Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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01 / 24 PART DISCOVERY SERIES
discovertomorrow
Uncover the story told through current world events
that gives hope to a world in crisis
Copyright © 2012 Adventist Media Network
Published by HopeChannel
Written by Clifford Goldstein
Edited by John Gate & Sue Robinson
Art direction by Jared Madden & Shelley Poole
Layout by Elena Janakijovska
Typeset in Univers
Printed in Australia by Signs Publishing Company®
Unless otherwise stated all Bible texts are from the New King James Version
For more information about this series, visit www.beyond.info
discovertomorrow
4 DISCOVER TOMORROW
Seem like we’re just set here, a woman said to me recently, and don’t
nobody know why.
However ineloquently expressed, the woman’s words say so much.
None
of us asked to be born.
Each of us were, as she said, just set down here,
and who hasn’t at times wondered why, especially when life gets hard?
ALL THIS WAY—AND TO WHAT PURPOSE?
Writing 2,400 years ago about the human condition, an ancient Greek
said that the best thing for any of us was never to have been born.
In the
past century, author Albert Camus wrote, There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Suicide?
Yes, because the real question in the face of so much tragedy, he said, is
judging whether or not life is even worth living.
I cried when I was born, wrote poet George Herbert, and every day
shows why.
A young man, just married, had survived the atomic blast over Hiroshima
in 1945.
His new wife, however, was obliterated.
Nothing remained but
charred bones.
Desperate, he gathered the remains, put them in a small
bowl, and managed amid the chaos to get on a train to another city
where her parents lived.
He wanted to give them the bones, something to
remember her by.
The only problem?
The city he went to was Nagasaki, where a few days
later the second bomb exploded.
The young man survived that bombing
DISCOVER TOMORROW 5
as well, but the blast threw open the top of the bowl that contained her
bones, and scattered them into oblivion.
Stunned, weeping, the young man cried out, All this way!
All this way, and
her bones are scattered who knows where - and to what purpose?
THE HARD QUESTIONS
And to what purpose?
We hustle, we struggle, we suffer, we go all this way, and then, after
that - we die anyway.
It seems too hard to make sense of it all.
No
wonder we wrestle with hard questions that cry out for answers that don’t
always come.
Why do we exist?
What are our origins?
What can we hope for?
What is
this we have found ourselves in?
Where is it heading?
What is the purpose
of our lives now that we are, and not of our own choosing, set down here?
Why so much pain and suffering?
What can it all mean when death has
the final word anyway?
The wise man Solomon, one of the Bible writers, agrees.
Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done
And on the labor in which I had toiled;
And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind.
There was no profit under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 2:11
King Solomon had everything - money, glory, women, power, fame,
brilliance - that this world could offer - and then some.
He had
accomplished more than most humans ever would, even if they had five
6 DISCOVER TOMORROW
lifetimes.
And yet, as he came to the end of his days, he deemed it all
meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Thus, the dilemma: We are beings who cry out for answers in a world that
doesn’t yield them easily to us.
SEAWATER SYRINGES
That’s why, from the earliest days of recorded human history, humans have
struggled with the reason for their existence, especially with the important
question of origins.
After all, how can we know how to live if we don’t
know the purpose of our life to begin with, and how can we know the
purpose if we don’t know how we got here?
Imagine if a shipment of medicines - say antibiotics - were to wash up
on the shore of an island filled with pre-civilisation people who had no
contact with the outside world.
The curious islanders open the box and
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