One day when shopping at Trader Joe’s, I saw an employee wandering around carrying a sign, “Ask me!” So I walked up to the young man and asked him, “What is the meaning of life?” He looked at me, surprised and speechless. When I broke into a grin, he looked relieved and seemed to hope I didn’t actually expect him to answer the question. People often refer to this as the supremely difficult or unanswerable question. Is it really impossible to answer?

Like most people, you have probably asked yourself, “Why am I here?” Another way of putting it might be, “What is the purpose of my life?” Now you can make up your own answer to that question, and many people do. However, many sense that there is a greater purpose outside of themselves to discover. Who or what else might determine our purpose in life? This brings us to another question that most people ask, “Where did I come from?”

We might begin answering the question, “Where did I come from?” with “From my mother and father.” But where did they come from? Where did any of us come from? Where did the world come from? There are primarily two common answers to this question: We came from nothing (The Big Bang and Evolution) or we came from God (some intelligent, powerful being). If we came from nothing, then you get to make up your own purpose in life (because there really isn’t one). If we came from God, then we should ask God what his purpose is for us.

So, which explanation makes more sense to you? Have we come from nothing or from God? It seems obvious to me that a world full of beauty, freedom, design, love, morality, and order did not come from nothing. The other explanation is that God created everything. The Bible teaches that the existence of God is obvious to us because of creation.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them,
because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes,
namely his eternal power and divine nature,
are clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,
in the things that have been made.
So they are without excuse.”
Romans 1:19-20

Next time we'll ask: "How do we know who this creator God is? Aren't there other gods and bibles?"