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“It's Not a Wonderful World”
Categories: M. W. Bassford, Meditations.jpg)
Recently, I ran across an NBC News story about a woman in the Lviv train station who played “What a Wonderful World” on a piano as refugees from the fighting in Ukraine streamed past. Of course, NBC painted her as a Symbol Of Hope amid devastation and despair, a promise of Better Days Ahead. The secular must seize on such symbols because if they can’t hope in this life, no hope remains.
I wondered, though, what the refugees thought of the message of the song, if they thought about it at all. When you’ve been driven from your home with nothing but the clothes on your back, does the world seem wonderful? How about when you know that people just like you are being callously slaughtered, and you’re fleeing for your life? How about when you look into your future and see a refugee camp or worse?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think wonderful worlds have refugee camps in them.
The delusion of a perfectible world has been hard to sustain, these past few years. COVID has carried off millions. In the worldwide wave of government mandates that has accompanied it, we saw a determination to master the disease from those who must believe that disease can be mastered.
The recent retraction of those mandates isn’t a declaration of victory, whatever the spinmeisters may say. It’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that we are at the mercy of a malevolent force that is too powerful for us. COVID might stop on its own, but we can’t stop it.
We cannot restrain brutal dictators, we cannot limit the ravages of disease, and we cannot keep disaster from overtaking our own lives. I have spent my life diligently pursuing wisdom and living according to it, only to find out that I was doomed to die young from the moment I was conceived. I’m certain that wonderful worlds don’t have ALS in them.
Of course, it’s not all bad. I have savored tremendous beauty, joy, and love in my life. Even after sin and death have done their work, we still can glimpse the original glory of God’s creation. Likewise, making a better world for our brother and our neighbor is a noble goal for any disciple of Jesus.
However, the world remains stubbornly irreparable, and the earthly good that we can do is limited by its setting. The fatal flaw of life under the sun is that it’s fatal, and people who hope in it will be disappointed.
This is not the hope of the Christian. We know we can’t defeat our earthly enemies, and the Bible warns us that life here is vain. Even as we drink of earthly delight, we must not hold the cup too tightly. Even as we work, we must remember that the good we do is temporary, but tragedy is here to stay.
Instead, our hope is in Jesus. Rather than trying to fix this broken world, He will consume its ruins with fire. Our eternal home will much better, new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. By His power, the dust of the slaughtered refugee, the COVID victim, and the ALS sufferer will be raised up to new life. The resurrected faithful will enjoy eternity with Him by His grace.
This world isn’t wonderful, and it never will be. Our Savior is wonderful, and He never will be anything else.
