God's Sovereignty

When I became a Christian, the one doctrine that gave me more trouble than any other was that of God's ultimate sovereignty, that its, His ultimate authority before which we literally have no rights. It is the idea that there is no part of my life that I can claim to be fully and rightfully my own. It is something that is central to the entire Christian mindset and lifestyle, but it was also something that nearly a decade and a half of secular upbringing had left me quite uneasy with. Ultimately, I found the answer to this difficult question of how God can have such authority in another question, that of where purpose comes from or (to put it another way) that what the meaning of life is.

What is Meaning?


To start, there is the issue of the definition of meaning (I should mention that while there may be some technical differences, for now I will be using the terms "meaning" and "purpose" interchangeably). This is a very difficult question to answer as the most obvious (and perhaps the most sensible) answer seems to simply be that it is what it is. It is almost too raw, too fundamental to describe. However we may get a somewhat more extensive answer by considering the phenomenon of a dying person reflecting on their life and asking if it was meaningful. In this quite human scenario, we are first able to discover that meaning is "above" the meaningful person just as beauty is above a beautiful object. If someone on the verge of death finds that they are satisfied with their life then their life is pleasing because it was meaningful, not meaningful because they are pleased with it.

Thus it is clear that the "height" of purpose above us means that it is what gives us value, or at least that some aspect of our value comes from it, but from this same scenario we are also able to glimpse another aspect of purpose. This characteristic is the timelessness or eternal nature of meaning. The dying individual is concerned with purpose in a new way because they have a sense of judgement (even among atheists and agnostics I believe this to be true, when we see our lives coming to an end it is part of our nature to anticipate some kind of summing up of our life) and when we search for meaning we tend to ask what we will leave behind. When it comes to the anticipated judgement it is worth noting that we are rarely concerned with skills and entirely amoral accomplishments and while I may be wrong I also suspect that the interest in pleasure is something that emerges when death is simply in the near future and that it is typically withered away when death is just around the corner. This is because all these things are temporal and we expect to leave them behind (even with skills which we might expect to keep we still see how vulnerable they are to death as we often see so many of our most reliable faculties all but obliterated in the final days) whereas our purposefulness is the one thing we expect to carry on with us to the great hereafter. It is the subject matter of our judgement when we must leave everything else outside the courtroom. Do not be deceived in this matter; meaning is either eternal or it is one big fraud, no matter how many millions of years it might last. The issue of death is not simply that our mortal lives are too short, it is that they end at all and if meaning also has such an end then it counts for nothing.


Does Morality Demand Meaning?


So how far does the reach of purpose extend over the abstract and spiritual realm? Can we have morality without meaning? I ask this question because there are many who would say they are content not to have objective meaning in their lives; I have even seen bumper stickers reading "the purpose of life is that there is no purpose." As far as I can tell, such individuals are split between the nihilists who reject the objective existence of any non-physical entities such as purpose or beauty and the postmodernists who find liberation in rejecting such objective and powerful standards as ultimate meaning. In both cases, one thing that neither of these groups are able to genuinely let go of for so much as a single day of social interaction is morality. Those who reject anything beyond the natural world often regard the spreading of scientific knowledge and naturalist ideas as the right thing to do, postmodernists quite paradoxically insist on treating other systems of ethics fairly and open-mindedly, and both groups tend to insist on a moral standard when it comes to human interactions (such as not harming others without just cause) in their own daily lives. In either case those who would deny objective moral law might argue that they only advocate the efficient and safe functioning of human civilization which is to say that they are advocating pleasure, but at the same time it is often true that putting the good of society first (while being perfectly beneficial for the majority of people) causes more harm than good for the individual in question. What's more is that if there is no objective good then the desire to live a moral life is quite arbitrary and there is absolutely no argument that can be given against someone who chooses to live the "fun but short" way.

So morality is inescapable. Does that then mean that anyone who would live an ethical life must also bow to purpose in general and ultimately to whatever "ultimate purpose" there might be for life and the universe as a whole? Can we have morality without meaning?

The answer I ultimately come to is "no" partially because I find the separation of ethics and purpose literally inconceivable (to quote C.S. Lewis, "I mean that the act of believing" such to be true "is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility.") and also because of one very practical difficulty. Every culture in human history has adhered to a system of right and wrong and they have also all accepted the same fundamental laws of morality, however every culture differs in regards both to how certain laws should be honored and in the level of emphasis they place on each law. The result is that we are able to see things done in one society in obedience to morality that are considered abominations in another society as both cultures believe in the same ethical laws but at the same time differ in their views on which laws have priority. The laws of ethics must clash, and in that clash there must be something else that decides the victor, something that transcends them. In other words, for moral law to function, it must do so in obedience to purpose.


Can We Create Our Own Meaning?


Now since all earthly things eventually pass away, if we are to find purpose we must address the question of ultimate meaning, of why anything exists at all, in order to find the eternal root of meaning and to understand what is and is not meaningful. But in order to tackle the question of why we are all here we must first answer one simple question: Can we create our own purpose?

The answer, not surprisingly, is that we cannot. If we derive value from meaning and if we have any sense of judgement attacked to the idea of meaning, then it must come from something greater than us. If meaning comes from us then it is not meaning just as a square that has only three sides is not a square. This may seem obvious, but it is essential to the question of why we exist in clearing away the nonsense. For instance, going by this principle we must accept that we do not exist to be happy since that would mean we exist for our own sake.
What Other Options are There?


But what does that leave? What ultimate meaning can we find that does not violate this principle? Do we exist to do good deeds? that can't be it firstly because the definition of "good deeds" comes from meaning and secondly because the most common and universally recognized good deeds are actions by which we serve other people and if neither I nor my neighbor are good enough to justify our own existence then it makes no sense to say that we are good enough to justify each other's respective existences. Do we exist for family and friends? The same problem emerges. Do we exist for friendship and kinship themselves? But if we are living within those two abstractions then we are doing so by not regarding them but rather the actual friends and kin. Do we exist for nature? But nature is just as mortal as we are and besides that what could we ever do for it?

The only way we can have purpose is if it comes from something or someone so inherently good that it has no need to justify its own existence. The only possible candidate is God.


So, returning to the original question, how can the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty over our lives be justified? I think a better question might be "How can we ever justify holding anything at all back from God and live even one second of our lives for the sake of anything that excludes Him?" The answer to that question is easy: we can't.