Centurion Living

LIFE OF PURPOSE
For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? (Esther 4:14)
What is the meaning of life?
The answer to this question is our original purpose. It is the sole reason that we have life in the first place. But how do we answer this question? When asked to define their purpose in life people often state that they were meant to be an engineer, or accountant, or doctor, or clergymen, or parent, or whatever. Someone may be called to one of these specific missions, but a mission in life is different from life’s purpose.
As we discussed in chapter one, mission and purpose are often used interchangeably but are, in reality, quite different. A mission is a life role or assignment, but every mission that you have in life is directed by a central purpose. This knowledge is essential to helping us understand and follow God's guidance for our specific missions. In another section in this book we will discuss these missions in more detail, but for now, know that you do have a purpose, and you must be focused on fulfilling that purpose in every mission that fills your life's journey.
So how do you know what your life's purpose really is? It's an easier question to answer than you might think. But first we have to agree on three key initial assumptions that must be made to arrive at the answer to this question:
1. First, we must agree that the Bible is God's Word and is thus the best source for understanding our purpose in life.
If something we believe about life, purpose, or ourselves is in violation with what the Bible teaches then our belief must be wrong and should be corrected. This requires that we constantly study God's Word.
It isn't enough to read the Bible once and assume that you know it. It isn't enough to rely on the Sunday school lessons you received as a child. It isn't enough to rely on the sermons you hear in church today.
God has given us an incredible owner's manual for life that tells His story for mankind from beginning to end. In the Vision section of this book there is a chapter on Living the Blessed Life in which we examine the opening chapter of Psalms. In the very first verse we are told that being blessed is a direct result of meditating on God's law. You can't mediate on something if you don't spend time studying it.
2. Second, we must understand that God is our creator.
It isn't the intent of this book to get into the great debate over how life came to be formed on earth. I have very strong beliefs about this, but that topic could fill volumes on its own. Instead, the intent of this book is to address the question of why life came to be formed.
Whatever the biological process through which we came to be here, it is clear that if our first assumption is true, then our second assumption must be that it was God who controlled and orchestrated those biological processes. The opening verses of God's Word clearly teach us that everything that exists was created by God, and this includes mankind. By the way, after each step in the creation process we are told that God surveyed His handiwork and said "it is good" except for when He created us. After creating mankind He surveyed His handiwork, gave stewardship of everything to mankind, and said "it is very good". (Gen. 1:31, emphasis mine)
3. Our final assumption is that God is sovereign.
Some people like to believe that God created everything and then left it to unwind on its own. Going back to the first assumption, if you spend time studying through all of scripture it will become evident to you that our history is really His story. The Bible is all about God and His direct influence in the lives of people throughout history.
God does not passively watch us unwind and wait to see what happens. He is, in fact, extremely active in our lives whether we realize it or not. One author put it this way:
We may not always be able to see that events in our lives work together for a wise purpose, but we know that God chooses from among all possible alternatives the ends and means for achieving them.
By studying scripture we can see that not only is God working directly in the lives of each one of us, He is orchestrating the lives of all mankind to fit into the bigger picture of His plan.
Now back to our question: What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose in living? People have been asking this question since the dawn of mankind. The Westminster Larger Catechism is a list of questions with answers designed to guide its readers to a deeper knowledge and understanding of God. The very first question that is asked is,
What is the chief and highest end of man?
And the answer given:
Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy Him forever.
This is superbly stated, a simple and direct summation of our purpose in living. We're going to dig a little deeper and fill in the proverbial blanks left by making such a simple statement, and, in doing so, simplify even further.
Resemble and Represent
Let's go back to the beginning. In the first chapter of Genesis we see the telling of how His story begins. We see the final act of God's creation in verses 26-27:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Gen. 1:26-27)
This is a wonderfully descriptive telling of God's creative handiwork in forming mankind. Note that we were created in the image and likeness of God. Understanding just what this means is critical to understanding the purpose for which we were given life.
The word translated image is the Hebrew word selem (or tselem). It is a word that was used to refer to something that was made to be representative of, or stand in substitution for, something else. The word is used in non-biblical literature to refer to replicas of various things such as statues, paintings, and even pagan idols. One author describes the meaning of this word by stating that image refers to a visual representation, with an idol depicting an invisible god as classic example.
Stop and think about the meaning of this word and the implication that it has for why you exist. Mankind (that's you and me) were created to be representative of God. No wonder we see later in the Bible that God commands that His people not create a graven image of Him. His people are the graven image of Him!
Did you ever stop to think that you are in fact the image of God, designed to be representative of Him on this earth? That's a pretty powerful statement. That is the meaning of life. That is your original purpose.
Let's keep digging. Mankind was created in both God's image and God's likeness. Is this two ways of saying the same thing? The two words are very similar in the original tongue, but they are not actually the same thing. The word translated likeness is from the Hebrew word demuth which, according to Google Translate, refers to a figure, character, image, shape, form, likeness, model, effigy, icon or guise. In his book, Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem explains the differences like this:
The word 'likeness' also means an object similar to something else, but it tends to be used more frequently in contexts where the idea of similarity is emphasized more than the idea of being a representative or substitute.