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Hohenwald SDA Church

Dennis Priebe

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

Do you know what life is really like for those who eliminate God from their thinking and then stop to think about their future?

I want you to hear from an individual, a philosopher at Oxford.

He had been a member of the British Parliament.

In the middle of it all, I was overwhelmed, almost literally so, by a sense of mortality.

The realization hit me like a demolition crane that I was inevitably going to die.

Death, my death, the literal destruction of me Was totally inevitable and had been from the very instant of my conception Nothing that I could ever do now or at any other time could make any difference to that Nor could it ever have done so at any moment of my life In the eye of eternity a human lifespan is barely a flicker.

Death will be upon us before we know where we are.

And once we are dead, it will be forever.

What can anything I do mean or matter to me when I have gone down into complete nothing for the rest of eternity.

What can it matter to anyone else either, when they too are eternally nothing?

If the void is the permanent destination of all of us, All value and all significance are merely pretended for the purpose of carrying on our little human game like children dressing up.

He wrote very eloquently about his struggle with meaninglessness, the realization that no matter what he did or what success he had in his life, whether he wrote great books or became foreign secretary, whether he married or not, whether he failed at everything he did or was very successful.

Nothing, he said, would make the slightest difference to me or to anyone else when all of us were nothing, as everyone was going to be, including everyone not yet born.

That it could therefore make no difference when I died, and would have made no difference if I had never been born.

That I was in any event going to be for all eternity what I would have been if I had never been born, that there was no meaning in any of it, no point in any of it, and that in the end everything was nothing.

He wrote all of this in a book called Confessions of a Philosopher.

He wrote that after all these years of seeking, I am as baffled now by the larger metaphysical questions of my existence as I was when I was a child, indeed more so, because my understanding of the depths and difficulties of the questions themselves is now so much greater." You know, most people try to ignore this reality by just not thinking about it.

But without God, this is the only reality there is.

Unless you can answer the problem of death, you have no answer to the problem of life.

It is the great neutralizer, the great destroyer.

He said, last year in front of students at a secular college in California, I spoke about the existence of God.

I said, you know, when I was about the age of most of you and not believing in God, when something convicted me every now and then that maybe God did exist, I always pushed the notion out of my mind.

Because something told me that if indeed God did exist, then considering how I was living, I was in deep trouble.

Dozens of consciences in sync started grinding against themselves.

It was almost as if the temperature in the room rose from the friction behind all these suddenly uncomfortable faces.

You know, every now and then, conscience seems to come alive, doesn't it?

And we are forced to think, even if just for a moment, just for a moment.

An atheist wrote, I want atheism to be true, and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right in my belief, it is that I hope that there is no God.

I don't want the universe to be like that." And I say, what an amazingly honest admission, straight up.

You see, God automatically comes with some moral problems.

If God exists, there's a transcendent moral power to whom I will probably have to give an answer to sometime.

And that is a thought some people don't want to have.

Even if they don't have a conscious knowledge of God, the thought that they're not living right.

And you know the real reason, the real reason evolution is so popular is because it offers a temporary escape from a nagging conscience.

Maybe there's some rational reason for what I'm doing.

Would you take your Bible and turn with me to Romans chapter 1.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

Because that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

Are you thankful today that you don't have to write or speak what we have just read?

Are you thankful that we have a reasonable and logical solution to the horrible thought that life is meaningless?

Turn to the 8th chapter of the book of Romans.

Verse 1, There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

I am covered by the righteousness of Jesus, the only righteousness sufficient to take away my guilt.

We know a guilty conscience when it simmers inside us.

We know that feeling and that guilt should drive us to Him, to the foot of the cross, to fall before our crucified God and claim His grace as our only hope.

And today I want to spend a little time reflecting on the 1 who gives us hope when things seem hopeless in this world, who provides a way out from meaninglessness.

We can only marvel at what we know about our faith.

Our Creator, the most exalted being in this universe, the 1 greater than the universe, became the lowest of the low and died the sinner's death so that no sinners need to die that death.

The 1 who is equal with God, the 1 who is God, the 1 who is the highest and most exalted in all creation became a curse for us in order that we would not have to experience that curse.

Turn with me to a profound passage, Philippians chapter 2, beginning with verse 6, Beginning with verse 6, "...who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Ellen White writes in Desire of Ages, page 25, In Christ we become more closely united to God than if we had never fallen.

In taking our nature, the Savior has bound himself to humanity by a tie that is never to be broken.

Through the eternal ages, He is linked with us.

God has adopted human nature in the person of His Son, and has carried the same into the highest heaven.

It is the Son of Man who shares the throne of the universe." Not only did the Lord take upon Him our humanity, but He will retain that humanity forever.

Humanity in the person of Christ will share the throne of the universe.

Numerous times while He was here in the flesh, Jesus referred to himself as the Son of Man, a reference to the humanity that he had adopted for the rest of eternity.

He had to take upon himself our humanity if he was going to be our substitute and our example.

Turn with me to another passage expressing this very well, Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews chapter 2, we'll begin reading with verse 14.

For as much then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

For verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham.

Wherefore, in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.

For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted." Not only did Jesus take upon himself human nature, he needs that nature to be our merciful and faithful High Priest, to understand what we're going through.

The humanity of Christ is the bond through which he has linked himself with us, a link that he kept long after his work on earth was ended, for the work he's doing right now as our High Priest in the heavenly sanctuary.

Turn with me to another text, 1st Timothy chapter 2.

1 Timothy 2 and verse 5, For there is 1 God and 1 Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Jesus, although still divine, retains that humanity that He first took upon Himself when He was born into this world.

The Bible gives us some powerful reasons to believe that Christ is forever to retain his human nature, the nature that He took with Him to heaven after His work was done.

And these words of Ellen White then become even more powerful, writing in Great Controversy, page 674, about the end of sin.

Our Redeemer will ever bear the marks of His crucifixion.

Upon his wounded head, upon his side, his hands and feet are the only traces of the cruel work that sin has wrought, and the tokens of his humiliation are his highest honor.

Through the eternal ages, the wounds of Calvary will show forth his praise and declare his power." Now, let us look back just a little bit to the time of his incarnation.

What does his humanity really mean for us today?

We struggle with failure, with discouragement.

We struggle with strong pulls to our lower nature.

Let's take a quick trip through some Bible text now.

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The Last Piece of the Puzzle

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