4 Replacement
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G. K. CHESTERTON3
It simply doesn’t exist. It’s humanly impossible. It would defy the way we were made. What am I talking about? Awelessness. It’s impossible for a human being to live an aweless existence.
I am a new grandfather. As I held my five-month-old granddaughter the other day, I began to think about awe and her little life. I was holding a little awe-wired, awe-inspired person. Right now, the only thing that completely captures her awe is her toes. She curls up her legs, gets her toes in her hands, and then, you guessed it, pulls her toes into her mouth—the destination of everything that gets her attention. But it won’t be long before we’ll see her capacity for wonder begin to shape her thoughts, desires, choices, decisions, words, and actions.
She’ll develop an awe vocabulary:
“That just amazes me.”
“I can’t believe he did that.”
“If only I had __________, then I would be __________.”
“I dream about that all the time.”
“It wouldn’t take much to make me happy; just give me __________.”
“When I grow up, I want __________.”
“I wonder what it would be like to have __________?”
“I can’t believe she got what I’ve always wanted.”
“It’s so cool, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“I just want to experience it once.”
All people share this vocabulary because we, like my granddaughter, are hardwired for awe. Yet this vocabulary also betrays a deeply spiritual, life-shaping, and often unnoticed principle that operates in all our lives. It is the principle of replacement. Every sinner quickly replaces awe of the Creator with awe of something in the creation. As the apostle Paul is discussing the sinfulness of sin and our need for rescuing grace in Romans 1, he notes that “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (Rom. 1:25).
Now notice the spiritual dynamics here. The dynamics of replacement require that we buy into a devastating lie. It is the lie of lies, the lie that was first told in the garden of Eden. It is the lie that destroys countless lives, crushing them with unrealistic expectations, disappointment, anger, and hopelessness. It is the lie that leads to death. What is this powerful, dark deceit? It is the belief that life can be found somewhere outside the Creator. It is the hope that true spiritual peace, rest, contentment, satisfaction, and joy can be found somewhere in the creation. In believing that lie, Adam and Eve willfully rebelled against the position and commands of God. The Scriptures are filled with the sad stories of disobedience, violence, idolatry, greed, envy, deceit, thievery, and murder that result from believing this lie.
If human beings were created to live in heart-gripping, life-shaping awe of God—and they were—then replacing awe of God with awe of something else will never go anywhere good. But it gets even darker and more personal, because in such replacement, we do not just generally put creation in the place of the Creator. It’s more catastrophic than that. At the most foundational of heart levels, we somehow always replace awe of God in our hearts with awe of self.
Think of Adam and Eve in that moment of temptation in the garden. What was the hook? Well, it wasn’t the odor and visual allure of the succulent forbidden fruit. Here’s the hook as recorded in Genesis 3: “‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (vv. 5–6). Yes, the fruit was food, and yes, it was pleasing to the eye, but what the Serpent sold—and Eve desired—was fundamentally different than a forbidden food buzz. What the Serpent offered to Eve, God’s creature, was the hope that she could be in the Creator’s place. She could be like him. She could have wisdom that did not depend on him. She could be at the center. She could know and experience the glory that belongs to God alone. Adam and Eve weren’t just after God’s forbidden fruit; they were after God’s position.
This is what sin does to us all. At a deep and often unnoticed level, sin replaces worship of God with worship of self. It replaces submission with self-rule. It replaces gratitude with demands for more. It replaces faith with self-reliance. It replaces vertical joy with horizontal envy. It replaces a rest in God’s sovereignty with a quest for personal control. We live for our glory. We set up our rules. We ask others to serve our agenda.
We curse whatever gets in our way. We hate having to wait. We get upset when we have to go without. We strike back when we think we have been wronged. We do all we can to satisfy our cravings. We think too much about our own pleasure. We envy those who have what we think we deserve. We pout when we think we have been overlooked. We hate suffering of any kind. We manipulate others for our own good. We attempt to work ourselves into positions of power and control. We are obsessed about what is best for us. We demand more than we serve, and we take more than we give. We long to be first and hate being last. We are all too concerned with being right, being noticed, and being affirmed. We find it easier to judge those who have offended us than to forgive them. We require life to be predictable, satisfying, and easy. We do all these things because we are full of ourselves, in awe more of ourselves than of God.
