Do Our Lives Have Genuine Meaning?

"What is the meaning of my life?" OR "Does my life have any real meaning?"

We have all asked ourselves a variant of those questions, and most of us, at least once, pondered with a sense that there really might be an answer to that question. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a Super Computer processes for 1,000,000 years and determines that the meaning of life is...42. (In fairness to the computer, it said we would not like that answer.) Picasso thought the meaning of life was to discover your true gift and then spend your life giving it away to others. But, if we are nothing but a series of "momentary and accidental patterns produced by the collision of atoms," of what value is ANYONE's gift? Or life itself? (The atoms quotation is compliments of CS Lewis as he describes the core belief sets of atheists like Richard Dawkins.)

At the end of the day, most secular philosophers have determined that there is no meaning to life other than the meaning we each give to it, which, ultimately, is to say your life truly is meaningless. As just one simplistic illustration of this, if your meaning of life is to color everything blue, and mine is to color everything yellow, is the collective meaning for both of us that everything be green? Or, do we each have two completely disparate meanings that can never be reconciled into the infinite future, with you and me battling over every inch of territory to have OUR meaning triumph while foiling the other person in achieving their meaning? And, can there be said to be any "true" meaning if it can be a different, potentially competitive and mutually exclusive, answer for all 7.4 billion of us on the globe at this point in time?

The subject of the meaning, or purpose, of life is discussed with poignant frankness in Ecclesiastes, one of the 39 books in the Protestant and Hebrew Old Testament. (The Catholic Bible has a few more Old Testament books, but none of them contradict anything within our discussion.) We have no idea who wrote Ecclesiastes and, in truth, we do not know who they were quoting when they talked about “The Teacher” or “The Preacher.” Yet, this book is perhaps one of the most relevant books for the 21st Century. It wrestles with the very soul of the question of your and my meaning, or purpose.

The Meaning of Life, in Just a Few Verses

 Ecclesiastes, Verses 1.2-10

 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”

   says the Teacher.

“Utterly meaningless!

   Everything is meaningless.”

What do people gain from all their labors

   at which they toil under the sun?

Generations come and generations go,

   but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets,

   and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south

   and turns to the north;

round and round it goes,

   ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea,

   yet the sea is never full.

To the place the streams come from,

   there they return again.

All things are wearisome,

   more than one can say.

The eye never has enough of seeing,

   nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again,

   what has been done will be done again;

   there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say,

   “Look! This is something new”?

It was here already, long ago;

   it was here before our time.

No one remembers the former generations,

   and even those yet to come

will not be remembered

   by those who follow them.

 New International Version

Thus begins the Book of Ecclesiastes. The remainder of the book's 12 chapters look at the various things that are meaningless “under the sun.” These include: Wisdom, pleasure, wealth and power, service and duty (including all the agenda items of the liberal left), work, personal and familial relationships, “spirituality” and “religion” (including all of the legalism of the Religious Right). This book of the Bible starts with an enlightened, Biblical Teacher/Prophet essentially telling us that everything we do, everything we pursue, every relationship we have “under the sun,” is "UTTERLY meaningless." What is a Bible-believer to make of that?

The Hebrew word translated as “meaningless” by this NIV version has been translated by other versions as “vanity of vanities,” “fleeting,” “ethereal,” “futile,” and “useless.” As we see above, the rock group, Kansas, termed it "dust in the wind." The writer of Ecclesiastes is unequivocally stating that EVERYTHING you do “under the sun” is absolutely futile and useless, and that, regardless of what you do, your life will be pretty much the same as anyone else’s, you will die, time will cyclically come to bore you to tears, evil will confront you and you will likely do evil, and God [if there is such a thing] is unknowable.

Peter Cleeft, the brilliant professor of philosophy at Boston College, has said “Ecclesiastes is THE greatest of all philosophy books ever written.” And, in fact, it is the only book of philosophy within the Judeo-Christian Bible. Why does a book that professes to be the progressive revelation of the universe’s Creator and Savior God — a 66 volume encyclopedia on “truth” — contain a book that is in complete alignment with the existential arguments of French philosophes Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea), Albert Camus (The Stranger), and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)? 

