y mother, more than once, has expressed disappointment with my life, wasted (she believes) as a writer and editor for the Adventist Church. I should have been (she laments) what in youth I had always longed to be, a novelist.

My mom took her premise (a rejection of God and the Bible) to its logical conclusion: my son spends his life promoting a god who doesn't exist. If that's not a waste, what is?

How obvious: everything that exists in our consciousness comes parsed, tinted, and interpreted from a perspective. The world arrives to us through our own personal filters, and because these filters are constructed from endless unconscious and often inexplicable variables, we each see reality differently. "There are," wrote scientist Ian Barbour, "trillions of neurons in a human brain; the number of possible ways of connecting them is greater than the number of atoms in the universe." (No wonder some folks like crunchy instead of creamy peanut butter.)

Running (slightly amok) with that idea, that the world is known only through our minds, that each mind views the world differently, and that we can never get out of our minds in order to see the world for what it really is, some philosophers had discarded the world out there entirely. We can never know it, so who needs it? Let's deal with what we can know, and because that's the only phenomena, the experiences of our own subjective minds, there's no sense speculating about reality as it really is, or about the Absolute, or about the Truth. The only reality we can know is a mediated reality--a premise that has helped frame the foundation for postmodernism and the moral relativism so regnant today.

Yet the notion of a "mediated" reality undercuts the relativism that arises from it: to modify the term reality is to assume that reality exists. A horse, red or brown, is still a horse. Reality, mediated, is still reality. That we can't know this reality "objectively" doesn't mean it's not there any more than that because we can't "objectively" know God means He's not there either.

But for now it is true--we do see a mediated reality, or, as Paul said, we see through "a glass, darkly" (1 Cor. 13:12); and we each see through that "glass, darkly" differently, which explains why on even the basics, the broadest a priori fundamentals, humans radically, even violently, disagree.

However, judgment day is coming, when the One in whom all things exist; the One in whom we live, move, and have our being; the One who is Truth and the source of all truth will strip away every contingency, every ambiguity, every excuse, and we will confront the Absolute, face-to-face, with every mouth stopped (Rom. 3:19). On judgment day many of the certitudes, the first principles and axioms with which we pulverized our enemies and mounted our moral high ground will melt off the bone before the One in whom there is no "shadow of turning" (James 1:17). What the world deemed great--the heroes it worshipped, the standards of worth, success, and genius it rammed into our childhoods--will crumble into "the chaff of the summer threshing-floors" (Dan. 2:35). Before the Absolute, even our math will look as transient and fleeting as fashions.

The question I ponder, though, is this: on judgment day, how will I--with all my selfishness, errors, and unrighteousness--fare before the Absolute standard of selflessness, truth, and righteousness? To stand before the Absolute is a thought that makes me cringe with fear! The only hope I harbor, the only one, is that Jesus--"the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), the "express image" of the Father (Heb. 1:3)--will take my place. How could anyone, with all our contingency and compromise, stand before the Absolute unless we have Someone in whom that Absolute has been met, in whom that Absolute has been fulfilled?

If I have no Substitute, one who embodies the Absolute, then on judgment day I will be condemned, and if condemned, lost. If so, though not in the sense she meant it, my mother would be right: my life's a waste.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.