Shakespeare put the following words into the mouth of Macbeth.

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creep in this petty place from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

What a sad outlook on life.  We certainly cannot classify Macbeth as an optimist.

Macbeth’s lament is the statement of an atheist. Without God, man is nothing more than a dying creature in a dying world.  Our existence is meaningless.  All our accomplishments amount to nothing.  There is no right.  There is no wrong.  We are but poor players acting our brief parts on a stage that, like us, is soon destined for extinction.

Do you believe this?  Those who deny God evidently do.  With no God, how can you make sense of anything?  From whence do we derive our ethical absolutes?  What is the purpose of life?  Why do we live?

And without God there is no punishment for evil.  There is no reward for good. There is no divine justice.

Richard Wurmbrand, Romanian Lutheran pastor, was tortured for his faith in communist prisons.  He says,

“The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good and the punishment of evil.  There is no reason to be human.  There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man.  The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil.  We can do what we wish.’  I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’  He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”

A prominent English theologian once said that if he believed that all the evils and injustices of life were not made right by God in the afterlife “I think I would go mad.”

I give thanks that there is a God.  There is love and hope and beauty.  There is also a final judgement, a heaven and a hell.

God is loving.  God is merciful.  God is just!