Means and Ends

A friend shared a parable with me years ago. A small group of friends set out to climb a previously unclimbed peak. They traveled until they came to a chasm. It spread too far in either direction, so, pooling their skills and resources, they fashioned a bridge with which to cross and headed on. Awhile later they came to a bigger, wider chasm. Again they set about with engineering and creativity to build another bridge across. By the time they finished the third such bridge at the third such chasm, a group of climbers behind them caught up and asked how they had accomplished such feats. So they, for a fee, explained their expertise. In fact, so lucrative was this little enterprise that they set up a thriving little bridge-building company on the route to teach and equip others to do the task ... and they got rich, but never ended up at the peak. "It was," he explained, "like the finger pointing to the moon. They focused on the finger rather than the moon. They got caught up in the process instead of looking at the purpose."

That's us so many times. Take, for instance, sex. (Got your attention? You know ... sex sells.) The Bible is clear that the purpose of sex is two-fold: the union of marriage partners and reproduction. To enable and enhance (means) that process, God made it pleasurable. He really did. The Bible affirms that. "And it was very good." Okay so far. But today we've focused on the finger rather than the moon to which it points. We've settled into a bridge-building business, seeing the pleasure of sex as the primary goal instead of the genuine purpose of union and reproduction that God intended. And to suggest today that sex is something more than simply pleasure becomes pointless. We've swallowed the means as the end and lost sight, even among Christians.

The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. This forms a second example of the confusion of ends and means. We all understand that we have needs to meet. These needs are not necessarily evil or irrational. We need to eat, to have shelter, and other such to live. In our world that is accomplished primarily by earning money to get them. That's how it started. That's not how it ends. We find that we "need" more. More space, more stuff, more of everything. So we work to meet the "needs" of our children by sending both parents to work ... neglecting the children. We struggle to meet our growing "needs" by working hard at making more money and eventually we end up working hard to make more money without "needs" in mind at all. We lose sight of the purpose (meeting essentials) and focus on the means (making money) and we end up lost again.

It works in reverse, too. We work really hard at avoiding trouble. We don't want pain, suffering, anything that is uncomfortable. Even as Christians we consider it unfair that the good should encounter bad circumstances. It's wrong! Of course, that's not what Paul says.

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Cor 4:16-18).

In this passage distinguish between "means" and "end". According to Paul "momentary, light affliction" is not an end to avoid, but a means to embrace. It is a means to "producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison." So while we cry and complain about affliction, we forget that it is a means to an end -- an end we should want.

It's everywhere. The process that we call "justice" was supposed to be a quest to arrive at the truth for the sake of justice, but today it's a contest of lawyers to see who can win regardless of the truth. In politics it was supposed to be the task of representing the people, but today it's a fight to win the fight, to get the office, to even support the party. The people have very little to do with it. For instance, how many Christians voted for "change" without knowing what it would be or where it would go? Confusing means and ends. Nowhere is it more prevalent than in the church today. While we are commanded to "make disciples", the best we seem to be able to do is make converts (the starting point of "disciple"). More prevalent is the attempt to make friends, to make entertainment, to make numbers, to appease the world. So many have shifted to the "social gospel" instead of the actual Gospel. Many preach a moral message when the Bible presents morality as a means to an end -- a living reflection of Christ ... you know ... like the name "Christian" implies. Means and ends are confused over and over again.

I started thinking about this a short while ago and I realized that this is so very often a problem for us in so many cases. Try it out yourself. I know that I suffer from it myself. I bet you do, too. How often do you mistake the means as the end? How often do you focus on the short term when the long term is the actual goal? How often do you indulge in sin because of short term instead of avoiding sin in favor of the long term? I would guess that, if you're anything like me, you do it far more often than you realize.