Worldviews: Does Life Have a Purpose?

[A]ll things were created through him and for him. . . . [I]n him all things hold together. (Col. 1:16-17 ESV)

We were made to glorify God. Some skeptics say that there is no God and life is ultimately meaningless. But no healthy human being lives that way. So they say we must construct meaning for ourselves, claiming we can then be free to have more fun. As Albert Camus put it, maybe "the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." Here's the problem. If life is ultimately meaningless, everything you experience will be meaningless too.

You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so afar you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.
-C.S. Lewis

Continuing to perform a meaningless act does not make it meaningful. Life is absurd unless there really is an eternal, all-powerful God who gives meaning.

[W]hoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. (Luke 9:24 ESV)

This verse reveals a paradoxical truth that is hard to surrender to. We love ourselves a lot! And freedom really is a good thing. But real freedom is not just freedom from. Genuine freedom is freedom for something. Consider the art we admire. No one sees Starry Night Over the Rhone and says, “Too bad Van Gogh imposed his will on that poor canvas.” What makes that canvas so amazing is that it reflects the will of an amazing artist. Similarly, when you submit your life to God, you can experience genuine freedom and fulfillment. If I live to glorify myself, concerned only with my selfish impulses and ambitions, I will shrink into despair and obscurity. But if I live to glorify Jesus, his word guarantees that I will be “raised in glory.” (1 Cr. 15:43).

Why bother with origin?

An imperative part of any worldview is the question of origin: How did we get here? This question has been debated time and time again. Why, then, is it so important as Christians that we know and understand our worldview? Consider Psalm 19:1: 

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." 

The psalmist here looks at all the glory and complexity of the world, and attributes it right to God. He cannot view the sky and the heavens without seeing they are a part of God's testimony of creation. The appreciation and respect for God is strengthened when the world is viewed as his "handiwork." We cannot view the world as something that occurred by chance, and God simply as an afterthought. The complexity of the world attests that it was designed. This is best put by this quote from Einstein:

“I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

From examining the most complex aspects of the sciences, it is clear that God's power is boundless and beyond what we humans can fully grasp. We can't comprehend everything. After making that realization, it's no longer a step of "blind faith" to believe the universe was created by God, but we then can see the complexity of the universe as God's handiwork.

Worldviews Apart

Every person has a worldview, a framework through which to interpret the world. When preaching the gospel, Christians should be prepared to present the Christian worldview to people who do not already understand or accept it. Over the next few months, we will discuss how the Christian worldview answers four very important questions:
(1) Origins – where did we come from and why does it matter?
(2) Morality – do good and evil exist, and if so, how do we know?
(3) Meaning – does life have a purpose?
(4) Destiny – what happens after I die?

Whether Christian or not, most people can provide some kind of answer to each question. But do the answers fit together coherently? Have we really considered the implications of our beliefs? Consider the question of morality. Some people say we have beliefs about morality, and they claim that these beliefs are nothing but beliefs. But then they insist that we can and must be good people. Similarly, some people say life is meaningless in the beginning and meaningless in the end. Yet they insist that we search for meaning during the present.

The myth of Sisyphus comes to mind. Are we like the condemned king, endlessly rolling a rock up a steep hill only to have it roll back to the bottom? Or is there something better?