100 years from now, every one of us is going to be dead.

200 years from now, nobody is going to care.

Those were the first words I remember hearing in the opening of a sermon at a church I was visiting for the first time. They were celebrating their first service in a new building, too. I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I would think to open a sermon on such a momentous day.

If those words hit you as they hit me, I suspect the reason is that we spend so much of our lives working toward some ultimate goal or purpose, yet something about those two simple facts of life cries out, “Meaningless! Meaningless!” Is there any hope in finding a purpose in life that isn’t snuffed away by the slow march of time, leading to the inevitable death of you, everyone you know, and everyone who cares?

Is it possible that the preacher was making a good point, perhaps even that he might tell a better story?

How Did We Get Here? The Loss of Purpose (Telos)

I believe life is rich with meaning and purpose, and I will contend for that before the article’s end. But to understand where our meaning and purpose truly lie, it helps to know how we wound up searching for purpose in the first place.

For most of human history, people believed that practically all things had a purpose, an end goal, or a “telos.” Much of this changed when Isaac Newton, considered one of the fathers of modern science, came out with his revolutionary laws of physics. Rather than believing that things like wind, waves, planets, and stars move for some divine purpose, we realized that, ultimately, they move through physical, mechanical processes. Even something as simple as a baseball doesn’t fly to second base to get a player out; it flew there because it was in physical contact with a fast-moving hand that released the ball in the direction of second base. There’s no ultimate purpose. It’s an illusion. It’s just physics.

The “Newton for a Blade of Grass”

Of course, living things like people could still be said to have a purpose, right? As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant boldly declared in 1790, (paraphrased) “There will never be a Newton for a blade of grass.”

69 years later, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, and the world came to believe he did exactly what Kant declared could never happen. As the theory goes, plants, animals, and people aren’t explained by purposes any more than rain, stars, and baseballs. We don’t exist for this or that. All life—including human life—is fully explained by physical, mechanical processes of mutation and natural selection. Once again, it’s just physics.

The Hunt for Meaning (And Why It Fails)

Like an unwanted child of accident, Darwin (or, shall I say, the ideology of Darwinism) stripped humanity of its purpose. Many philosophers declared, therefore, that the ultimate end of a Darwinistic universe is the philosophy of Nihilism—a completely meaningless, purposeless, valueless existence. After all, it’s just physics.

Indeed, as the reality of Darwinism set in, many accepted the dismal embrace of Nihilism. But that wasn’t the whole story. We can’t help but long for some bigger, higher purpose in life; that’s part of what it is to be human. So we searched, inventing a lot of “ism’s” along the way—humanism, materialism, existentialism, expressive individualism—all in an attempt to embrace something to give us meaning again. We tried to rise above the absurdity of a random, chaotic existence and create our own meaning.

If that doesn’t sound strange, it should. If you create your own meaning, how could that lead to a bigger, higher purpose? Traditionally understood, purpose has a greater, binding mission behind it, like a holy beckoning from the clouds. There’s a higher calling and obligation to fulfill one’s purpose. That’s what gives it color. But if you invent your own purpose on a whim, then nothing compels you to follow it, and you can just as easily change your mind and come up with a different purpose. If that’s the case, was it really “purpose” to begin with, or just a desperate attempt to make us feel better about our existence in a universe that doesn’t care? Repeat after me: “Meaningless! Meaningless!”

A Better Story: The Bible’s Brutal Honesty

Believe it or not, you just quoted the Bible.

““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.”

“No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered.” -Ecclesiastes 1:2–4, 11 (NIV)

Even long before Darwinism, the Bible was brutally honest about the despairing reality that in 100 years, we’ll all be dead, and in 200 years, nobody will care. But like that church preacher, the author of Ecclesiastes was not trying to make us depressed. He’s trying to snap us out of the hopeless illusion that we can invent our own meaning.

The Purpose We Were Made For

Why? Because there’s a better story to be told: We are God’s creation (Eph. 2:10), made in His image (Gen. 1:27), to know God (John 17:3), to appreciate His gifts (Eccl. 3:12–13), to reveal God’s multi-layered wisdom (Eph. 3:10), to restore the world to Him (2 Cor. 5:18–19), to finish the race, to keep the faith, and to receive the crown of righteousness from God Himself (2 Tim. 4:6–8). This isn’t just a purpose of our own imagination; it’s the highest purpose from God Himself, evidenced by the historical reliability of Scripture—one that dignifies humanity with a divine calling so infused with meaning that everything else looks like garbage (Phil. 3:8).

10,000 Years From Now

The fact is, we long for meaning and purpose because God made us that way. He made us to be fully alive and satisfied in Him, both now and forever. That’s how the Bible starts, and that’s how it ends. That’s the better story He invites us to be a part of.

What, then, do we make of death? Yes, unless Jesus returns, we’re all going to die, and 200 years from now, nobody will care. But here’s the thing: neither should we. Our purpose is found in God’s great story, not ours. Even more, Jesus said in John 14:19, “Because I live, you also shall live.” Jesus died, but then he resurrected. It’s a promise for everyone who accepts God’s invitation to save us from our sins and redeem us into an eternal relationship with Him. If we can take the story off ourselves and see the greater purpose of our existence, we can reflect on Heaven and sing along with the poet to the tune of Amazing Grace:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

Than when we’d first begun.

 

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