The meaning of our existence
I recently wrote about the story of our creation and used logic to reason that our Creator is YHVH, or God, who we can come to know through reading His Word in the Holy Bible. A key point of that reasoning was to show that through learning about our Creator, we learn that He must have had some objective and by extension there must be some underlying objective for all of our existence. In many ways, this piece will be a natural ‘part two’ of the creation piece - that is to say it’s been written for someone who might not believe in God yet, but who accepts that God may exist and is therefore interested in learning more about who He is. As such, I’m not going to focus too much on arguing why God’s meaning of life is a more noble meaning of life than any other philosophy - I’ll leave that for the reader to decide.
Now any believer will explain that they know in their hearts what God’s objective is and they have learned that through prayer and reading the Word (The Bible), but given my intention with this article is to explain that objective to someone who is not yet a believer I am assuming that you will not have read or understood the Bible. If the objective feels right in your heart, then naturally you will want to explore it further and in doing so will fulfil the very objective I have in composing the Wise Unto Salvation blog - to implore those who want to know truth to pick up a Bible and seek it themselves.
There are just short of one million words in the Bible and naturally there are layers and layers of complexity that no individual will ever fully understand, yet we can simplify the whole of the Bible into the following storyline - creation, exile, redemption and restoration. That is to say we are created by God, we do things that cause us to be exiled from God, we are redeemed by God to bring us back to Him and the final denouement of God’s plan is the total restoration of His creation. Most of us broadly know the story of the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus, which are perfect examples of this creation-exile-redemption theme. But we see the cycle repeating over and over through the remaining 37 books of the Old Testament from Leviticus to Malachi.
Without restoration, mankind always ends up back in exile. We see that perfectly through the story of Noah’s Ark. Noah, ‘a righteous man and perfect in his generations’ (Genesis 6:9), is commissioned to build an ark that will carry the remnant of mankind who will be redeemed by God and taken out of exile, with the rest of creation destroyed in the flood. In theory, by ridding the world of evil and leaving the only righteous man as the seed for future generations, those that follow should also be righteous and therefore freed from exile. However, it isn’t long after the flood that we see Noah become drunk and defiled by his youngest grandson Canaan who would be cursed for this act (Gen. 9:20-25). The same thing happens in Exodus when the Children of Israel are taken out of exile from Pharaoh and redeemed by God. And so the story repeats through every book that follows. The Israelites know that they need restoration, not just because the Tenach (AKA the Old Testament) tells them so, but because they know in their own hearts that they always fall short of the glory of God. The prophet Micah laments that ‘The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net.’ (Mic. 7:2). We learn from the Tenach that man is incapable of restoration through their own works - restoration can only come from God as a free gift to mankind. In Exodus 6, the 7th of the famous ‘I Will’s’ that God declares to His people concludes with “I will give it you for an heritage: I am the Lord.” In other words, you can’t earn restoration but I can give it to you.
I have to admit that the first time I read the entire Old Testament, there was a bit of a feeling that I was reading a soap opera - it’s drama, resolution, then a new drama on repeat from start to finish. You can wonder how God, in all His glory, failed so many times with His creation of mankind. How could he be so perfect, yet make so many mistakes? The Book of Malachi, the final book of the Tenach written around 400BC, certainly doesn’t provide any sort of fairytale ending to the story - the glorious future that had been announced by the prophets had not yet come. God’s people were still not restored. It’s only through deeper study of the Scriptures that I learned of God’s perfect plan and then it all makes sense - every single line of the text.
Before I go on I’d like you, the reader, to undertake a thought experiment. Imagine you are the creator of this earth - how would you design a system for our existence? Consider the complexities of freewill, suffering, righteousness, truth and judgement. In trying to pull it altogether, I guarantee that every system you imagine has a glaring hole in it that you can’t resolve. For example, if you allow no evil then you have removed mans freewill - how can something be good or righteous if there is no choice to do anything but that action?
Now let me articulate to you God’s perfect plan. There was no mistakes, everything that has happened was written at the beginning of time and has been by deliberate design.
God created the first man in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and He made them in His own perfect image (Gen. 1:27). Now Eden was paradise and it had everything every man could ever dream of - God walked in the garden with the first two inhabitants and they had access to an abundance of food, a perfect climate, no sickness, no sin or evil, a companion with perfect love for each other, ability to grow a family and dominion over all living things. It was Heaven both as God intended it and also as the average person today might describe Heaven. But here is the problem - if man is there because God has put them there with no choice to stay or go, then it is not Heaven, it is a cosmic dollhouse. As such, in God’s very first encounter with man he gave them a choice - ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’ (Gen. 2:16-17)
Eden encompassed every single thing that was good and man could decide to remain there forever without any knowledge or interaction with evil, or they could choose to disobey God and know evil. Adam and Eve, just like every man that has followed them, gave into temptation and disobeyed the commandments of God when they listened to the serpent who told them that they should eat it and ‘thou shall not surely die’ (Gen. 3:4). The serpent did not get into God’s garden by accident - it arrived because God placed it there. The serpent as God’s perfect opposite was the necessary element of creation that gave mankind the ability to choose between God or His adversary. There could be no love for God without the ability to reject Him instead - true love must always be a choice.
