"Show Me How to Live" is a demand made upward. A made thing turns to the one who made it and says, in effect: you gave me life, so now teach me what to do with it.
That much could be a prayer. What makes the song strange is the wound. In the chorus the speaker points to a nail in his head and says it came from his creator. It is the bolt in the neck of Frankenstein's creature, the mark of how he was put together. The nail proves the life was given. It also proves the work was left unfinished, because it comes with no instructions. He is asking for those instructions while showing the scar. The plea and the accusation arrive in the same breath.
Scripture has heard that complaint before. It has also answered it, in a way the song does not expect. The answer turns on where the nails end up.
The Song and the Singer
Audioslave joined Soundgarden's Chris Cornell to the players of Rage Against the Machine: Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk. Rick Rubin produced their debut album, recorded between May 2001 and June 2002 and released in November 2002. Cornell wrote all the lyrics. "Show Me How to Live" came out as a single in June 2003 and reached No. 2 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. Its video cut the band into footage from Vanishing Point, the 1971 film about a driver running a white Dodge Challenger across the desert ahead of the police.
The man writing those lyrics was coming apart. Cornell's drinking and drug use hit bottom while the album was being made. He later called it "a horrible personal crisis". Before the record came out he had entered rehab, and his marriage had ended. He described rehab as being like school, and said he was learning he could be "teachable at age thirty-eight". He stayed sober for most of the years that followed. He died in 2017.
Many lyric sites print the nail in the speaker's hand. Cornell corrected that himself in a 2009 reply to a fan on Twitter: the nail is in the head, and the source is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The band repeated the Frankenstein credit in 2018 (Wikipedia cites both).
The Complaint
The verses fill in the grievance. The speaker lies awake through the night and says he was not received. He tells his maker to look at the stains of his birth and remember what he did. Then comes a warning. The maker thinks he made a man, but the creature's role may end up defining the maker instead. In the last verse the creature promises to land in the maker's waiting hands, shed his skin, and stand ready to begin in the maker's final hours.
It is Frankenstein's shape. The creature confronts the creator who gave him life and then left him without instructions. The creature means to outlast him.
Scripture lets a man say this to God. Job says it almost word for word: "Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me." A few lines later he adds, "Thou hast granted me life and favour" (Job 10:8–12). Life was granted, and the one who granted it seems to have turned on him. Job's book does not silence him for saying so.
Isaiah names the danger in the same posture. "Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?" (Isaiah 45:9). The song's warning is that question with a threat attached. Scripture keeps both voices: the honest complaint, and the warning about what happens when the clay decides it will define the potter.
Jacob shows what the wrestling looks like when it goes the distance. He fought the stranger at the ford of Jabbok until daybreak and would not let go: "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me" (Genesis 32:24–31). He came away with a new name and a mark from the one he wrestled. As the sun rose, "he halted upon his thigh." Jacob carried his maker's mark too. The difference is that his came with a name. The creature in the song has the mark and is still demanding the name.
The Request Already Made
David prayed the song's title three thousand years before Cornell sang it. "Shew me thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day" (Psalm 25:4–5).
The words are nearly the same. The posture differs. David asks as a student who expects to be taught and is willing to wait all day for it. The song asks the way a creditor asks for payment. In Cornell's later word, David is teachable. The speaker in the song has not yet decided whether he is.
Micah answers the request as if it had already been met. "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8). The prophet's verb is past tense. The showing has happened. The last of his requirements is the one the song lacks. Walking humbly is how a creature receives instruction from its maker.
That is a hard answer to give someone in pain, and it is incomplete. Instruction alone does not heal a head with a nail driven into it. Scripture's fuller answer comes in a person.
The Nail
Read the song's grievances again and some of them sound familiar. A man made by his maker, not received, with a nail driven into him. A man who lands in waiting hands at the end and rises ready to begin.
John tells that story about the Maker himself. "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not" (John 1:10–11). In John's account the one who goes unreceived is the Creator. The nails go into his hands. Isaiah had seen it coming: "he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). In Luke, his last words from the cross are "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). Those are the waiting hands.
The song puts the creator's nail in the creature's head, the mark of a careless assembly. The Gospel turns the instrument around. The nails go into the Maker's own hands, driven by the creatures he made. That reverses the whole complaint. The made thing asked to be shown how to live. The Maker came down and lived it, including the part with the nails.
When Thomas would not believe without proof, Jesus offered the wound as the proof. "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands" (John 20:27). A creature pointing to the nail in his head is met by a Maker holding out nail-scarred hands. Earlier the same Jesus had said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). The request in the title is answered by someone who stands in the way and says to follow.
Teachable
Cornell wrote a song that demands to be taught. Within months he was in a clinic, saying with some surprise that he could still learn. Whatever he believed, the song and that remark belong together. One is the demand. The other is the beginning of the posture that can receive an answer.
The song never says whether the creator replies. It ends with the request repeated over Morello's guitar until the song runs out, as if repetition might force a response. Scripture does not claim that every such cry is answered on the schedule the crier sets. It does claim that this cry was anticipated. The Maker did not send instructions from a distance. He came into his own world, was not received, and let them drive the nails into his own hands.
The creature in the song shows his wound to accuse. The Maker shows his wound to Thomas, and to anyone else who asks for proof, and says to reach out and touch it.