The answer lies in the meaning of the term “under the sun.”

This often misinterpreted and “depressing” book of the Bible is describing what life is like living without a dynamic and personal relationship with God. What life is like if we take the physical universe that we can measure and observe and then live our lives as though that is all that is there. What life is like for many reading this article. 

This is Part I of a three-part series. Here in Part I, we will look at our Founding Fathers' (and Lincoln's) strong belief that God was vital within our government and its deliberations. Even the Deists called for prayer and warned that a government that labors without God labors in vain and will result in nothing more significant than the Tower of Babel -- impressive until it collapses. Our nation's greatest leaders in its first 100 years strongly believed that God was the architect of the American Dream, and, without Him, everything they were working to create and establish would be temporary and meaningless.

Part II of this series will explore the prices we are now paying in the 21st Century for abandoning our heritage and legacy and trying to run our affairs using our best thinking. I will support the reasoning behind my belief that we are witnessing the dissolution of the Nation which our founders warned us would come if we chose to live “under the sun” instead of “under God.” 

Part III will look at what a Biblically-centered life would look like. What the author of Ecclesiastes ultimately concludes regarding "Life and Meaning," and what a nation built on these premises might look like. Part II will be hard to write -- we've never had a civilization like that yet, anywhere, at any time.

Thomas Jefferson

For the first 200 years or so of our country’s noble experiment at a new form of government and governing, we believed, as a collective people, in “God.” Not just any God, but the God labeled today as the Judeo-Christian God, the One Who created the universe and gave us the Ten Commandments. Some of our founders believed Jesus to be divine and others didn’t, but all of them, to a man, believed themselves to be morally accountable to the Creator God who would one day judge their thoughts and actions. This is significant; they did NOT believe they could accomplish anything of value "under the sun." To many, this appears to be an audacious claim to make in 2018. Let us look at the support for this position, starting with the words of Thomas Jefferson. 

Jefferson could be said to have been downright hostile to Christianity (although he referred to himself as a “Christian,” he did not believe in the divinity of Christ or in any of the miracles in the New Testament). Today, we label him a Deist—a person who believed that God created everything in the universe we can see and everything we cannot, set things into motion, and has been sitting back, relaxing, and observing how things unfold. It is unarguable that he professed a steadfast and lifelong belief and faith in God. Since he is usually the politician that “Separation of Church and State” advocates and “non-Christians” use to bolster their arguments that God and religion have no place in government, let’s look quickly at a couple of his written references to God.

Let me preface our look at Jefferson by noting that official days of prayer, called by elected officials, are in the best tradition of the Founding Fathers. George Washington (1779 as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and 1789 as our first President), John Adams (1797-1800), Thomas Jefferson (1774), and James Madison (1812-1814) all called for national days of prayer during the early years of the Republic. Jefferson did not call for a National Day of Prayer during his Presidency, believing prayer to be a matter for personal, rather than state, involvement. But, what did he write before his presidency?

This is a resolution that Jefferson submitted to the Virginia House of Burgesses on May 24, 1774, just after the British started penalizing the colonies for the Boston Tea Party, calling for a day of prayer by the Virginia State Legislators:

“This House, being deeply impressed with apprehension…deem it highly necessary that the said first day of June be set apart, by the members of this House, as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, devoutly to implore the Divine interposition, for averting the heavy calamity which threatens destruction to our civil rights…

“Ordered, therefore, that the Members of this House do attend…with the Speaker, and the mace, to the Church in this City, for the purposes aforesaid; and that the Reverend Mr. Price be appointed to read prayers, and the Reverend Mr. Gwatkin, to preach a sermon.”

