Never being nonexistent

This morning I woke up thinking about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a 6-year-old movie. Go figure.

The story concerns a man who is born in a septuagenarian’s body and who ages backward throughout the course of his life. You can well imagine the fecundity of this concept for generating intriguing situations, especially the matter of what happens when Benjamin falls in love. While he is at the stage where he looks like 20, Benjamin marries, but as he continues to fall in age and look like a teen, his once equally yoked partner is growing old and haggard. The heartbreak of the movie is that when true love does come knocking, Benjamin and his lover are always painfully aware of the fleetingness of their relationship and desperate in their efforts to make the most of every minute.

Benjamin Button is an interesting plot device for getting at important philosophical ideas. One does not have to be a couple aging in opposite directions to take sober stock of the finite number of days one has with one’s spouse—fleeting days in which one can either choose to love one’s mate well or to forever squander the chance.

Nevertheless, it was not this but another idea that captured my imagination this morning: namely, the suddenly terrifying specter of nonexistence. For, of course, the final stage of Benjamin is that after he has devolved from senior citizen to middle-ager to vigorous manhood to childhood, he will finally become a baby and then a fetus and then an egg—and then will disappear altogether into the abyss of nothingness, never to know or be known.

Now it is doubtlessly true that for an unbeliever the prospect of nonexistence is always looming as the possible state waiting behind the curtain after death. Therefore, contemplation of the departure pole of life should be frightening enough without contemplating the birth pole. Apart from Christ, we all were, to some degree of consciousness, people “who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15, ESV).

Nevertheless, for some reason, the terror of nonexistence smote me more poignantly regarding the stretch of eternity before my debut in the world than after. Just imagine proceeding from nothingness and then, after a brief agitation, returning to nothingness. I am grateful to know that my post-earthly sojourn guarantees eternal sentience. But how deeply disturbing it was when I contemplated my pre-earth time, and that there may have been an endless stretch on the other side of my four score and seven in which I was a cipher.

It is with these troubling thoughts that I entered the day. But then my husband and I happened to read 2 Timothy for our morning devotions, and here is what God said:

“… share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace,which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus …” (2 Timothy 1:8–10, ESV).

Happy day! So then, even before I came on the scene—before a certain sperm and egg collided—I was never nonexistent but was from eternity “living” in the mind of God. This is no chopped liver. You and I who have trusted in Christ have had no acquaintance with nonexistence—ever. We are not those who proceed from void to void, but we have always been: first, in the very heart of God, and, finally, in His presence forever and ever.

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