This is what Paul is talking about when he writes that Christ “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves” (2 Cor. 5:15). Here we see the great replacement again. It is what sin does to us all; no longer living for God, we live for ourselves. The myriad of dysfunctions of the human community can be traced to this one thing: awe. When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community.
Replacement Angst
You see it played out in a thousand ways every day. If you listen, you will discover that the universal language of sinners in this broken world is complaint. When you’re at the center, when you feel entitled, when your desires dominate your heart, and when it really is all about you, you will have much to complain about. It is amazing how much more natural complaint is for us than thanks or how much more we tend to grumble than we tend to praise. We talk much more about what we want than about what we have been given. Notice how much we compare what we have to what others have and how little of the time we are satisfied. Listen to people very long, and you’ll hear the drone of complaint far more frequently than you’ll hear the melody of thankfulness. You see, we don’t first have a grumbling problem. No, we have an awe problem that results in a life of personal dissatisfaction and complaint. When awe of self replaces awe of God, praise will be rare and grumbling plentiful.
Awe lies at the bottom of a whole range of human struggles. Jim was disappointed. He had set his sights on that promotion for years. He had done all the right things. He had gotten to know all the right people. He had played the game well, but the promotion had gone to someone else. In his disappointment, all he could think of doing was quitting. He wasn’t going to allow them to treat him this way. Now he had been out of work for eighteen months, and he didn’t know what to do.
Janice was so hurt. She had been a loyal friend. She had had Sue’s back again and again. She thought they had a bond like sisters. As an only child, she was so glad to finally have a “sibling” relationship in her life. The thought that they would be best friends forever made her smile—until Sue told her that she was moving. For six months she had known and never told Janice. When Janice found out, the room went dark. She felt she couldn’t breathe, and she refused to open herself up to anyone else. After ten years, she still wondered what happened to Sue.
George was so angry, he wanted to punch a hole in the wall. No one was going to get away with disrespecting him like that, especially his own son. He couldn’t wait for him to get home, and when he did, George would make him pay for every bit of that disrespect. “My house, my rules, and my reputation,” George repeated to himself over and over again as he waited for his son to arrive.
“I could die today and no one would notice,” Caleb complained. Depressed and alone, all he wanted to do was die. “Why does nothing good happen to me? Where are all the friends I once had? What’s the point? I’m forty-two with a junk job and elderly parents—nice life! I wake up in the morning and can’t find a reason for living. I wish I could just turn off the breathing button.”
He didn’t feel like it was much to ask: “Just let my life be easy and a little predictable for once. If I had that, I’d be satisfied.” Hector was so frustrated. It seemed to him that he had a target on his back. For every one step he moved forward, he was knocked three steps back. “I can’t deal with it anymore. I just want life to work,” he yelled as his frustration boiled over.
She used to love going out with Jen, but it had become increasingly difficult. They had gotten married at the same time. In fact, they had talked about having a double wedding. Whenever they were together, Jen talked about how wonderful her marriage was. But Emily’s marriage hadn’t produced the happiness she desired. Emily couldn’t stop the envy she felt. Why had Jen gotten to live her dream? Emily started finding excuses for not meeting with Jen. It all seemed unfair to her.
Dan just wanted to be accepted. He longed to be part of the group of cool athletes in high school who seemed to be the center of attention wherever they went. He was all too conscious of how they responded to him, though he didn’t realize that they knew it. They had the power to make or break his day. And his fear of never being accepted made him nervous and ill-at-ease whenever he was around them, causing him to do dumb and embarrassing things. The more he focused on their acceptance, the farther away it seemed.
John was the quintessential loner. He trusted no one. He was vulnerable with no one. He gave no one the chance to take advantage of him. He had been burned too many times, and it wasn’t going to happen to him again. He lived with his guard up at all times. He mastered the nonanswer. He lived behind impenetrable emotional walls. He joined nothing and hung out with no one, and that was just the way he liked it. He didn’t need anyone in his life but himself.
