The Meaning of Life
The title of this post sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? How can one explain what the meaning of life is? It’s too complicated to be done in a few phrases, you say. It isn’t! God made it easy for us to understand the meaning of life, and has placed this knowledge in virtually every book of the Bible. Think of this article as a primer, as an invitation to read your Bibles. Read what I have written, then start reading your Bible at any verse or page you want. In 5-10 minutes of reading, I promise that you will stumble upon some verses that will speak to you on this very subject.
Let’s establish a few facts:
Our God is a God of love. This is the key to unlocking the meaning of life. Everything he does shows it, and anyone who would have you believe otherwise is misinformed.
God gives us life every day. He also blesses us every day, in ways that we can never know unless we get the chance to go to heaven and read the full account of our lives there. Who knows how many dangers could have befallen us but were held back because God wanted us to be safe? We only focus on the negative aspects of our lives, and we blame God for them as if they are of His doing. We fail to realize that we have done it to ourselves through the bad choices that we made, or that it happened because it was better for us and for our ultimate fate that it happened that way. We cannot possibly question these things. We can only see the trees, but God sees the forest. He knows when it’s best to let something happen to us, either because He wants to preserve us as His, or because we have already gone beyond salvation and if we went on living, we still wouldn’t return to Him.
As we all know from Genesis, God created the world, but did you know that it was really Jesus Christ that did it? Read the first verses of the Gospel of John, and you will realize it. But why did the writer of Genesis (Moses) refer to our Creator as God? It was because the term God can refer either to God the Father Himself, or to the whole three-part union that makes God: God the Father, God the son, and the Holy Spirit. All three act as one, and thus cannot be distinguished one from another by their actions alone. When Jesus does something, it is God Himself doing it. That is how closely their minds and desires are united. Their love for one another is something that goes beyond comprehension for us. We cannot even express it properly in English. Why am I telling you this? Because it was fatherly love that allowed us to come into existence in the first place, it is fatherly love that has allowed us to continue to exist even after sinning, and it is still fatherly love that has allowed Jesus to die on the cross in order for us to gain the privilege of grace. God let Jesus create the entire universe as an expression of fatherly love, and that is another reason that Jesus is identified as God in Genesis. God could have certainly done it – that is beyond question. He chose to let Jesus create these worlds and beings as an expression of His love for Him, just like we as people let our children build or make certain things, and we love to just sit there and watch them accomplish what they set out to do.
In our minds, the word “love” can only conjure a limited number of meanings. These days, most of these meanings have unfortunately been corrupted by expressions or practices of the day. But God’s love for Jesus is something that only He, as the everlasting, ever-present Creator of the Universe can have for His Son. Our love for our sons or daughters cannot even compare to it. When Jesus created us, he placed in us the capacity to feel love and other feelings, but through thousands of years of sin, we have dulled our senses, and today, we feel only a fraction of what we could feel. Furthermore, we are not equal in our capacities with God. Far from it, we are below the angels on that scale. How much deeper then is God’s capacity for anything! It is truly beyond comprehension! All that we can say is that His love is limitless. That explains how He can forgive us after we commit the most heinous sins, time and time again.
Given all of this, can any of us really grasp how much God suffered when Jesus lived and died for us, and how much more he continues to suffer when He sees us blatantly ignoring the sacrifice that Jesus made for the forgiveness of our sins? How easily we choose sin instead of obeying the will of God, especially when it’s a question of pleasure! How easily we choose ephemeral, worldly pleasure over obedience to God!
It’s because he continually wishes it that we still exist – as persons, as a species, as a planet, as a universe. If he so desired, he could wish it all out of existence, and it would be like it never was. He doesn’t need us. We’re only trouble for Him. But He loves us and wants us to love Him back, and that’s the only reason we’re still in existence.
Having considered these few vital facts, here’s the simple meaning of life: God wants us to fellowship with Him throughout eternity. That’s why He made us. He wants to fellowship with us!
What do we have to do during our lives - right now? He wants us to live our lives here in a way that can help us decide whether we want to live eternity with Him or to simply die when our time comes. Life here on Earth is a trial that we should continually place in the light of His ultimate plan. This is our chance to choose our destiny, to choose where we spend eternity, either alive forever with Christ, or dead and long forgotten.
Do you know that God wants to establish his throne here on Earth, and spend eternity in fellowship with us? (Just read the book of Revelations to find this out in detail). Giving into worldly pleasures and forgetting about God’s plan is the worst mistake we can make! You’d be giving up eternity with God! Everything here on Earth is touched by the devil, and it is either dead or decaying. As soon as babies are born, they begin to grow, and their bodies slowly head towards the dust of the grave. Our inevitable fate in this world full of sin is to end up dead. No matter how famous we get, no matter how good we might have it while we’re living, we’re all still going to die.
It’s up to us to decide whether we want to die after having lived in a manner that pleases God, and thus be brought back to everlasting life and fellowship with Him, or to simply die and in the end be judged with the evil, in the all consuming fire that will cleanse this Earth of sin once and for all.