The serpent (otherwise known as the Devil, Satan or Lucifer) isn’t the fiery bad guy that we always see depicted in the world - Eve was deceived because ‘The serpent beguiled [her]’ (Gen 3.13). To beguile is to persuade, attract, or interest someone, sometimes in order to deceive them. The Devil has one objective and one objective only - to distance mankind from God and he’s got a million and one ways to do so. The law of the Devil is therefore the opposite of God’s law, or as Aleister Crowley puts it “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Unfortunately the word sin is almost always misunderstood in modern society - no one likes to be told of their sinful nature because everyone believes that they are inherently good. By understanding the correct definition, that to sin is to do that which is against the will of God, you should hopefully realise that in fact the opposite is true. We are all sinners, or as Paul tells us in Romans 3:23 - For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. When we think of ourselves as being inherently good, we’re mistaking it with our will to do good and knowledge of our transgressions through our conscience that gives us the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:22). Much of mankind desires to do good and yet we can’t help but to tell the occasional lie, wish ill upon our enemies, have lustful thoughts or put our own desires before others.
We are given the one simple choice - choose God, or be beguiled by the Devil and reject Him. Our eternity will be spent with the one we choose with our own freewill - in God’s Kingdom with God, or in hell with Satan. The harsh reality of this turns a lot of people away from it because they’d prefer to ignore it, but as I’ve written about previously - absolute truth doesn’t care what you believe.
God’s real creation is His Kingdom, the New Eden described in the final two chapters of the New Testament (Revelation 21 & 22). This ‘new heaven and a new earth’ (Rev. 21:1) will have all the glory of the Garden of Eden, but man will be there by choice. The earth and our existence is just the mere prelude that was a necessary step to establish it. But how can man gain entry into this Kingdom when we all fall short of God’s glory? Not one of us has earned the right to spend eternity with God - we have all sinned, given into temptations and turned our back on Him. I commonly hear atheists say that they’re generally good people and that if Heaven does indeed exist, they hope that God would let them in. In order to understand righteousness and just how far short we fall, I recommend reading Jesus Christ’s most famous speech - the Sermon on the Mount. Finish reading this then ask yourself whether this sounds like righteousness in its purest form and if so, just how righteous you really are.
This is where the perfection of God’s plan makes itself known and the centrality of it is indeed Jesus Christ. Perfect not only in its design and execution, but perfect in its righteousness, judgement and unconditional love for His creation. Jesus Christ did not just appear out of nowhere 400 years after the Book of Malachi, He was there in the beginning and in becoming flesh fulfilled at least 300 of the messianic prophecies that had been given to us in the Scriptures. The Israelites in the times before Christ knew that ‘we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags’ (Isaiah 64:6). Common figures of speech in modern language like the sacrificial lamb, scapegoat and day of atonement all derive from Torah based rituals that the Children of Israel would undertake to make themselves clean before God. Yet they knew they could never wash away their iniquity - they were in need of restoration which could only come via a Messiah that was to be sent by God.
The Tenach describes the Messiah in exceptional detail. He would be resurrected (Psalm 16:8–11), bring a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31), be forsaken, pierced and have lots cast for his garments (Psalm 22:1-31), born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), called the Son of God (Psalm 2:1–12) and born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) just to give a few examples. The Book of Daniel prophesies the exact time that he would come to earth. The Book of Isaiah Chapter 53 will make your spine tingle as it prophesies the Messiah who would come as a suffering servant and be wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities and through his stripes we will be healed.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was not just a nice story for us to reflect on - it was the perfect fulfilment of God’s plan to restore mankind and bring them out of exile from Him for all of eternity. His final words on the cross, ‘it is finished’, marked the completion of that plan. Not one of us deserve to dwell with God for eternity, yet through His grace we are given the opportunity to do so as a free gift. It all ties in with the I Will’s of Exodus 6 which served as a prelude for what God told us He was going to do for all of mankind - through Jesus Christ He will release us from our burdens, free us from the bondage of sin, redeem our sin debt, take us to be His people, know us personally, bring us into His land and give it to us as an inheritance.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, created us, loves us, seeks eternal fellowship with us and desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16).
We cannot be made whole unless our soul is connected to our Creator. The meaning of our existence is simple - to learn the truth, accept His offer to us and enjoy eternal fellowship with Him.
If you liked reading this piece and would like to read more, you can find an index to all of my content here.