What is Nihilism?
Today in our Bible study we’re going to look at the word Nihilism. Don’t let the word scare you for it is a word that is very popular in many people’s minds today and something you should understand in order to help anyone caught in its tentacles,
To put it simply nihilism is a non-Christian belief that says the world is totally meaningless; the only meaning in life is the one you personally give to it; but there’s no ultimate meaning to life. That sounds awful depressing to me. Nihilism is rather fatalistic it comes from the Latin phrase nihil that means “that which does not exist.” The bitter truth is that it means to annihilate. Like an atomic bomb it evaporates all before it.
A very famous German atheistic philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche was the originator of nihilism. To him there was simply no absolute truth. In other words all values are worthless. Nietzsche was an extreme pessimist, a dyed in the wool skeptic. To him man’s only allegiance is to power, a super race; a philosophy which Hitler grasped on to and which almost annihilated Germany as a nation.
In nihilism there are no absolute moral values. They’re are merely social pressures that we agree upon to survive as social beings. In a nutshell nihilism believes that truth does not exist and is not real.
Christianity, however, takes a totally opposite view. It says that nihilism is a false philosophy, and that truth and knowledge and faith and morals and absolutes most truly do exist. They are absolute because they emanate from God himself. God makes it very clear in the Scriptures that we can know him whom to know is life eternal. Paul said,“I Know whom I have believed…”
The apostle John put it this way, “And this is eternal life, that we may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,’ [John 17: 3]
As Christians, we have the supreme confidence and conviction that God is who He says He is and will do what He says he will do.“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:24-28).
As Christians Our Greatest Reality Is Yet To Be.
Rejoice!
Pastor Bob