Per Jefferson, the result of this Day of Prayer THE ELECTED OFFICIALS themselves were ORDERED to attend, was as follows: “’The effect of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity,’ moving the Virginians to choose delegates to establish self-rule.”

Twenty-five months later, Jefferson then wrote these famous words (we know this as the American Declaration of Independence):

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …. [I have removed all the grievances against England and its King here enumerated]

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Readers of the Declaration of Independence can easily see that Jefferson appealed to God four times on that one sheet of parchment. He states that civil rights emanate from God (and not from the State, opinion polls, or the political correctness police). He asserts that the laws of nature and of the Universe are God’s laws. He appeals to God for the moral authority to stage the American rebellion and then asks God’s protection as America prosecutes its war against Great Britain. All of these claims are plainly written by Jefferson; none of what I have written in this paragraph is remotely debatable.

Benjamin Franklin

 Moving on. When discussing the Founding Fathers, ordering the discussion is a bit difficult. Although Benjamin Franklin was much older than Thomas Jefferson, his statements regarding God and religion occur later in time than those I have shared from Jefferson. The founders, and Benjamin Franklin in particular, spoke of a belief “Public Religion,” a religion which believed in moral accountability of each person to a real and present God and God’s authorship of the Ten Commandments (which, after all, were Commandments, and not “voluntary initiatives” or “preferred ways of being” or “nice moral principles”). Most Americans today do not know what those 10 Commands of God are, so they are briefly summarized as follows…

1. Put God above everything else

2. Do not worship anything created more than the Creator (have no idols)

3. Do not misuse God’s name (like, “swearing to Him” while lying)

4. Work six days, rest for one, repeat

5. Honor your parents (the only Commandment with a promise—doing so will give long life)

6. Do not murder

7. Do not commit adultery

8. Do not steal

9. Do not lie

10. Do not covet

So, those were the beliefs of our Founders. Even the Deists like Jefferson and Franklin. Considering that, it should come as no surprise that the following speech was presented by Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention that formed our country’s government. This speech was delivered in Philadelphia, PA on July 28, 1787, when the conclave was at a “perilous deadlock”:

“In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection.- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, & they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle [The Revolutionary War] must have observed frequent instances of a superintending providence in our favor.

To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth- that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that "except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest.

I therefore beg leave to move-that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that Service.”

James Madison

James Madison wrote the United States Constitution. I think it worth noting that his Virginia neighbor and mentor, Thomas Jefferson, was in Paris, France as our minister (i.e., Ambassador, but we were not yet a sovereign nation) the entire time the Constitution was being written, debated, and ratified by the States. Accordingly, should not anyone trying to really understand "intent" look at Madison, and not Jefferson, as THE voice of authority on what the Constitution intended on the issue of Separation of Church and State?

Long after he served as our fourth president from 1809-1817, Madison was asked by a preacher named Jasper Adams to provide comments on a sermon he was to deliver in 1933 titled "The Relation of Christianity to Civil Government in the United States." Here is the concluding paragraphs of Madison's 36-page, hand-written reply:

Did the people of the United States, when in adopting the Federal Constitution they declared, that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," expect to be understood as abolishing the national religion, which had been professed, respected and cherished from the first settlement of the country, and which it was the great object of our fathers in settling this then wilderness to enjoy according to the dictates of their own consciences?...

I. The originators and early promoters of the discovery and settlement of this continent, had the propagation of Christianity before their eyes, as one of the principal objects of their undertaking ... The Christian religion was intended by them to be the corner stone of the social and political structures which they were founding.

II. We shall be further instructed in the religious character of our origin as a nation, if we advert for a moment to the rise and progress of our colonial growth ... They were designed to be Christian communities. Christianity was wrought into the minutest ramifications of their social, civil and political institutions.

