“Everybody thinks about death every day. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't. It's like everything you do in life is pointless if you just take a step back and look at it.”
Damien Hirst, the artist of dead cow/diamond-encrusted skull fame, in the Daily Telegraph, with commendable honesty. Death renders everything “pointless” — death mocks all our ambitions and achievements.
Which pretty much sums up the message of Ecclesiastes: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 1 v 2).
Hirst concludes: “You've got to find a reason to live. We need to find hope wherever we can.”
He finds reason for living in his art, which is “a celebration of something”. But how does art remove the pointlessness from life that the reality of death brings? How does art bring hope to a man who knows death will come?
If you struggle with the thought of mortality or perhaps death is preying on your mind; there is good news for you.
Jesus said: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11 v 25-26).
Here's the man who would enable you to say "Life: there really isn't anything else".
And here's something well worth celebrating in art.
Carl is Publisher and Co-CEO at The Good Book Company and is a member of Life Church Hackbridge in south London. He is the bestselling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as Series Editor of the God's Word For You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
