Your Purpose in Life is to Testify to the World That God is Great

found online by Raymond

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Your calling is you are on planet Earth to put a telescope to the eye of the world. That’s why you exist. By your behavior, your parenting, the way you do your job, the way you worship, and the way you handle your things in life, everyone should read off of your life, “God is great.” That’s why you exist.

— John Piper, Why Am I Here?

Evangelicals such as Calvinistic Fundamentalist John Piper have a reductionist view of the world. In their minds, the sum of everything is the Christian God. Everything traces back to God. He is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, and the beginning and the end. God is in believers, they live their lives through him, and to him go all praise, honor, and glory. This God is a jealous deity, demanding that his followers worship him alone. Worshiping other Gods or no God at all brings upon people his wrath and judgment. This God demands that believers in him devote their entire being to him. He is not only the hub around which everything turns, he is also the rim, tube, and tire. Simply put, from birth through eternity, life is all about God.

After Evangelicals have spent their entire lives worshiping God, guess what they get to do after they die? More of the same.

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2 thoughts on “Your Purpose in Life is to Testify to the World That God is Great”

  1. That sums up my thoughts and feelings on the matter pretty well.

    I composed a brief series of posts on problems with Heaven when I still had my blog. Biblical descriptions of the afterlife aren’t very detailed (better to leave it to our imaginations, I suppose, than to invite scrutiny and criticism with specifics), so one can only say so much in response, but the idea of eternal worship is quite unappealing if taken literally.

    In fact, I can’t imagine enjoying any activity forever. The mind craves variation. Someone commented to tell me otherwise–something about how he would never get tired of the feeling of waking up next to his wife every morning. Of course, it’s easy to say that about a feeling that you only experience–and only *can* experience–briefly each day and when you are free to move on to other things afterwards. But he also informed me that the typical need for variation is a human flaw that would be either fixed or satisfied by God. That played right into my chief complaint with the concept of Heaven: it absolutely requires a radical identity change, from the dissolution of earthly relationships, familial or otherwise, to the alteration of the mind to such an extent that all “sinful” desires are eradicated. And if we’re to undergo such a change and become so similar to each other, even inhuman, then I have to wonder why we weren’t just created like that in the first place. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble and suffering, including God.

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