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A lifeline is a rope to which a drowning person clings while being pulled ashore. Drowning is a condition of being invaded and overwhelmed by water, which gets into your lungs so that you cannot breathe. Metaphorically, you can be said to drown in sorrow, or grief, or any other invasive mood that disrupts normal personal life.

Today we are surrounded by people drowning in the raging waters of hopelessness. The proverb rightly says that while there's life there's hope, but the deeper truth is that only while there's hope is there life: When the light of hope goes out, and there really seems nothing to live for anymore, life itself becomes a killing burden. We are so made that we live very much in our future, and the desolation of feeling that there is nothing worthwhile to come, nothing good ever to be expected again, eats the soul away like a corrosive acid.

To moderns drowning in hopelessness, disappointed, disillusioned, despairing, emotionally isolated, bitter and aching inside, Bible truth comes as a lifeline, for it is future-oriented and hope-centered throughout. The God of the Bible, whom Christians know as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit united in a shared divine life, is both a very present help in trouble and a very potent hope in times of despair. The triune God, we might say, is the lifeguard, who, in true Baywatch fashion, comes in person to the place where we are drowning in order to rescue us; the Holy Scriptures are the lifeline God throws us in order to ensure that he and we stay connected while the rescue is in progress; and the hope that the Scriptures bring us arrests and reverses the drowning experience here and now, generating inward vitality and renewed joy and banishing forever the sense of having the life choked out of us as the waves break over us.

That the Bible throughout is a book of hope is not always appreciated, but it is so. From the giving of the promise that the woman's seed will crush the serpent's head (Gen. 3:15), the Old Testament constantly looks forward to great restorative things that God will do for his people and his world. The New Testament nails down this hope by its repeated assurances that the Lord Jesus Christ, our divine Sin-bearer and present heavenly Friend, is with us by his Spirit to keep us sane and safe till he returns to re-create the cosmos and lead us all into unimaginable endless glory with himself. Meantime, he gives our lives permanent and satisfying meaning by making us his servants, with jobs to do, and that is a relationship that will continue forever. In a world in which the individual's natural sense of significance is so largely snuffed out, such a hope is a lifeline indeed.

The deep-level story of the twentieth century is of hope destroyed. In 1900 the hope was that this would be "the Christian century." The church would spread, the ethnic religions would crumble, all humankind would be Christianized, and the kingdom of God would come on earth.

These hopes failed to reckon with the titanic energy of human sin. What has happened is the opposite of what was looked for. Our century has seen two nightmarish world wars, each followed by a spectacular failure to win the peace and make militarism a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, Christianity in all its forms has lost its grip on the West, which now leads the world in materialistic, relativistic, and hedonistic secularization. The size of its arms industry is the measure of its cynicism; the size of its abortion industry is the measure of its paganism. The global culture that has established itself is not a Christian ideology but a technological monster, raping the planet for financial profit and generating horrendous ecological prospects for our grandchildren. The great Asian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, have come to new life to oppose global Christianity. Our era has turned into an age of atrocity, in which the barbarian obscenities of terrorism, genocide, torture, and religious and political persecution have re-established themselves on a grander scale than ever before.

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October 28 1996, Vol. 40, No. 12