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The Gospel Observer
"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations...teaching them to
observe all that I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to
the end of the age" (Matt. 28:19,20).
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November 25, 1990
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Contents:
1) The Futility of Life Without God (M. Thaxter
Dickey)
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-1-
The Futility of Life Without God
by M. Thaxter Dickey
EMPTINESS! FUTILITY! VANITY! This is the estimation of a life without
God. Though modern, such despair is not new. It was explored 25
centuries ago by the writer of Ecclesiastes. As he, himself, says:
"There is no new thing under the sun."
Solomon sought happiness (Eccl. 2:3) with a singlemindedness and
dedication unmatched till the present me generation, but even this
generation's opportunity does not equal his. Though our present culture
enjoys unparalleled mass opportunity, he enjoyed unequaled individual
opportunity to explore pleasure. "Who can eat or have more enjoyment
than I?" he asks (Eccl. 2:25). Indeed, who? He excelled in wisdom, as a
judge, a student of nature, and a writer of 3,000 proverbs and 1,005
songs. His wealth also enabled him to pursue pleasure. His income
amounted to much more than $4 million a year (1 Kings 10:14-23). He
also had unlimited access to pleasure. (He had 700 wives and 300
concubines, though many would doubt that a plurality of wives could
produce anything but unpleasantness.) And if any man ever could have
derived pleasure from his accomplishments, that man was Solomon. Though
the temple was the culmination, it was by no means the extent of his
building program. By present standards, he should have been happy; but
his conclusion is that all life is vanity.
Oh, yes, life has its momentary pleasure: wisdom is better than
foolishness; work is better than sloth; pleasure is better than pain;
friendship is better than loneliness; prosperity is better than
poverty. But death overtakes all, and all is vanity without God, for
Solomon's quest and conclusion do not consider God, constrained as they
are by those often repeated phrases "under the sun" and "on the earth."
It is on the basis of the material, without considering the God who is
beyond the sun, that his conclusion is based.
Modern philosophy, expressed in the works of Sartre, Neitzche,
Dostoevsky, and Camus, also wrestles with the meaninglessness of life
without God and ends, too, in despair.
Dostoevsky, in Brothers Karamazov, consciously explores the emptiness
of life without God. In the book, Dimitry plans the murder of his
father, and says: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."
The difficulty is insurmountable: without God, there is no morality;
without morality, there is no meaning; without meaning, there is no
happiness.
Camus' The Stranger portrays a man who lives by this principle and thus
feels no regret for murdering a stranger. But he is the stranger -- a
stranger to the fulness of human life.
Sartre in Nausea describes the meaninglessness of life thusly: "Nothing
happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out,
that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without
rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition." It is, he adds,
"a wheel of purposeless activity." No wonder Camus, in The Myth of
Sisyphus, says the only truly philosophical question is suicide.
So it is for those without God. They find no meaning in life. And no
knowledge can provide it. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, says: "Yet
all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this
world is mine...you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored
universe can be reduced to the atom...You explain this world to me with
an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry. I
shall never know."
Failing to find meaning in knowledge, they search for it in living
life, in thrills. Sartre's anti-hero in Nausea has traveled far and
wide and experienced many things that the average man only dreams of,
but he says: "I have never had adventures. Things have happened to me,
events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn't a
question of words; I am beginning to understand." What he understands
is that it is meaningless: there is adventure only when there is
purpose.
Such despair gives the lie to humanism. As Sartre has his hero say to
the humanist, who claims that humanity is the goal of life: "Men are
admirable only as they are creations of God." Humanism without God
conjures up the comic-tragic vision of a group of men standing in a
circle, each admiring, even worshiping, the other. But if there is no
meaning in the individual man, there can be no meaning in the
collectivity of humanity.
Such a philosophy, whether worked out personally or accepted
unknowingly and second-hand, as it so frequently is today, inevitably
leads to the same meaningless existence so prevalent and so deplored in
this day: a life of drugs, immorality, self-indulgence, and disrespect
(2 Tim. 4:1-5).
Solomon and modern existential philosophers despair as they look only
under the sun. But God has put eternity in man's heart (Eccl.
3:11). Solomon finally lifted his head to look to the God who is
beyond the sun. There he found meaning and concluded that God is the
only center of a happy, meaningful life (Eccl. 12:13,14).
Ecclesiastes teaches, as G. Campbell Morgan says, "the appalling folly
of any philosophy that begins in the dust, and stays in the dust, and
grovels in the dust, and yields to the dust, and tells the abysmal lie
that vanity is everything."
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"O Lord, Thou has searched me and known me. Thou dost know when I
sit down and when I rise up; Thou dost understand my thought from
afar. Thou dost scrutinize my path and my lying down, and art
intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a
word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, Thou dost know it all" (Psa.
139:1-4).
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The Steps That Lead to Eternal Salvation
1) Hear the gospel,
for that is how faith comes (Rom. 10:17; John 20:30,31).
2) Believe in the
deity of Christ (John 8:24; John 3:18).
3) Repent of sins
(Luke 13:5; Acts 17:30).
4) Confess faith in Christ
(Rom. 10:9,10; Acts 8:36-38).
5) Be baptized in water
for the remission of sins (Mark 16:16; Acts 2:38; 22:16; Rom. 6:3,4;
Gal. 3:26,27; 1 Pet. 3:21).
6) Continue in the faith;
for,
if
not,
salvation
can
be
lost (Heb. 10:36-39; Rev. 2:10; 2 Pet.
2:20-22).
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First published for the Tri-state church of Christ in Ashland,
Kentucky, at 713 13th Street.
evangelist/editor: Tom Edwards
tedwards1109@gmail.com
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