Video from Desiring God
God’s Purpose in Our Boredom - Ask Pastor John
Audio Transcript
"We’ve talked a lot on the podcast about escaping a life of triviality, escaping this desire to be entertained to death. Twenty-five or so episodes in archive now prove that this is a major theme on the podcast, Pastor John. I summarized those episodes in the APJ book on pages 291–307. But here’s a unique question on the topic with a little twist, and it comes to us from an anonymous young man. “Hello, Pastor John!” he writes. “With your emphasis on Christian Hedonism, my question is about how you think of boredom. I often find myself wondering what it is exactly, and why God created the world with boredom as a main feature of daily life — at least in this age, post-fall. I’m not talking about depression, but the general ennui in this life, common to all of us.
“We stay busy with work and family and hobbies not to feel it. But it’s always there. A moment of downtime and it finds us again. Such boredom in this world seems to lead to all sorts of behaviors that Christians deem sinful: drug use, overindulging in smartphones and social media and entertainment and gaming, illicit relationships and affairs, gossiping and idle conversation. It has always puzzled me that God, at least in terms of his sovereignty over fallen man’s daily experience, has us experience a seemingly constant desire to be entertained or to otherwise ‘escape’ from reality by going to concerts, movies, playing board games, etc. At root, what is boredom? What causes it? What does it signify? And do you think God has a purpose in it for his children?”
I really enjoyed thinking about this question, partly because I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve never considered how the word (or the experience of) boredom is handled in the Bible. Isn’t that amazing? I don’t think I’ve ever asked myself that question until getting ready for this APJ. So I had never done a word search on boredom in the Bible, so this was not boring to me, which tells us something right away about the meaning of boredom — namely, it has to do with monotony. It has to do with dull repetitions that have no interest for us. So the reason thinking about boredom was not boring for me is because it was not monotonous or dull or repetitious. I’ve never done it before, and I wanted — and that’s a key word for non-boredom — to know what the Bible has to say.
And I’ll bet our listeners have already guessed what I found — namely, that word’s not in the Bible. Boredom is not. Boring and bored are not — except if you’re going to bore a hole through somebody’s ear. You can find the word boring, but it doesn’t have the meaning of this. So it’s interesting to me that the Bible doesn’t have the word boring, and it doesn’t have the word interesting anywhere in it. It doesn’t have the word exciting. It doesn’t have the word fascinating anywhere in it. (I’m basing that, by the way, on the ESV. There may be some other English translations I’m not aware of that might have some of those words, but not the ESV.)..." from the Transcript
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