking of the necessity for absolutes in one’s life. Easter certainly is one of those absolutes, perhaps the greatest of all.

You know, there are a lot of things that are absolutely true in life whether or not you or I believe them. Take for example, what happened yesterday! “It” happened, all 24 hours, 1440 minutes of it, whether remembered, meaningless, or monumental. “It” absolutely “is” or “was”. “It” is life! “Something” is the absolute truth of yesterday. We call it history! We may argue concerning its meaning to us, but what happened yesterday is an irrevocable, absolute fact, a reference for what we think today.

Frankly, I have to chuckle at the sophomoric comments pop culture…spins when denying absolute truth. For sure, relativism is the default position of pop culture. Everything is relative to something else; there can be no actual reality. What delusion! All this “justifies” no right or wrong, it is simply your opinion against mine. It is sophistry; it is called “situational ethics”, which leads to a “feel good” mentality and morality. And you wonder why our Judeo-Christian culture is floating out to sea? Don’t wonder long. Oh… post-modernism has such an erudite ring! Yes, yes… but “the fool says in his heart, there is no God”, as the Psalmist states. Psalm 14:1

Enter Easter! Easter has always been the greatest of holidays for me. Why? It celebrates the most revolutionary event in all history, again, whether you or I choose to believe it or not. I like the Apostle Paul’s word to his friends in Corinth 2,000 years ago: “What I received, I passed on to you of first (absolute) importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve. After that he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time… then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”

The son of God became the son of man, born into the world from the hoary mists of forever. His birth happened! It absolutely did. Easter happened! It absolutely did. Disbelieve at your peril, but receive Him and He too will appear to you. Each of us has his/her own story of His appearance to us, just as Paul. I pray it has happened to you, trekker. You, though dead, were and are made alive in Christ. “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” Trekker, that is absolute truth, the core of the Good News.

Some skeptics who deny absolutes blow me away with their banality and denials. To say there are no absolutes is the height of impracticality in the natural world. Gravity is real; metrics are a must if you want to build a boat, a house or a nation. Standards must be valid and followed. Of course, if one accepts absolutes, one is obligated to live by them, in nature or in morality. So the justifiable “out” is to deny the standard and live like a heathen, doing “one’s own thing”. It is perpetual adolescence. I have concluded over the years that accountability is what man is really rejecting when one says “there is no absolute truth.” As we all deal with yesterday’s “absolute” failures (guilt?), there can be and is hope for a better tomorrow. And that is the Easter message! Two thousand years ago, God was dying on a cross to demonstrate His love for us. We confess our failure to believe in this absolute love in order to receive the deeper truth that we have already been forgiven. And to “prove” it all true, He rose from the dead. “I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive forever and ever” according to St. John’s account in Revelation.

Man doesn’t create the absolutes; one cannot “dream or think them up”. They are to be received from “outside”, and lived a day at a time. Trekker, life itself is not up for grabs. It is routine, it is a given… the sun rises and sets every day. That is an absolute truth because God is and creates routine and order. Life is predictable. HOW WE RESPOND definitely IS “up for grabs”! When life occurs, we better all be “pro-choice” because it is up to us to choose the absolutes of history! What irony… the pop culture “pro-choice” phrase is anything but, particularly for a precious life aborted.

C.S. Lewis’s writings are always at my fingertips. His book “Mere Christianity” is next to the Scriptures in importance to me. Here is his comprehensive explanation of Holy Week “absolute truth”: “We believe that the death of Christ is just that part of history which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shines through our own world… the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it. We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That‘s the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.”

Believe this absolute truth, trekker! Love it, live it, and “shout it from the house tops.” “For if the Spirit of Him who raised Christ from the dead (that first Easter) lives in you, He too will give life to you through His Spirit living in you.” Romans, Ch. 8. This is absolute truth. Believe it absolutely, trekker. Let us serve the risen Savior, for He is in the world today.

Grateful to my Redeemer; and I know absolutely He lives within my heart,
Jim Meredith