The recent Gulf War played havoc with my schedule. I learned years ago that if I didn’t follow a schedule, I got little done. Thus I rise at 6:30; breakfast at 7:00; read the Scripture and share a time of prayer with my wife from 7:20 until 7:45; and start work at 8:00. I spend a half-hour at lunch and then take an hour for a nap. (I started that discipline when I turned 70.) Then it’s back to work until 6:00, when I take a full hour off for a quiet dinner, sharing the family news with my wife, and listening to Bach, Vivaldi, or Mozart.
I then read and study until 10:00, when I knock off for the day, go to bed, and read Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Agatha Christie, or some other novelist who requires no mental energy, until I get sleepy—usually no later than 11:00.
But it wasn’t that way during the Gulf War. I couldn’t keep away from the television. You would think an old man with no members of his immediate family in the war would not be so involved. Yet, I was intensely concerned. The awful destruction of innocent people and the loss of resources were utterly sickening.
First thing in the morning, I’d turn on the television to hear how the war had been going. I went to my work, but again and again I was lured back to the screen during the day. In the evening it disrupted our dinner hour. And before we went to bed, we watched again to see the latest news.
While Others Die
Several things troubled me: Why should I be so privileged as to monitor the news in safety while others were fighting, hoping to achieve a bit more justice in the world? No Christian would think the war would bring either permanent peace or perfect justice. But to secure a better justice, to battle against wickedness in high places, to alleviate human suffering—these are worth living and dying for. Next to the good news of the gospel, nothing is rated higher in Scripture. Should I be sitting in my study reading and writing while others are suffering and dying?
Then I was reminded of an old sermon by C. S. Lewis. His text was Deuteronomy 26:5—“A Syrian ready to perish was my father.” He writes: “How can we continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?”
The only answer to this question, he argues, is to put it against another question every Christian ought to have asked himself many times. To a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero is not that he fiddled while the city was on fire, but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. War, Lewis explained, does not create anew suffering and death. The truly great tragedy is sin and suffering and death—which all human beings experience; and the greatest tragedy of all is to be punished by eternal separation from God. What war does is to remind us in most vivid and immediate form of the larger tragedies we face every day.
Our Lord has revealed his will for us with clarity: to bear witness to the gospel in all the world, to hold out to all the forgiveness of sin and the hope of the life to come, to teach the necessity of obedience so that we may live wisely and well in the light of eternity. These things are of infinite value, and we must give them highest priority.
The question we need to ask ourselves with Lewis is, therefore, “How is it right … for creatures who are every moment advancing either to Heaven or hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities [as the ordinary pursuits of life].”
Yet, we dare not forget that God has given other commands: we are to care for the widows; to bind up the wounds of the injured in our society; to seek justice; to celebrate our joys. Our Lord attended a merry wedding in Galilee. The apostle Paul urged the Thessalonians to stick to their ordinary jobs. He even provided instruction about going to dinner parties held by pagans. “Christianity,” Lewis sums up, “does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities.” The single unifying test is that we must do all to the glory of God.
