Can I Ask That? – Part Six – What is the Purpose of Life?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%201%3A3-17&version=NIV
Head/Mind – the Helpful Information
The fundamental problem of our time is Nihilism. Nihilism is the idea that life has no purpose. Nihilism means that our lives are meaningless. Anyway we choose to live, including a life of great achievement, great acts of philanthropy, or even self-discovery, it will all end in nothingness.
The best description of this world view was uttered by Macbeth after he heard of Lady Macbeth’s death, in Act 5, scene 5, lines 16–27.
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth is one of the best known nihilists and his life comes to a fitting end, as he is ultimately defeated and dies upon the battlefield, a victim of his own stupidity.
What is the antidote to nihilism. Ayn Rand says the highest aim of life is to please oneself. She encourages her readers to be completely selfish. She says the world would be better if people would just admit and be consistent with the fact that they really only care about themselves.
In her book Atlas Shrugged, Rand says that Christianity has ruined everything. It has given us socialism and taken away the dignity of hard work. It is anti-sex because it asks us to deny our pleasures. And it undermines reason, asking us to depend on faith, which she says is the antithesis of critical thinking.
Friedrich Nietzsche also points the finger at Christianity. In his books, The Anti-Christ and Beyond Good and Evil, he says that the purpose of life is the accumulation of power. We should claim for ourselves anything we desire and are capable of acquiring. To deny ourselves anything is to deny our very nature. He says that morality was invented by weak, sheeple to make wolves behave like sheep. Strong people should throw off these restraints and take from life whatever they want. What would life be like if everyone decided to live out these political philosophies? It would be like driving on the 385/240 corridor into Memphis. Christianity makes pale, weak, lifeless men through its teachings of charity, chastity, and mercy.
How do we answer these charges? We do so by focusing on the purpose of life, as articulated by our faith.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches us that the purpose of life is to “Glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy, says it this way, “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.” –Matthew 22:37. In the next part of the sermon, we will look at this verse more closely.
Heart – The Personal Connection
Both Nietzsche and Rand think that Christianity is anti-sex, anti-work, and anti-intellectual. But is it?
Remember that the book of Genesis starts not with original sin and the fall, but with the original goodness of creation, and God’s invitation for his humans is to be partners with God in the task of governing and developing God’s good world. Human beings are called to procreate and fill the world with other image bearing humans. Adam and Eve are also invited to explore God’s world, seeking to understand it and to give order to what they found. That is a part of what the story of Adam naming the animals is about. And all of this happens before the fall.
In other words, we are given a job to perform in the garden. Work only becomes a burden after the fall, when the curse of sin adds frustration and hardship to the mix. But work was first a blessing, not a curse.
We are also invited to enjoy God’s good creation, including the gift of sex and food. And we are called to develop the life of the mind, by exploring and trying to understand the world around us.
All of this is echoed by Jesus. He says to love God with our heart. In Hebrew, the word heart is not about emotions. It is about drive. In Hebrew, the heart is the command center. In other words, we are to love God with or deepest desires. To love him with our soul is love him by directing our lives toward aims that bring God glory. And, of course, to love him with our mind is to treasure and practice becoming people who know how to think critically.
In the last section, I want to talk about passion, calling, and time.
Passion – It would seem that some Christians think that to have strong desires is somehow sinful. Some Christians do seem to be afraid of the strong life-forces which God has built into us, and which the Bible refers to as the heart. In order to love God, do we need to find a way to lessen or even eliminate these desires? No.
C.S Lewis, in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, says,
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
In Genesis, both the stories of the snake that tempts Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Able are, in part, about what we do with the strong passions that make up the heart.
– Human Nature
The ancient rabbis taught that there are two sides to human nature. The Hebrew word “Yetzer,” means will or impulse, and the rabbis believed that we were created with two impulses within our yetzer. One is the “yetzer-ha-tov,” which is the moral conscience, or inner voice that reminds us of God’s Torah before we commit an immoral act.
The “Yetzer-ha-ra” is more difficult to define, because there are many ways to think about it. It is not a desire to do evil in the way we normally think of it. Rather, it is usually conceived as the selfish nature, the thirst to satisfy personal needs (food, shelter, sex, etc.) without regard for the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires. In fact, it says in Bereishit Rabbah 9 that yetzer-ha-ra is part of what makes the world “very good,” instead of just “good,” because “without yetzer-ha-ra, no one would build a house, or take a spouse, or have children.”
The problem is that because of the impact of sin on humanity, this impulse is now in the drivers seat, where it is not meant to be. It is meant to be the engine, not the steering wheel. This helps us to understand Paul’s language about living according to the Spirit, as opposed to living according to the flesh. Though he is using language that will be more familiar to his Greek/Gentile audience, he is still using the Biblical idea that the human person is out of sorts because of sin, not that the body is bad and the human soul good.
