Jimmy Akin - The Words of Eternal Life: True Happiness and Where to Find It

Jimmy Akin

The Words

of Eternal Life

TRUE HAPPINESS AND

WHERE TO FIND IT

2020 Jimmy Akin

All rights reserved. Except for quotations, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, uploading to the internet, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

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To Whom Shall We Go?

All of us want to be happy. No matter who we are or where were from, we all share that desire for happiness.

Some things make us happy for a short time, like food, fun, and being with friends. But these pleasures come and go. Many are able to find longer-term happiness with family, but families also come with disappointment and hardship.

And ultimately, all of us are confronted with an inescapable realitywere all going to die.

When we contemplate the end of our lives, we must ask serious questions. Is there nothing more? Is life, as Shakespeares Macbeth said, just a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

Two thousand years ago, the most influential man in history preached good news to the people: by embracing Godthe source of all happinesswe can find true, perfect happiness that doesnt end.

But God is infinitely above us. He is all-knowing and all-wise. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isa. 55:9). Thus, God sometimes tells us things that go beyond all human expectation.

Sometimes people struggled with lessons Jesus taught, finding them to be hard sayings (John 6:60). When some even abandoned him because of these teachings, Jesus turned to his core disciples and asked, Do you also wish to go away? (John 6:67).

St. Peter spoke up and said, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

This is exactly right. There is nowhere else to go. Jesus has the words that bring the happiness of eternal life.

Since that day, billions of people around the world have heeded Jesus message. They have found the happiness and life that only Jesus can give. But many others are still seeking it. Perhaps that includes you.

Perhaps you are one of the many who has never heard Jesus message.

Perhaps you have never seen the evidence that shows why its true.

Perhaps you have forgotten his message and need a reminder of how important it is.

Or perhaps you have found that happiness and want an even deeper experience.

Whatever the case, this book is for you. In it, well look at Jesus words, why we can have confidence that they are true, and how we can gain true and lasting happiness from them.

Jesus came to bring us the words of eternal life. And now we have them.

1. Everything Starts with God

Today we live in a skeptical age, and some ask why we should believe in God at all.

Part of the answer is that its built into our nature. Religion is a human universal. It appears in every culture, through the entire history of the world.

Human Nature as a Clue

The two fundamental ideas in religion are the divine (God or the gods) and the afterlife. Every religion has teachings about one or both of these. There never has been a people that disbelieved in the divine and the afterlife. Not even in the twentieth century, when some totalitarian regimes tried to ban religion (it didnt work). Religion is built into our nature. To be religious is simply to fulfill your human nature rather than resisting or ignoring it.

This is an important clue to the nature of reality. British author C.S. Lewis wrote:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

The twin desires for the divine and the afterlife, which appear in every time and land, are powerful pointers to their reality. There really is a God, and the human desire for him is so strong that, if denied knowledge of the true God, people will invent new ones to fill the gap. The desire to be with him is so strong that people recognize it cant be satisfied in this lifepointing to life after death.

In the Beginning

We can say more about Gods existence. Some scholars have proposed an argument based on the fact that things have beginnings. Whether its a cloud, a rock, or a baby, everything in the universe has a beginning.

We perceive that these things didnt come out of nowhere. There were reasons why they came to be. Evaporating water forms clouds. Lava cools to make rocks. And, of course, a baby has parents. Not only does everything in the universe have a beginning, there is a reason why it began.

We call these reasons causes, and the quest to understand causes is one of the main goals of science. Scientists have discovered causes for many of the phenomena in nature, but the overall guiding principle is the powerful human intuition that things have causes. When something begins to exist, there is a reason why.

Some thinkers have used this fact to argue for Gods existence like this:

1.Everything that has a beginning has a cause.

2.The universe has a beginning.

3.Therefore, the universe has a cause.

4.The cause of the universe is a basic definition of God.

5.Therefore, God exists.

Sometimes people respond by asking, If everything has a cause, what caused God? But this is a misunderstanding. The argument doesnt claim that everything has a cause, but only that everything that has a beginning has a cause. If something doesnt have a beginning, it doesnt need a cause.

The idea that God is eternal and so has no beginning is an important part of all the worlds monotheistic religions. Christians follow the words of the Bible, which teaches, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). If God himself didnt have a beginning, then we dont need to ask what caused him.

Does the argument for Gods existence work?

The first premisethat everything with a beginning has a causeis a truth we can readily observe, a fact that drives scientific inquiry.

Another premisethat being the cause of the universe is a basic definition of Godis simply a definition, and so it doesnt need to be proved any more than definitions like a bachelor is an unmarried man or a triangle has three angles. These are all true by definition.

Of course, a single argument can only do so much. But if its true that the world has a cause, then its legitimate to understand that cause as God, whatever else he may be. So the question at that point would not be, Does God exist? but What kind of God exists? To build a full picture of God, this argument would need to be supplemented with others to reveal more aspects of his character.

The key part of this argument is the second premisethat the world has a beginning. If thats true, everything else follows. Do we have evidence of such a beginning? Yes, and weve had it for a long time.

The Night Sky