I did not write this but it answers your question.
What is the Meaning of Life?
"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" -Mark 8:36-37 (NIV)
What is life? Truly, what is a life well lived? What satisfies the innermost parts of man? Does not all humanity search for answers? And yet life ends with only more questions. What is the sense in that? What kind of justice is that? Life is filled with inconceivable paradoxes. We search, but we do not know what we look for. We feel that there must be an answer, yet we are unsure of the questions. Our souls long for something to fill the aching within us, and yet nothing seems to satisfy. Can there truly be meaning?
There are various ways that most of us go about filling the void within us. Some succeed in all they do, hoping that their next achievement will somehow give them what they truly desire. But alas, it only serves to deepen the thirst, driving us on toward greater achievements but the thirst itself is never to be satisfied. Some turn to religion, only to find that there is nothing to be found in legalism; there is no power in the strict adherence to hard if not obscure laws. Some turn to addictions and in the end are controlled by them. Others try to find themselves in relationships, only to be hurt time and again by the ones they opened up to and loved. Still others simply give up and retreat within themselves, as if to wait out the sentence of life for the blessed rest of oblivion. If we dig deeper and are honest with ourselves, we are faced with the ultimate question: What is life? The next question that follows is: Why?
It seems as if humankind is on an endless quest for meaning. It drives us onward, ever searching, ever pressing, ever pleading for the answer. We hunt, we conquer, we kill, we play, we create, we sing, we wail and cry out in everything we do, always searching for the answer. And yet we do not find it. Our souls moan in agony of what we long and hope for and yet it escapes us; ethereal, it always slips just beyond our grasp like water between the fingers.
If we are honest and look into the depths of who we are, we find staring us in our faces all of our futility, our inadequacies, our desperation, and our sin. Some deny that we are spiritual creatures, saying instead that we are merely matter, driven by the chemical impulses that occur in the synapses of our brain. How can those chemicals make us weep at the loss of a loved one, smile at a newborn child, and feel hopelessness and despair? Those who deny their own spirituality deny a part of themselves and die a death unimaginable. If there is not something larger than us, if there is no purpose to life, if we are the product of chance, what is the point in living? There is no hope for those who abandon their very self.
What then is there for the rest of us, those who do not deny their spirituality, but cannot find a way to fulfill it? Is there hope? There must be, but where is it and upon what is it based? Many believe that the answers lie within us, that somehow the human potential that is within each of us can be unlocked. But how are we to unlock our inner potential? Where is the key? We strain and we struggle against something that we dont quite understand, something that cant quite be defined. We long to be free from the shackles that bind us but we cannot free ourselves; we dont know how. Our yearning is to become what we feel that we were meant to be, something greater and more glorious than the ever-present now.
If we cannot free ourselves, we next turn to others. Answer the cries of our hearts, we plead, fulfill our innermost beings. However, this path ends in futility as well. If others cannot set themselves free, how will they liberate us?
Most of us are appalled at the final option, instead choosing to go back to the endless and unfulfilling search. We would choose to live in denial rather than face the idea of a supreme being, a deity. The reasons for this are as varied and as numerous as the pebbles on a beach.
Pride holds some people back, a defiance and a tenacity to do things on their own. The illusion of being self-made offers a pretty picture for some, but all too often the costs are much greater than expected. He who dies with the most toys, the saying goes, wins. Do they really? What good is it to gain the whole world and yet forfeit your soul, having never experienced love? Where is the joy in having material possessions or in becoming the most successful person on earth? How empty a life that is without something greater to live for than oneself! Pride is to curse God and then to die. It is merely temporary satisfaction, much like treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.
For many, their view of God is shaped by their life experiences, carved out by their trials and tribulations. He is not a good god, but one that delights in the suffering of the peoples of the earth. Why should our hope and even our trust be placed in a god like that? Why indeed, if that is your view of God? He might be able to set us free from the very things that bind us, but to what end? To death? To hell? To a different kind of slavery? If that is what God is really like, it is better to not believe in Him. Perhaps He will ignore or forget about mankind and simply go away.
Others have a small view of God, someone who created the earth and then left to do something else. From time to time, He looks in on things and might change something, but for the most part leaves things the way they are. Why even bother with Him? This type of god simply doesnt care, hes apathetic toward the human race. Many people would make Him out to be impersonal and aloof, perhaps because they are the same way. They have been deadened by the harsher realities of life and have ceased to see the beauties of it. They simply dont care about anything and they dont want God to care either.
