There’s meaning to life if you believe

IN his comic novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, author Douglas Adams imagined that a super-computer had been asked to give “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”.After millions of years of computation, the machine came up with its answer... 42. The answer is, of course, meaningless and Adams intended it as no more than a joke.

The answers that some intelligent people give to the same question are certainly not intended as jokes but their results are equally meaningless. There is no creator, they say, but all that exists has reached its present state by chance events, combined with the rigid processes of physics and chemistry.

Well, if you, in common with everyone and everything, are nothing more than an accident, the purposeless product of chance and time, then there is no meaning to your life. You are simply an advanced animal, controlled by your genes.

There is no reason, apart from established convention, why the law of the jungle should not govern human relationships: might is right and the strongest will survive. You have no reason, apart from convention, to treat anyone else with respect, or to expect that anyone should respect you, for life is as the doomed Macbeth described it, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

The Christian answer is very different. You are a unique person of immense value, whom God the Creator loves. He wants a relationship with you that will give you purpose and meaning for your living. He wants this so much that God the Son came into human life. He lived and died and rose from death in order that his followers should be joined to him — human beings linked with the life of God. And because every other person is also unique and of immense value to God, we have a compelling reason to treat them with respect and consideration.