I’ve always been a big history guy, but had never read Eusebius: The Church History until recently. As with almost everything in my life now, I had apologetic motivations for reading it. Skeptics are always distorting the history of early church, and I wanted to see what someone who lived so close to the beginnings of our faith had to say about it. I’ve always known that followers of Jesus endured horrible persecution for almost 300 years after his ascension, but reading an historian (263-339) who witnessed it first hand, and who reported on other first-hand accounts, was sobering. What stood out to me was something we in the 21st century secular West have a hard time accepting: this life is not all there is. Of course we Christians claim to disbelieve this, but we live much of our lives as if this life was indeed all their is. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else because in our thoroughly secular culture it’s very easy to do.
What a secular culture means is that the dominant plausibility structures (what seems real to us, and the reality generating mechanisms of the culture) we inhabit every day preclude God. The reality we perceive because of the culture makes God seem less real to us, and “this is all there is” seem more real to us. This has nothing to do with evidence or logic or reasoning, but the seemingness of it all. The culture is why it’s so easy for us to find our hope, meaning, significance, identity, and purpose in this material world, and not in the spiritual reality of God’s being and forever presence. When, for example, we get frustrated or angry because our circumstances are not living up to our expectations, we can know secularism is having its influence.
Prior to Constantine, who transformed the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity in the 320s AD, Christians faced the very real possibility of an horrific death. The sadism Eusebius wrote about and that he himself witnessed is disgusting. Although persecution existed widely in these centuries, it wasn’t consistent. There might be long periods of time when Christians lived in peace with their pagan neighbors, but then a new emperor would take the throne and decree that Christianity be crushed. In one part of the empire at the same time there might be peace, while in another horrible persecution. Christians knew it was a very real possibility as a follower of Jesus in the Roman Empire. In fact, he predicted it! And Christians are still persecuted in many places even today.
One of the things that was reemphasized to me as I was reading Eusebius, is how easy it is for me to see this world as my true home. Since this website ostensibly has to do with parenting (it is in the title, after all), one of the greatest things we can do for our children in the current secular age is to continually remind them that, “this isn’t all there is.” I can get downright morbid at times by how often I comment on the ubiquity of death. This thing called life, even if we live to a ripe old age, will be over before we know it. No matter what we strive for or achieve in this life, we will not find any kind of ultimate fulfillment because as Paul says, “our citizenship is in heaven.” An apt metaphor for this fleeting life lived in a fallen body in a fallen world is the Hebrews traipsing around the wilderness desert hoping to enter the promised land. This desert world is just a way station on the way to a promised forever land, or as Jesus called it on the cross, paradise.
I came across this quote by A.W. Tozer from The Pursuit of God at church recently that captures the attitude all Christians should aspire to, although it’s not easy:
The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One. Many ordinary treasures may be denied him, or if he is allowed to have them, the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary to his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one after one, he will scarcely feel a sense of loss, for having the Source of all things, he has in One all satisfaction, all pleasure, all delight. Whatever he may lose he has actually lost nothing, for he now has it all in God, and he as it purely, legitimately and forever.
May God in Christ be our ultimate treasure.
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