Digging Deeper: A Period, Not a Question Mark

Where are we in the universe? If you look at other galaxies, they’re all moving away from us. As Edwin Hubble noticed when he looked through his telescope, the light from distant galaxies shifts toward the red end of the spectrum. That redshift tells us they’re moving away from us. And they’re doing it in every direction.

Imagine a balloon with buttons glued on the outside. The buttons represent our galaxies, and the surface of the balloon represents space itself. As you blow into the balloon, any single button would see all the others move away. And if you reversed the clock, they would all collide together into a single point.

Which is what physicists believe about the universe. It’s not simply that galaxies are moving through space. Space itself is expanding. When you rewind the clock, you eventually arrive at the beginning of the universe as we know it, a beginning to space, time, and matter. Which is, more or less, what a Hebrew shepherd wrote down three thousand years before anyone built a telescope: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).

But what about the future? As the balloon fills, the galaxies grow more and more distant. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics states that usable energy will always be in decline. Physicists have predictions about the end of our universe that are fairly well agreed upon. They even use a theological term to describe it: physical eschatology.

Our universe will grow colder and darker. It will disperse into a thin soup. Like each of the candles at our Christmas Eve service being blown out one by one, each star will die. There will be no light, no heat, only cold elementary particles drifting into oblivion.

This is not science fiction. This is the heat death of the universe. Absent God, everything is doomed to death, not just our bodies. Which means death puts a question mark at the end of everything we do. Every orphanage, every service project, every well dug, all end in the heat death.

Known as the absurdity of life without God, this argument isn’t really an attempt to show that God exists. It draws on 20th-century atheists like Camus and Sartre, who followed their own premises where they led and didn’t like the destination.

But the deeper problem was named centuries earlier. Writing in 17th-century France, Blaise Pascal noticed that people weren’t wrestling with the big questions at all. They were avoiding them. He called it diversion: we hunt, gamble, work, and chatter precisely so we never have to sit alone in a quiet room and think about dying. Pascal’s France had card games. We have phones.

If God does not exist, then not only do we die, everything dies. And along with it go meaning, value, and purpose. The story isn’t “life is good and then it’s bad.” It’s just bad.

But that’s not the promise our God made to us. Scripture doesn’t end with everything fading into darkness. It ends with God saying, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Our God promised a new heaven and a new earth. God restores the meaning, value, and purpose in our mission trips, Big Gives, and concession cookouts.

Without God, death puts a question mark at the end of everything: Did any of it ultimately matter? But death doesn’t get to write the ending of our story. God does.

Death is a period, not a question mark. And our resurrected bodies and time with Jesus are the next sentence.

Ask Yourself:

• • What do you reach for when a quiet moment shows up?
  • Name one ordinary thing you do for God’s kingdom. What does it mean if that work is not in vain?