Galatians 5:13-24
13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh – “yetzer-ha-ra” [a]; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[b] 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh – “yetzer-ha-ra.” 17 For the flesh – “yetzer-ha-ra” desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh – “yetzer-ha-ra.” They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever[c] you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
19 The acts of the flesh – “yetzer-ha-ra” are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh -“yetzer-ha-ra” with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
The Holy Spirit is given, in part, to help put the human person back in alignment. Now, with these two ideas in place, we are ready for our story.
We learn to love God with our passions by bringing them under control and directing them in productive ways.
What the ancient church called asceticism was not about snuffing out human nature, but about training it. Asceticism is the same word from which we get our word athlete. Any athlete who is serious about becoming a champion will learn to tell themselves no; not for the sake of denying themselves something good, but for the sake of gaining something that even better. The same is true in the spiritual life.
We do not urge our young people to wait for sex until marriage because we think sex is bad. No. We think that it is such a good and sacred thing that it going to be best experienced the way God intends, within the context of marriage. No one with any intellectual honesty can say that wide spread sexual promiscuity has been good for society, for families, or for those who participate in it.
We do not urge our youth to be less passionate, but more. But when passion is not focused, it becomes dispersed, diluted, and weakened. If you will say no to all possible sexual partners until marriage, you will be able to give your spouse a magnificent yes.
In the movie, Second Hand Lions, an old man tells a foolish boy that he has the wrong ideas about manhood. He says,
I’m Hub McCann. I’ve fought in two World Wars and countless smaller ones on three continents. I led thousands of men into battle with everything from horses and swords to artillery and tanks. I’ve seen the headwaters of the Nile, and tribes of natives no white man had ever seen before. I’ve won and lost a dozen fortunes, KILLED MANY MEN and loved only one woman with a passion like you could never begin to understand. That’s who I am. NOW, GO HOME, BOY!
For the entirety of Tom Brady’s career, he set a bedtime for himself, denied himself processed foods, and pushed himself to do hard things. Again, the word athleticism comes from our asceticism. Both can seem harsh, fanatical, and unreasonable. Both can seem life denying. But they are none of these things. The athlete, both in the physical and spiritual sense, focus their passions on more worthy goals, saying no to ever lesser goal.
Hands – The Practical Application
Calling/Vocation is about loving God with the soul or life. It means ordering our life in such a way as to bring glory to God by what we do with it. Some people miss out on understanding their calling because they think that it will come as some mystical experience in which God sets the room ablaze with his presence, like he did with the prophet Isaiah. It doesn’t always work that way.
The best way to find your calling is to seek to understand three things and then to line them up. The fist thing to understand in the character of God and his plans. You cannot do that apart from a deep understanding of the Biblical story and a deep prayer life. Second, is to begin to understand yourself, you interests, your strengths, your weaknesses, and your opportunities. The third is to understand how the world around you is in need of God’s grace. Line those up and you will find your calling. Frederick Buechner once said that your vocation will be that “place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Time – Tom Oden, in his book, After Modernity, said that post-modern people have a lot of neuroticism about time. We relate to time in ways that reveal a deep sickness of the soul.
The Past – We either live with regret about the past, burden with shame and wishing there were some way to go back on undo our sins and mistakes, or we idealize it, and wish we could go back and stay there forever.
The Present – Chronic Boredom sets in when we forget how amazing it is to be alive. Mitch Albom, in his book, Tuesdays with Morrie, is the memoir of a young man who finds out that his mentor has been diagnosed with ALS and decides to be intentional about spending time with him before this dreaded disease steals away the possibility forever.
Just before his death, Morrie Schwartz was interviewed on ABC news. The journalist asked Morrie what he wanted people to remember about life. He answered, “I want them to remember how good a sandwich is. How originally life is an extraordinary gift.”
Boredom is a deep sign of spiritual sickness. In his book, Orthodoxy, G K Chesterton says,
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
A young Christian asked an old abbot to teach him how to pray. The old man said, “The most important step is to be present where you are.” The young man asked, “Am I not present where I am?” The old man said, “No. In your mind, you are mostly somewhere else.”
The Future – We either live in constant fear and anxiety about what the future might bring, or we imagine that the best years of our life are just beyond where we are now.
As to fear and anxiety, Mark Twain said, “In my life, I have seen a lot of troubles coming, but few of them ever arrive.” Most of what you dread will never happen and you let fear of tomorrow rob you of joy today. And, even if your worst fears come, God will not leave you to face them alone.
As to always wanting to skip over where you are now, so that you can get to some other part of your story, I’d say two things. One, someday you might look back on the hardest part of your life and realize that it was the best time of your life. Two, you are now at the stage that some past version of yourself daydreamed about and said, “When I get to that part of my life, I will have it made.”
The cure to our neurosis about time is to love God with our minds, so that he can train us to be healthy in relationship to it.
“We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.” – 2 Corinthians 10:5