When I attended Cincinnati Christian University I was introduced to the disciplines of the world’s great philosophers. And what I discovered was these philosophers and great thinkers often disagreed with each other about what path people ought to take in contemplating what I call the three legs of every philosophical schools, 1)what is the meaning of life; 2) what is the purpose in death; and 3) what is the usefulness in things. I remember one particular philosopher whose name was Diogenes of Sinope. He was nicknamed “The Dog.” He was a Cynic. The word Cynic literally means “dog-like.” Diogenes felt the best of man was being wasted by societal obligations. He felt man’s greatest identity was not with the city-state, but in moral virtue, and that of his natural self. He walked around Athens with his bath tub. When it was common in his day for people to call themselves Athenian, or Corinthian, he was the first to use the term “Cosmopolitan,” which identified him as a citizen of the world. He was mentored by Antisthenes who once beat him with a stick to try to chase him off. Diogenes responded, “Strike, for you will find no wood hard enough to keep me away from you, so long as I think you’ve something to say.” The Cynic philosophy was the dog-like philosophy marked by an animal-like behavior having sex in public, eating, drinking, bathing, defecating, and urinating in public.

But that’s the kind of thinking you can end up following, if God is not your shepherd. Proverbs 14:12 (NASB) says, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but the end is the way of death.”
People with this kind of intellect can end up living in a land of death because they can’t even accept the truth that they EXIST. Think for a moment my proposition of a clock on the wall. Is it better if there is a clock that does not work hanging on the wall, or having no clock at all? We would think, having no clock at all. The wall’s purpose is to hold the nail that hangs the clock. It is not important if the clock works or not, only that the wall and nail fulfills it’s purpose. And yet, a clock that is not working has all the parts to work, but hasn’t attained to its purpose because it has not discovered itself. This leads me to Rene Descartes and the philosophers who struggled to produce the answers to the three-legged stool of wisdom (life, death, usefulness). How can we prove who we are? Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am.” To the Christian, our purpose and identity is only fulfilled when the Clock Maker, who has not only put all parts together for a purpose, but also has made agreement with the clock as to its usefulness. It’s living and dying has only the usefulness of its intended purpose.

It is a struggle today to resist the Cynic philosophy when considering what society has created as far as the human identity. We must first know that we are not defined by others, or ourselves. We are not of this world, and therefore not even cosmopolitan. Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NASB) “He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.”

There is no wall, there is no nail, there is no clock apart from the Maker’s purpose. Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”