Don't Waste Your Life: Thoughts from Chapter 1

This semester, those of us in our campus Bible study (we number about eight) are studying John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life. Throughout the semester, I hope to blog on some of the passages that impact me the most. My reasons for this are two-fold: I want to interest other people in the book, and I would also like to further discuss it. Last Friday, we discussed the first chapter, “My Search for a Single Passion to Live By,” where Piper contrasts existentialism (“first you exist and then, by existing, you create your essence”) with Absolute Reality (“all that looks like reality to us is dependent on God”). When one considers the prevalence of existentialist thought, it is unsurprising to observe the hopelessness of today’s culture, where everyone is struggling in their futile attempts to “create their essence.”

Perhaps my favorite paragraph from the first chapter was actually one where Piper quotes from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.

You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
I won’t try to extrapolate on it, but I will ask this: what are common examples of our culture’s attempts to “see through” first principles?