If you’re convinced that this life holds no meaning, no significance in the grand scheme of things, boy, is this for you.
Reason with me for a moment.
Why, if that premise were true, should such a realization matter in the first place?
Because in many ways, you and everyone else were made for meaninglessness.
Think of it as reverse-engineering the “Purpose-Driven Life”.
So many skeptics today, they’re hardened. They’re hardened because they see a hard world around them, a difficult life, a life that seems in many ways senseless.
And I get that. Believe me, I get it. In fact, I used to live there.
But if those of us who call ourselves believers in Christ claim to have “the truth,” we have to be ready to engage them. We have to be able to talk about the seemingly meaninglessness of it all, because, let’s be honest, even Christians experience that feeling of meaninglessness sometimes.
The Apostle Paul, that great Christian thinker, exhorts us to cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
We’re to do this, Paul goes on to say, in the pursuit of bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
Those high, lofty things like atheism and evolution are brought down by the truths of God.
And while I think a lot of skeptics hold on to those, at the end of the day, the foundation for many of them, there’s an anger and a hurt.
There’s a pain they hold onto against a world that’s very painful, that’s very difficult to navigate.
And we’ve got to be able, I think, as Christians, to engage them on both levels because they know it’s true.
That’s why CFOs of major corporations throw themselves off the 18th floor of their high-rise Manhattan apartments.
That’s why our children - faced with an onslaught of sexual propaganda and identity politics - now face higher rates of suicide and depression.
They know sin is real.
They may not call it that - opting instead for postmodern terminology like “harm” and “trauma” - but they know the world is broken.
They see it all around them in every system of life, in every facet. They’ve lived it out in the classroom.
The boardroom.
The home.
It’s broken.
Something is terribly wrong with the human race, with humanity.
And everything finally made sense, every question I had as a 12-year-old boy was at least hinted at or immediately answered by understanding - “believing” - that Jesus Christ, first and foremost, is God.
That He is not only real, but intimately involved with his creation and that he’s humbled himself into his creation in the pursuit of reconciling those who rebelled against him back to himself and to know him.
Once all that came together for me, all the other questions I had about ‘why this?’,
‘why that?’, they either were answered by a biblical truth or they simply didn’t feel as important anymore.
Why? Because the Bible clarifies in undeniably stark terms the nature of this life.
The Christian existentialist acknowledges that everything you do will be forgotten. (Isaiah 65:17, Revelation 21:4)
The earth and all the things done in the earth will be burnt up, consumed by an all-consuming fire. (2Pet. 3:10)
The wisest man to ever live said as he looked at his life’s work, “it was all so meaningless — like the chasing the wind.” (Ecc. 2:11)
So then, concluded King Solomon, the wisest and wealthiest man to ever live, you might as well live to glorify God.
Or at least die trying.