Liz was the definition of hopeless. She had looked everywhere for life but to no avail. She committed herself to countless activities and groups, yet they all gave her way more grief than blessing. Liz lacked motivation to do anything anymore and had to force herself out of bed each morning to go to work. She had long since given up on her church. More than once she told herself, “If life is out there, I missed it, and I am too tired to look anymore.”
Eaten with anger, he determined to settle the score. Rick was filled with vengeance. He reasoned that nothing was more important than justice. He was determined to make wrongs right, no matter how big or small. When it came to justice, he argued, you can depend on no one else; somehow you have to make it happen yourself. And he would.
The Awe Problem in Action
At first read, the stories of these people all appear very different, but while they all differ in some ways, each of their struggles results from the same basic problem. Their core struggle is not with the people, situations, or locations of their lives. No, the disappointments with people, situations, and locations draw such emotions out of them because they all suffer from a deeper problem: an awe problem. Let me capture their struggle with some principles.
1. Your emotional life is always a window into what has captured your awe. It is quite clear that your emotions always reveal the true thoughts, motives, desires, longings, hopes, and dreams of your heart. Since this is the case, it also follows that your emotional highs and lows, joys and sorrows will be connected to and flow out of what has captured your awe. If I live in a life-shaping awe of affluence, I will celebrate when financial success comes and sulk in the face of monetary loss. Only when a greater awe than the awe of physical created things has captured my heart will I be liberated from the emotional rollercoaster and live with lasting peace and rest in my heart. You see this clearly in the stories above.
2. Awe amnesia always leads to awe replacement. The brief vignettes above also demonstrate the principle of replacement that is the subject of this chapter. Each person has in some way, at street level, replaced awe of God with awe of something else. They have hooked the delight and satisfaction of their heart to something other than God. The problem is that they don’t know it, because this seldom happens at the formal theological, confessional level. They may have a theology of awe that puts God at the center, but between Sundays they live as if God doesn’t exist, hoping to be wonder-struck by an experience of some created thing. They are hurt, angry, jealous, and frustrated, not just because life hasn’t worked as they wished but because awe replacement has made that disappointment a more profoundly discouraging reality for them.
3. We replace vertical awe with horizontal addiction. I am deeply persuaded that, much more often than we think, true worship is replaced by obsession. When my heart is enamored with the stunning glory and utter unchangeability of God, when I am living in conscious awe of him, I have no need to look vigilantly for life day after day. Vertical awe puts my heart at ease. It gives my soul rest. It produces contentment and satisfaction.
Horizontal awe is obsessive and addictive because the things to which I am looking have no ability at all to give me what God can give. At best, the buzz of these things is short-lived, and because it is short-lived, I have to go back again and again. Because I have to go back again and again, I am looking for it all the time. And because it doesn’t ever really satisfy me, I need more and more of whatever it is to give me the buzz that I am seeking. Because the physical, created world will never save me, it can never provide lasting rest of heart. As we saw, none of the people in the stories above possess hearts at rest.
4. We quickly replace awe of God with awe of self. Vertical awe amnesia always ends up putting me at the center. It really does make life all about me. Awe of God means I live knowing that there is a greater story than my little personal story. Awe of God means that there is a grander kingdom than my little kingdom of one. Awe of God means that God has a plan far bigger and better than any plans I have for myself. Awe of God humbles me. It puts me in my place. It reminds me that I am small, that since I am a creature of One who is far greater, it cannot be all about me.
Forgetting the awesome and glorious One who made it all and holds it all together by the sheer power of his magnificent will, will always insert me into the center. This means that no story will be more important to me than my story. I will ask no bigger question than the question of how I am doing. I will have no bigger concern than my satisfaction and comfort. I will ask life to serve me, to submit to my interests, and to deliver whatever I demand. This viewpoint will guarantee me a life of huge disappointment. And not only that, it is also an insane way to live. I am not the center of all things. The world will not do my sovereign bidding. God will not offer his awesome throne to me. Awe of self, worship of self, underlies every form of self-destructive living.
