The Search for Significance

24 The Search For Significance
would make her know good from evil like God
Himself.
How subtly Satan twisted God's truth into history's
most believed lie! The God of love said to
Adam, "You are My image bearer, My companion
ruler, the reflection of My glory," but Satan distorted
the message to say, "You are something
other than that, something more. Eat the fruit and
you'll find out!"
Being deceived, Eve traded the truth of God
for the lie of the serpent. One of the tragic implications
of this event is that mankind lost his
secure status with God and began to struggle with
feelings of arrogance, inadequacy, and despair,
valuing the opinions of others more than the truth
of God. This has robbed man of his true selfworth
and has put him on a continual, but fruitless,
search for significance through his success
and the approval of others.
In one form or another, Satan's lie still thrives
today. For example, humanism, the central philosophy
of our schools and society, teaches that
man is above all else, that he alone is the center
of meaning. Teaching that man has meaning totally
apart from God, humanism leaves morality,
justice, and behavior to the discretion of
"enlightened" man and encourages people to worship
man and nature rather than God. Living
without God's divine truth, humanity sinks lower
and lower in depravity, blindly following a philosophy
that intends to heighten the dignity of
man, but instead lowers us to the level of animals.
Rather than spiritual and emotional people, we
have been classified as merely natural phenomena
of time plus chance, no different than rocks, animals,
or clouds. The apostle Paul described this
foolish and demeaning perspective of man in
Romans 1:20-25: