Question

What do you believe is the meaning of life?

Answer 1

The meaning of life cannot be determined that simply. It varies from person to person. For someone who has a deep passion for music, life would mean spending days listening to the beat of every instrument. For someone who is in love, life would simply be spending their time with their loved ones. And for someone like you and me, it can be very different. So there isn't really a fixed answer for this.

Answer 2

A lot of people turn to religion to find meaning and purpose--after all, religion usually offers explanations for how we got here, why we're here, where we're going, etc.

The apostle Paul, who wrote most of the books in the New Testament of the Bible, said that looking for meaning and purpose in religion was useless. He said religion is a way of trying to get to God by bringing Him down--either by trying to make temples for and idols of Him on this earth, or by imagining that we can live good enough lives for Him to ignore all the ways we've broken His law (thus making God out to be some kind of benign, elderly man who cares more about making us feel good than about bigger concepts of the universe, like justice and true love).

Paul said the purpose of every person was to seek after God and find Him, and He said that the only way we could really "find" Him was to repent (turn away from living for ourselves and turn to God) and trust in Jesus, because only Jesus (by dying on a cross for sin [sin = breaking God's law]) is able to make us innocent before God when we go to be judged, after we die.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what Paul himself said to a crowd several years after Jesus died:

"The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children.' Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead."

(from Acts chapter 17)