WHAT IS LIFE?
What is life? What’s it all about? What am I doing here? This is a profound and provocative question. People ponder this question silently and propose it publicly, etc. The slogan of a popular tabloid reads: “Inquiring Minds Want to Know.” Everybody ought to care, ought to “want to know,” the answer to this question. Here are my thoughts:
Life is a divinely given, relatively brief opportunity we have to find and follow God’s will as it is universally revealed in the holy Scriptures and consistent with Scripture, revealed to us individually and intimately by the Holy Spirit. Life on earth is marked by accomplishments made and adversities met, and by the discoveries we each make empirically and emotionally relative both to what is around us what is within us. It is lived within the context of what we know as time; time that it transitory and transitional; time that is preludial to, and meant to be lived in preparation for, its merging into the realm of eternality. See James 4:14-17.
Time for all of us will at some point merge into endless eternity, the conditions of which are determined by what we do with the opportunity time allows us to prepare now for an endless eternity in one of two places: (1) an eternity of indescribable joy and peace in the presence of God in a place He has prepared for those who have Jesus as their Lord and Savior or, (2) an eternity of irreversible sorrow and terror in a place occupied by those who had neither time or desire for Jesus Christ as their own Lord and Savior. See Amos 4:12.
Preparation for heaven requires that people sincerely and simultaneously (1) acknowledge, renounce and repent of their sin to God, and (2) acknowledge their belief in Christ’s death and resurrection and their need and reception of Him as their Lord and Savior. Preparation for hell requires that a person, during their lifetime, do nothing. See John 3:16-21; Rom. 10:10-17.
Receiving Jesus as Lord and Savior makes it possible for us to live “abundantly” during our time here on earth, and when time here is over, to enter “abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” See John 10:10; 2 Pet. 1:11.
“Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”—James 4:14