5. Only grace can give us back our awe of God again. The dynamic of awe replacement, that the awe of God is very rapidly replaced by awe of self, can only drive us to one place: the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, our problem is not that we live in a world of awe-inspiring things. No, our problem is more foundationally internal and personal. Sin causes us to want for ourselves what God alone has. Sin causes us to quest for the position that belongs to him alone. Sin causes us to become all too committed to our own plans, to work all too hard to establish our own sovereignty. Sin makes us want to write our own rules and follow our own way. Sin makes us focus obsessively on how we feel, how we feel about how we feel, and how we feel about what we’ll need to do to alter the way we feel. Sin makes us all God amnesiacs, and because we are, we become desperate, self-focused, unhappy, demanding, and disappointed addicts of the created world.
It’s not just that we lost our spiritual minds in the fall. No, we lost a big chunk of our humanity too. No human being was meant to live this way. It is irrational and self-destructive. In fact, the Bible calls the person who lives this way a fool (see Psalm 14). The problem is that all sinners replace God with something else. It is as natural and intuitive to us as breathing. Putting ourselves in the center of our awe is the DNA of sin.
This human pattern of replacing awe of God with awe of self reminds us of how awe wrongedness has deeply twisted our hearts and our world. AWN lies at the core of all the horrible choices, family dysfunction, violence, vengeance, idolatry, jealousy, greed, immorality, foolishness, materialism, power hunger, discontentment, and self-centeredness in our world. AWN really is the hereditary and communicable plague that eats away at the heart of everyone who has ever taken a breath. No one has escaped, and no one has discovered a way to inoculate themselves. Our self-aggrandizing craziness results from this fundamental awe exchange. When we put ourselves in the center of the story, not only do we become rebels against God, we become a danger to ourselves and others. And since we are our greatest problem, we are left powerless to help ourselves.
To push further, if this universal awe replacement is our problem, then it is the height of theological absurdity to think that the law can deliver us. What set of rules can decimate our bondage to ourselves or our tendency to put the creation where only the Creator should be? What set of laws can return our wonder, amazement, worship, and awe? The law can reveal how much you have put yourself in the center of the story, but it has no power to put God back in his rightful place in your heart. We are confronted with the utter foolishness of repeatedly asking the law to do what only grace can accomplish.
No human solution can fix our replacement instincts and our replacement lifestyle. No set of rules will free us. No social or political insights will liberate us. We have met the enemy, and it is us, and because it is, we have no power to defeat it. We will forget God. We will replace him with something else. We will place ourselves at the center. And thus, we will live driven and dissatisfied lives, self-centered and immoral in the deepest sense of both terms. And we will live as a danger to ourselves and others, because only when God is in his rightful place will we set ourselves and others in the appropriate place in our hearts.
This is why Jesus had to come. The law was not enough. The revealed theology of the Scriptures was not enough. Kings, judges, and prophets were not enough. We needed a means by which God could forgive us for our awe thievery and a means by which God could free us from our self-slavery. And this means had to be exercised without compromising God’s holy position and justice. That means was the Lord Jesus Christ. He came and lived perfectly so he could go to the cross as the spotless Lamb. He died willingly, satisfying God’s just requirement. He rose again, defeating the power of sin and death over us. And part of why Christ did all this was to give us back our awe, so that we would live for him once again and celebrate his awesome glory, not just now but forever and ever.
So we have only one place of hope, one solid rock on which to stand, and that rock is Christ Jesus. Only when we admit that we have awe-fickle hearts will we begin to reach out for and cling to the forgiving, transforming, rescuing, and delivering grace of Jesus. To the degree that we deny the awe wandering of our hearts, to that degree we devalue the grace that is our only hope in life and death.
When you humbly accept the very bad news of our awe replacement, you will then seek and celebrate the very good news of God’s grace. Because of Christ’s work, that grace is yours for the taking.