Myth 4 – Somewhere out there is the good life – if only I could find it

There is a secret desire that lies deep within each one of us. It’s woven into the very fabric of our souls. Although we may not recognize it and although at times we may lose touch with it, this deep longing fuels much of what we do.

It is a longing for the good life. By the good life, I mean a state of being where we are consistently finding joy, fulfilment, and delight. We long for a world where things are beautiful and ordered. A place of peace and tranquility, but also a place where we can find excitement and high adventure. A world in which we can experience deep and satisfying relationships, enjoying intimacy and communion with others.

But when we look at our lives and our circumstances as they really are, we find that they are far from this. Life is messy, complicated, stressful, frustrating, and often terribly painful. And so we struggle to come to terms with what life is and what we wish life could be.

At this point, the world steps in and says “You can have the good life that you are yearning for. If you are smart, creative, willing to take risks, and above all, willing to spend money, you can have the good life you are looking for.

The world whispers to us that the good life is available; that it is attainable, that it is “out there” and you can grasp hold of it if you look in the right places and do the right things.

Is this true? No, it isn’t true. Just look at the people who have everything, who are living the world’s definition of the “good life”. Are they happy? Have they found the secret? Are they fulfilled? No. Far from it. In the words of the U2 song “They still haven’t found what they’re looking for”.

Many people that the world calls “successful” are actually miserable because they have made the discovery that the good life is far more elusive than we think. And to the extent that a person achieves even a small part of the good life, they then become fearful of losing it.

Author Dan Allender writes “In every person there is a passionate, driving desire for more… The dilemma is that our longings for material joy are almost partially blocked; our desires for better health and deeper relationships are never entirely possible. Our passion is more than usually stymied. The world simply does not bend to the desires that roar or whimper inside us. Our desires are rarely satisfied in a way that relieves the ache of imcompleteness, and our hearts seem to rage against the ache.”

Why do we yearn for the good life? What is it about us as human beings that gives us these unfulfilled desires? Why do we have this inner restlessness, this underlying dissatisfaction with the way things are?

I believe that the answer is found in the book of Genesis. The Bible tells us that we have been created in the image of God. We are creatures who have been designed to have a close, intimate relationship with him. Furthermore, the book of Genesis tells us that when God made us, he placed us in a perfect environment: a garden – the Garden of Eden.

Linguists believe that the word “Eden” derives from a Hebrew word meaning pleasure or delight. The Garden of Eden was literally a paradise in which human beings could live and flourish, work and play, and find joyful intimacy with one another and with God.

But as we know from Genesis 3, Adam and Eve deliberately chose to reject the will of God and go their own way. The result was catastrophic. Not only were Adam and Eve now cut off from intimacy with God, not only did they die spiritually and begin to die physically, not only were they now under a curse that brought pain and frustration into their lives, but they were banished from the Garden which had been their true home – the very Garden in which they had experienced the good life.

And ever since then, the quest of humanity, as expressed in the words of the old Joni Mitchell song Woodstock, is that “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.” We yearn to return. We want to live the good life for which we were created.

The memory of this ancient catastrophe echoes across cultures and civilizations. There seems to be a common memory of an earlier time of perfection, of a “Paradise”; a Utopia; a Shangri-la, which has been lost and which must be re-found. There is a distant recollection of a golden age which contrasts sharply with our present dismal state of suffering. This cultural memory is, I believe, a memory of the Garden.

And there is, I believe, a personal remnant of that memory within each one of us which is especially strong in childhood. When we are children, we have a view of the earth and of life itself which is full of promise and hope and expectation. But it soon fades. Listen to the poetry of Wordsworth as he describes this fading hope…

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

The earth and every common sight

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream…

Heaven lies about us in our infancy;

Shades of the prison house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

We yearn for that wondrous celestial light that fades into the light of common day. C.S. Lewis calls this sense of loss, this nostalgia, the “inconsolable secret”.

Do you remember how Genesis 3 closes? It closes with the tragic picture of God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden, and placing cherubim with a flaming sword at the entrance. Perhaps you have seen the famous painting depicting this event.

Genesis 3:24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

There are a couple of different perspectives on the significance of that angelic guard. The immediately preceding verses suggest that God placed the guard in order to prevent man from somehow finding his way back into the Garden, partaking of the Tree of Life, and achieving immortality in his sinful state.

But another view is that God provided the angelic guard to make sure that the way to the Tree of Life would always remain open – that no enemy – particularly Satan – could close it and thereby prevent us from ultimately being redeemed.

Whichever view you take, it is clear that we can only get back to the Garden on God’s terms, not ours. And that is the rub. Because we know in our bones that we were created for the good life. We yearn for it; we long for it. But in our sinful state, we come to believe that we can achieve it on our own.

And that is the essence of the fourth myth in our series: Somewhere out there is the good life – if only I could find it. If only I could organize my life, and put myself into the right surroundings; if only I could have the right things and arrange the right people around me, then I would have the good life.

