“GATSBY BELIEVED IN THE GREEN LIGHT” 91 things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their cast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...” Gatsby had been a mountainous figure in life, but it didn’t matter to anyone except Nick, who wasn’t swayed by money. Instead, it was Gatsby’s positivity and possibility he exuded that attracted and inspired his friendship with the man. Gatsby believed he could make his own fate and get what he wanted out of a life that everyone around him thought was meaningless. He “believed in the green light,” the color possibly alluding to envy and/or money itself. While Gatsby is kind and confident and full of life, he is woefully ignorant of how cruel most people are and of the pointlessness in trying to control every outcome in life. Just as Gatsby “stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she [Daisy] had made lovely for him...and he knew that he had lost that part of it,” so too are our lives, as Scripture reminds us: “yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy’s voice is “full of money,” but he refuses to see its corruption the way Nick can. The Modernist movement saw the greatest economic boom in American history up to that time after the war, and consumerism has only become more and more frivolous and corrupting in the century since. Scripture has numerous warnings about the worship of money, which is “a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). There are over 2,000 verses about money in the Bible, and almost half of Jesus’ parables deal with money, including wealth and giving. In one of Jesus’ angriest moments, he trashes the business tables men had set up in the temple (Matthew 21:1213). Multiple times, Scripture instructs people to “sell your possessions and give to the poor” (Luke 12:33). While the Modernists thought life was pointless, Scripture says that it is rather the search for wealth that is pointless: “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). Just as pointless is the attempt to try and control our fates or desti-
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