III. To examine with a good prospect of success, the nature and extent of the changes in regard to Religion, which have been introduced by the people of the United States in forming their State Constitutions, and also in the adoption of the Constitution of the United States ... THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES HAVE RETAINED THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AS THE FOUNDATION OF THEIR CIVIL, LEGAL AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS; WHILE THEY HAVE REFUSED TO CONTINUE A LEGAL PREFERENCE TO ANY ONE OF ITS FORMS OVER THE OTHER. (capitalization emphasis in original; bold print my emphasis)

The Constitution of the United States contains a grant of specific powers, of the general nature of a trust. As might be expected from its nature, it contains but slight references of a religious kind. In one of these, the people of the United States profess themselves to be a Christian nation. In another, they express their expectation, that the President of the United States will maintain the customary observance of Sunday; and by parity of reasoning, that such observance will be respected by all who may be employed in subordinate stations in the service of the United States. The first amendment declares, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" This leaves the entire subject in the same situation in which it found it; and such was precisely the most suitable course. The people of the United States having, in this most solemn of all their enactments, professed themselves to be a Christian nation; and having expressed their confidence, that all employed in their service will practice the duties of the Christian faith;--and having, moreover, granted to all others the free exercise of their religion, have emphatically declared, that Congress shall make no change in the religion of the country. This was too delicate and too important a subject to be entrusted to their guardianship. It is the duty of Congress, then, to permit the Christian religion to remain in the same state in which it was, at the time when the Constitution was adopted. They have no commission to destroy or injure the religion of the country. Their laws ought to be consistent with its principles and usages. They may not rightfully enact any measure or sanction any practice calculated to diminish its moral influence, or to impair the respect in which it is held among the people.

These are the words of the man who wrote our Constitution, 45 years after it was ratified by the initial 13 States. He was one of the three authors of The Federalist Papers, the body of work that was written to explain the meaning of the various provisions of the Constitution throughout the ratification process. The argument today that "We were never a Christian nation" is something that James Madison clearly would disagree with, and he was one of the less religious of our Founding Fathers.

George Washington & Abraham Lincoln

Need more? This is the last paragraph of George Washington’s First Inaugural Speech, April 30, 1789:

"Having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave; but not without resorting once more to the benign Parent of the Human Race in humble supplication that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating in perfect tranquility, and dispositions for deciding with unparalleled unanimity on a form of government for the security of their union and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures on which the success of this Government must depend."

Fast forward another 74 years, and let’s look at how our Nation’s reliance upon God was expressed by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, PA on November 19, 1863, in a speech that took him 87 seconds to deliver:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Recapitulation

At this point, we have looked at excerpted writings/speeches of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln (Washington being the only mainline Christian of the group) to demonstrate that our country was founded by people who believed in God and believed that a nation that tries to run itself without reference to God are, in the words of Franklin, as foolish as “the Builders of Babel” (please look back above if you missed that one). Our Founders agreed with the refrain of the Teacher/Preacher we started with: "Everything is meaningless if separated from God."

In Part II, we will look at my hypothesis that America's current-and-escalating discord and acrimony is the fruit of us having abandoned the belief sets that guided this country as it grew into its greatness. We will look at some of the stated philosophies of the Social Justice Left and the Religious Right and compare them to the wisdom of our Founders and/or the Bible, exploring where both sides seem to be missing the point.

That is why we need a Part III -- What would "Life under God" instead of "life under the sun" look like? Would that be desirable? How could we get there from here? And, what most likely happens to us, and our children and grandchildren, if we don't?

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If you liked this article, you might also like these other articles written by Marcus...

• How Seminary Made Me a Better Financial Executive
• Thomas Jefferson and "The Wall of Separation"
• The Paradox of Evil: Is God Really All-Loving?

Marcus Jonesi is a Financial, Operations, and MIS Executive and Consultant with 25+ years of successful, broad-based leadership experience. He is both a Texas-licensed CPA and a PMI-certified Project Management Professional ("PMP"), as well as a graduate from Fuller Theological Seminary with a Master's Degree in Theology. Mr. Jonesi is dedicated to functioning from moral principles, values, and ethics as a way of making powerful, positive differences in the environments in which he works.