And so we go through life trying to organize our circumstances in such a way as to make that happen. But it never quite works out. And I’ll tell you why…

At the end of Genesis 3, God appears in a very severe light. He curses Adam and Eve, places a curse on creation, and expels the man and the woman from the Garden. Each of these divine acts has at its core the idea of God intending to foil us; to block us; to thwart us.

1. The curse on Adam – v. 17ff To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Men are, by and large, doers. Get a group of men together for the first time, and generally the first question they ask each other is “What do you do?” Men find their sense of identity, of selfhood, and of satisfaction in what they do. Achievement. Competency. Mastery. These are important things for a man.

Yet in these verses, here is God saying to the man: “I will foil you, I will thwart you in the very place where you will seek to find your fulfilment. You’ll want to make the ground produce food, but it won’t be easy. It will take painful toil and the sweat of your brow. And even then, it won’t do what you want it to – it will produce thorns and thistles instead. It will resist you and frustrate you, and in the end, it will conquer you. I created you to have dominion and mastery over all the earth, but you will end up as part of the earth – as dust yourself.” These are the consequences of turning away from God.

No matter how much a man accomplishes in this life, it never seems to be enough – it never really gives him lasting satisfaction. And in the end he has to give it all away. Hear the words of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes…

Ecclesiastes 2:4-9, 11 I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.

I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me.

I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired men and women singers, and a harem as well — the delights of the heart of man. I became greater by far than anyone before me.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 2:21 For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it.

Someone has observed that when man is born he is born with his fists clenched, but when he dies, he dies with his hands wide open.

2. The curse on Eve – v. 16ff

To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Where is it that women generally seek to find their sense of fulfillment? Relationships. Particularly family relationships. Put a group of women together and they don’t talk about things – they talk about people. They talk about relationships. They talk about family. Intimacy. Communication. Understanding. Nurturing. These are the things that are important to women.

And here is God saying to the woman “The very area where you will try to find your sense of greatest satisfaction and fulfilment is the area where you will experience the most pain and frustration. When God said “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing”, I don’t think he was talking only about, or even primarily about, the mere physical act of childbirth. I think he was talking about the whole process of having children – and the heartache and frustration that that involves.

Now I don’t mean to say that families are not a source of joy. Frequently they are. But they are also a source of sorrow, particularly for a woman who is seeking to find her sense of self and satisfaction in her family.

Notice that God also included the dimension of marriage. A woman wants her husband to understand her, to enter into deep communion and intimacy with her, but frequently – even in the best of marriages – this is foiled.

I would like to do a survey and ask wives one question. How does your present marriage relationship measure up to the expectations, hopes, and dreams you had for marriage on your wedding day? How do you think most women would respond to that question?

God says here that marriage can become a battle of the sexes. The sense of this verse is that the woman will contend with her husband, desiring to domineer him with her will, and the husband will tend to want to overpower his wife and beat her into submission. Not a pretty picture!

So there seems to be built into the order of things a divine thwarting – God foiling of our attempts to find the good life on our own terms in the areas most important to us.

Which leads us to the question: Why? Why would God want to foil us? Why would he block the way back to the Garden with a flaming sword?

Answer: To show us that there can be no “good life” apart from Him.

The author of Ecclesiastes finally came to that conclusion. He said “for without God, who can eat or find enjoyment?” (Eccl. 2:25)

When Jesus came to earth, he came bringing a promise of the good life.

John 10:10 I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

Several times in his ministry, Jesus asked people “What do you want? What do you want me to do for you?” He asked this of John and Andrew in John 1; of a couple of blind beggars in Matthew 20; of his disciples James and John in Mark 10; of another blind man in Mark 10; of a crippled man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5, and in a roundabout way, of the woman at the well in John 4. He said to her ““If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

He talks to her not about her physical thirst, but her spiritual thirst. This woman had been through a series of broken relationships. The man she was currently living with was not her husband. She was seeking fulfilment in relationships, but it clearly wasn’t working. She still hadn’t found what she was looking for.

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t give her a sermon on morality or adultery. He barely mentions the fact that he knows all about her lifestyle and her five husbands. But he takes her down to something deeper.

Author John Eldredge suggests that what Jesus was asking this woman, and these other people, was “What do you really want? What is your heart’s deepest longing? You want life, you want love, you want acceptance, forgiveness, wholeness, understanding, intimacy, don’t you?”

And he doesn’t rebuke us for wanting these things! But he says if we want these things – if we truly want the good life we’re looking for – we have to come to him.

In John 7, on the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles when the crowds would have been largest, Jesus stands up in the Temple and says ““If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

And Jesus said Come to the water, stand by my side,

I know you are thirsty – you won’t be denied.

I felt every teardrop when in darkness you cried,

And I strove to remind you that for those tears I died.

Jeremiah 2:13 My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

And it is only when we realize that the cisterns we are digging don’t hold water that we will be willing to come to the Lord. Jesus has nothing to say to a person who is completely satisfied with the way things are.

Isaiah 55:1-2 Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

Jesus said “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

The myth says that we can find the good life ourselves. The reality is that we can find it only in Jesus.