When it came up on Spotify, I knew I had to listen to it—Fall Out Boy’s updated version of Billy Joel’s hit single “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” And it’s well done. The update picks up where Joel left off in 1989. Like the original, the lyrics highlight current events and personalities, albethey from the past 30+ years. The Arab Spring, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the Chicago Cubs, and the rise of YouTube all get mentions.
The chorus of the new version is the same as the old: We didn't start the fire / It was always burning since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire / No, we didn't light it, but we're trying to fight it. It’s catchy and it invites listeners to belt it out at the top of their lungs as they drive down the expressway. But it’s also a musical representation of the hopeless humanistic worldview, because when your starting point is that there is no God and therefore no meaning or order to life, then time has no terminus. For such people, the course of human events is nothing more than a meaningless dumpster fire that has been raging chaotically since the beginning of time—whenever that was—and all we can do is try to fight it. I pity those who cling to such a philosophy. What drudgery it must be to get up every morning, thinking that it’s all pointless. How lackluster must be golden sunsets, Christmas mornings, and the first cries of new life! I emphatically do not subscribe to such a view. And it’s not because I choose to be a Polly Anna or a mindless optimist. It’s because I choose to trust God’s explanation of things. As Andree Seu Peterson once wrote, "I've always wanted to be an optimist because they are fun to be around. Instead I became a Christian. Which is an optimist but with good reasons." Yes, and darn good reasons they are. The Bible offers an entirely different interpretation of the events found in “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” It does not assert that the fire has always been “burning since the world’s been turning.” Rather, after God created the world, He pronounced it all “very good.” Where did the world go wrong, then? The Bible says it happened the moment Adam chose to rebel against God by breaking the one command he was given.That single act resulted in the fall of the entire human race, ushering in a dark and evil world, full of pain, thorns, trouble in the Suez and Starkweather homicide. Yes, there’s a fire. And we started it. Thankfully, God has not tasked us with “trying to fight it.” He took care of the problem for us by taking on human flesh, taking on the sin of mankind, and taking on the penalty of sin for us. All those who trust in that sacrifice, alone, are forgiven. The human story, then, with all its drama and confusion, is not meaningless. History has a purpose and a goal: the return of the rightful King. When He comes, there will no longer be any sad lyrical litanies of our broken course of human events, no Red China, H-bombs, or children of thalidomide. The fire will be out. In its place will be the righteous reign of the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. And that’s a conclusion I look forward to.
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AuthorTy Perry is a writer based in metro-Detroit. Archives
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