The underlying theme of all of life can be encapsulated into one question: Is God trustworthy? Most, if they are honest with themselves, believe that God exists, but they dont completely trust Him. They have been tainted by bitter experiences or perhaps everyday life. In their eyes, the very nature of God has been diluted and twisted. Only by looking at the past can we truly see the story behind history, glimpsing at the true character of God. When we see that God is a god of love, then we will be able to see the threads of story that our lives play in the grandest drama of all time. Then we will understand and perhaps will begin to be able to truly live.
Before all of time and history, before the created existed, God lived and moved and loved. The very essence of His heart and soul and being was love. In His love and out of it He created, not first the earth and man, but the heavenly beings. They reflected in many ways the very being of God, luminous and diverse, ethereal and beautiful to behold, individual beings of a free will. In the midst of their created splendor and magnificence, tragedy struck.
The most beautiful and powerful of the heavenly beings, Lucifer, the son of the morning, betrayed the Most High. He was determined to become God, and in his pride and deceit, he convinced a third of the heavenly beings to share in his folly. There was a great war and he was cast out of the heavenlies, along with all his followers. He had betrayed the very One who had created him.
God, out of His love, then created the earth and mankind in hope that they, of their own free will, would love and trust Him. He created man and woman to rule the earth and to subdue it. Everything that we see around us today had its potential lying there at creation, waiting only to be unlocked by one of the caretakers. God set before mankind an absolute paradise, the likes of which we could never even imagine.
Oh, but we fell, we fell from that heavenly paradise, dragged down by our pride, by Satans promise that we could be like God. Sin became our stumbling block and separated us from our Creator, the very One who cared for us. Even though He loves us deeply, God could not tolerate the unholy and impure, and so we were banished from paradise and were condemned to die because of our sins.
God could not bear leaving us to die, eternally damned to the fires of hell. He knew that there was nothing mankind could do on its own to regain its righteousness, its paradise lost. He called from among the nations, one nation, Israel, to be pure and holy and set apart for Him, an example for all mankind. He gave Israel the Law as a guideline for holiness, even though there was no one who could fulfill all the requirements that it contained. Man needed to see for himself that there was nothing he could do to achieve purity and righteousness. Israel, Gods chosen nation, failed again and again, turning to false gods and turning against God. Their wickedness and betrayal led them into destruction and captivity, exiled first among the Babylonians, then the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans.
God was not done with Israel or the human race, however; no matter how sinful we had become, He still loved us. He knew that ours was an innocence lost, and that we could never be made pure on our own again. We needed help, and we needed it desperately. Fear not, God said, Your Deliverer is coming.
One quiet night, in the small city of Bethlehem, a savior, the Son of God, was born. He was born to poor parents, but He had heavenly riches. He was born a King, and yet He did not come to rule. Jesus came to set us free from our sins so that we could enter the presence of God once again.
Jesus began His ministry at the age of thirty and for three years He moved among the people of Israel, teaching them, curing sicknesses and diseases, healing the blind and lame, and raising the dead to life. He was love come to life for He ministered to those who were poor and without hope, desperate and longing for a helping hand. He met them at their needs, giving them both physical and spiritual healing.
Still, in the midst of all the healing, our sins needed to be accounted for, a price needed to be paid. Only a sacrifice that was pure and holy could cover over our iniquities. Jesus became that sacrifice by dying on the cross, He died so that we might live. He shed His blood instead of spilling ours, all because He loved us so. He was laid in a tomb and buried. But death could not hold Him, the grave could not conquer the Son of God. Three days later He rose again.
It is in the resurrection of Jesus that we find our hope. It is in His death that we find life. For now we know that, even if we die, we can rise again. We know that even though we have sinned, Jesus sacrifice has paid the way to righteousness and life. We can be transformed, crossing over from death to life, a new creation, a child of God. Jesus Christ became the bridge from God to man. But how does this happen?
There exists in the heart of every man and every woman a God-shaped hole. If left unfilled, this hole will ache, it will gnaw at the spirit, it will tug at the soul. Many try to fill it with earthly things, but to no avail. Such things can satisfy only temporarily and will never last. But Jesus satisfies, Jesus fills that hole and He takes your heart and holds it gently in the palm of His hand. He is seeking you out, longing to comfort you. Behold, He says, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. (Revelation 3:20) He is calling out to all those who will listen, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30)
God is trustworthy. He can be trusted with our hearts, our hopes and our fears. He loves us so much that He sent His Son to die for us. He gives life to all who seek Him, He saves all who call on His name.
So what is the meaning of life? Simply this: We were created for paradise and the presence of God, but we have fallen, never to regain what we lost because of our sins. But God loved us so much that He could not bear to leave us fallen; He sent His one and only Son pay the price for our sins by dying on a cross. Through His Son, Jesus Christ, we can regain paradise, we can reenter the presence of God. Through Jesus, we can have eternal and everlasting life.
