In Douglas Adam’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer named Deep Thought was asked to answer the ultimate question of the meaning life. After 7.5 million years of computing, it finally found it: forty-two. "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. “
Forty-two?
Well, that answer doesn’t seem a whole lot better than what many of the world’s most feted, wined and dined thinkers give us. That's because we are cosmic accidents created by chance through the unconscious mechanism of random mutation and natural selection; therefore, our lives really don’t have any transcendent meaning after all. We’re just transient, even if complicated, bits of stardust.
“Thingless we come into the world,” wrote poet Charles Wright, “and thingless we leave.” As the apostle Paul wrote: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” As the patriarch Job said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.” And King Solomon: “As he came from his mother’s womb, naked shall he return, to go as he came; And he shall take nothing from his labor which he may carry away in his hand."
Thingless on the way in, thingless out; nothing in, nothing out; naked in, naked out. We are, to quote Goethe’s Faust, “earthworm’s dust-engendered brood,” and there’s nothing we can do about it, or, as Samuel Beckett’s character Estragon said, “Nothing to be done”, because nothing can be done, at least by us, no matter how hard we try to latch on to eternity as opposed to being swallowed up and devoured by it."
That is, unless, one introduces the Gospel and all that entails, which is what? That God created us, and in His image, too (Genesis 1:27), and that He loves us (John 3:16), and that Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), and He offers us eternal life (Romans 6:23) in a new heaven and a new earth, where sin and evil will never rise again (Isaiah 65:17; Isaiah 66:22; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1).
No quite forty-two, but whole lot more hopeful for sure!
