What is the purpose of life? Seems to me most people live to change their surroundings to suit their fancy. If they are poor they try to make money. If their car is broken they try to fix it. If they are sad they try to make themselves happy. If they are sick they try to make themselves well. If they are hungry they try to feed themselves. If they are bored to try to find pleasure. If they are scared they try to overcome the fear. Etc, etc, etc.

What is the purpose of life? Is it merely trying to change our environment to accommodate our personal preferrences? And once our world is the way we like it, then what is the purpose of life? Is there more to life than merely hoping for the things we don't have and striving to acquire them?

[ October 21, 2002, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Mike Lowe ]

I have come to believe that the purpose of life is to discover and then to share new things that reveal the love of God.

What about you?

In and of itself, there is no purpose, no rhyme or reason, no meaning and no value to life. It is all vanity. We are dust.

Then what gives life meaning and purpose outside of itself?

Only a good God can give value, meaning & purpose to life.

KMcCan,

If there can only be purpose and meaning to life as God is good, do you see God as being good?

I used to wallow around in this question as a teenager, and a painful one it was, too. The feeling of life being meaningless, of being a no-one and nothing, is agony. They tossed it around in sociology class in college, when I went. I majored in clinical psychology, and it was a major topic in text books. I remember praying on my knees that God would make something of me. Fateful prayer!! I was soon plunged into the belly of the beast, the whale of Jonah, The Three Nights Journey, of a mental breakdown that took several years to work out of. But it changed my whole life and relation to people and to my God. I was always a good writer, and always wished I only had something important to write about. Well, I certainly do now. I use my talents the best i can, tho not enough, it seems, to help others find God in a deeper way, too.

Daryl

Rather than answer your question yes or no, I'm going to explain what I meant.

If there is no God than we are nothing more than chemical accidents occupying insignficant space for less than a nanoblip in eternity. Nothing we say or do has any real meaning because there is no permanence to anything. Eventually, one way or another, we would become extinct and not even a memory of the collective "us" would exist let alone a memory of individuals. Our existence simply wouldn't matter.

Kansas had a great song that expresses a Godless existence well. "Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind...... All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see....It slips away and all your money won't another minute buy...Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind."

The alternative is a God, good or evil, who created us.

If there is a God then the only purpose of our existence is that which He created us for, therefore in order to serve the purpose of our existence we must serve Him. If we live the purpose for which we were created and thereby serve Him then our lives have meaning and value to God regardless of His nature. But is there any significance, meaning and value in it for us?

Good and evil are by definition antithetical, mutually exclusive. They can co-exist but never commingle.

Good does not need evil to appear good, nor can good be diminished by the absence of evil, but rather good suffers evil for a purpose of good. If God is "good" as He claims, then He must be wholly (holy) good. No "spot, wrinkle blemish," or taint of evil coexisting in Him.

Evil on the other hand needs the appearance of good. Without it, evil is diminished; there could be no temptation, no deception, no hopes raised and dashed, no expectations to fail, no pleasure to destroy, no peace to threaten, no happiness to thwart, no dreams to crush etc. While torment and suffering would exist, evil would be significantly lacking from it's full potential, missing a dimension that only an appearance of good could achieve to render evil entirely evil. If God is evil then He must appear good in order to be wholly or fully evil.

If God is evil, then regardless of His power to create, His nature is to destroy that which He creates. Your life then only has purpose, meaning, and value to Him as His toy, for as long as you amuse Him. You live His purpose without any choice because you were created to be played with, to suffer and die. Whatever meaning, purpose and value you may think your life has to you or anyone else, it is nothing more than a fleeting illusion - we're all just dust in the wind.

If God however is good then He has a wholly (holy) good purpose for us and we have a choice whether or not to accept that purpose. Any other purpose imagined by His created beings is just that, vain imagination that if embraced and pursued to it's end renders the creature utterly useless and worthless, irredeemable to it's Creator. When we imagine any other purpose than His, He does not exist in that purpose and to pursue it leads us eventually and ultimately to a completely Godless existence even while paying lip service to Him. We cannot sustain our lives ourselves and He will not sustain us eternally apart from Him - to be Godless is to be without Him, and without Him we become, again, dust in the wind. No meaning, no purpose, no real value in our lives.

It is only if God is good, and we live His purpose for us then that our lives can have any real meaning, value, and significance to us, because it is only within His purposes that anything lasts.

Kate

Kate,

Your reply and this topic reminds me of this verse from the Bible:

quote:

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1 Corinthians 15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

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With this text in mind, what then is the purpose of life now?

Daryl

That verse addresses whether or not there is a hope of a life after death.

In the preceding verses Paul is speaking to those who believed there is no resurrection of the dead.

He tells them that if there is no resurrection then Christ is not risen. The witnesses lied and everyone fallen asleep in Christ is perished. If their only hope is in Christ then all men are most miserable because their faith is in vain having been placed in a dead God who was really nothing more than a mere man. He would have perished as we all perish to become mere dust.

Basically that verse affirms the only hope for man for meaning, purpose, significance in life (here or later) is in a good God who must have risen from the dead. Otherwise:

"Why stand we in jeopardy every hour?....if after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." 1 Cor 15:30,32

He goes on to affirm the resurrection - death swallowed up in victory, the corruptable putting on incorruption, the mortal putting on immortality, the natural body becoming a spiritual body, from bearing the image of the earthy to bearing the image of the heavenly.

The only meaning purpose and value of this life is to be found in obtaining the future promised life Paul went on to describe. Promises that only have value for us, if God is good. There simply is no other hope for man.

Kate

[ November 04, 2002, 04:59 AM: Message edited by: KMcCan ]