WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Program 109
Look to God for Security
by Ernest O’Neill

We’re talking on this program at this time each day about the meaning of life, about why we are here, what
you’re doing here, what the purpose for the education and all the working, and the eating, and the sleeping,
and the marrying and the having children…what is the point of it all? What we have been sharing is an
explanation of that reality that we have heard from the most remarkable human being that ever lived, the man
that lived in the first century of our era.

Particularly what we have been doing in the past few weeks is matching that explanation of reality up
with some of the bewildering phenomena that we have come across in our own personal lives. One of those
is known as the “Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome.” It takes its name from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson about
the respected, and kindly, elderly, generous doctor Jekyll who was the friend of the poor and needy in a
certain area of London.

That is, he was a friend of the poor and needy until he began to discover within himself certain urges to
anger, and hatred and selfishness that he had never believed had existed within him at all. Gradually, this
alter ego so took control of him that he became weary in trying to suppress it so that he could keep his good
side uppermost. At last, he invented a drug, you may remember, that gave a physical expression to this alter
ego that would give him at least freedom from the strain of suppressing it.

So was born that character known as Mr. Hyde, an ugly, violent, hunchback man who roamed the streets of
London, and murdered and assaulted the poor and needy. Eventually, the Mr. Hyde character took over from the
Dr. Jekyll character completely, so that Jekyll had no alternative but to commit suicide. What the story, of
course, does is highlight an experience that all of us have had ourselves, because there isn’t one of us
listening today who hasn’t had an experience of an ugly side to our nature which we cannot possibly explain.

When we most want to be kind, and gentle and understanding and loving to our relatives and our friends, we
find within us often a surging up from deep down in the darkest parts of our hearts an ugliness and a hatred,
and an anger and a selfishness that we cannot control. Indeed, many of us wonder if we are not going
insane, so strongly does this temper at times rise within us. We cannot believe that it is us at all.

On occasion, we wonder whether we are not actually schizophrenics, if we’re not actually split personalities,
so strong, so violent and so contradictory is this character or this lion within us, that rises up at times
and is most inconvenient to us. Probably all of us have felt that even when we haven’t allowed it to express
itself as Jekyll did. We have felt a motive life that is murky and that is very selfish compared with the
outwardly generous attitudes that we express in our words.

So that is a phenomenon that is quite difficult to explain. What we have been saying is that it comes from
the very heart of the reality of our creation and our origin. We have been sharing that the Creator that made
us (and of course there has to be a Creator; we’ve discussed that over the months and if you want to hear
those discussions, by all means write and ask me, and I’ll send you some cassettes of those early broadcasts),
but we have discussed the origin of the world in the light of the fact that we are such personable people.

We have said that an animal cannot make a person. Or, an impersonal process cannot produce a person. There
has to be somewhere back of the universe, a mind and an intellect that is at least as personable as we
ourselves are. The suggestion that there is an intellect behind the universe comes from the fact that

there is so much design and order built into our universe right from the occurrence of the seasons regularly
year after year to the more complex structure of the DNA molecule.

There is evidence all around in the chart of the elements, and the orbiting of the stars and the planets, that
the whole thing was designed and planned and has not come about by time and chance. We’ve been sharing how the
man that lived at the beginning of our era, the man called Jesus, explained that the Creator of the universe
was actually His Father. He created you because He loves and He wanted to love you and He wanted you to love
Him.

He wanted you to live in a friendship with Him and to live your ordinary, everyday life in personal
relationship with Him, trusting Him for the things that you needed in this life. Of course, Jesus and His
followers (indeed, His predecessors in the old book that is called the Bible), explained how we as a human
race rejected that whole idea. We didn’t like the idea of living in dependence on some invisible Creator. We
determined we would use the world for our own purposes in our own way.

We determined we would substitute for the love that we now missed from this Creator — we would substitute for
it the attributes that we felt that love had. We would substitute ways to meet those attributes and to
reproduce those attributes from the world. Of course, any of us who have had a good father and mother know
that if they love us, we have a great sense of security. We have no trouble at all wondering where our next
meal is going to come from. We knew they loved us and would provide it.

Nor have we any problem with thinking we’re important, because they make us, of course, as the very apple of
their eye. We immediately had a sense of identity and self worth. Nor have we much trouble with finding
happiness, because our greatest happiness is to be with them and to be in a real relationship of love and
trust with them. So, those were the attributes that the love from our Creator provided for us.

We would have a great sense, of course, of security, because the Father of us all was the Creator of the
universe. He owned the cattle on a thousand hills. He owned all the daffodils and the tulips, and all the
gold in the gold mines and the coal in the coal mines. So, we would naturally have a great sense of
confidence that He would look after us. If we did what He put us here to do on the earth, then He would
certainly take care of us.

We, of course, would obviously have a complete sense of identity. We would know exactly who we are because of
His love. When we realized the hairs of our heads were numbered by Him, we would have no trouble with whether
anybody thought much of us or not. If the one significant other thought the world of us, what did we care
what anybody else thought of us? So that was the way our Father planned for us to live. When we rejected this
whole idea, we had to find substitutes, so, we turned to the world of things.

We tried to get from things that are in the world the security that the Father’s love would give us. We have
tried to amass enough things to give us a sense of security. We tried to amass enough money, so we would have
sufficient food to last us to the end of our lives. We’ve tried to amass enough money to provide us with good
shelter, good home; good clothing that would make sure that we continued in this life satisfactorily until we
died.

We have begun to depend on our jobs and our salaries, on the way our bosses treat us, on the way the economy
goes for our security. All of this is, of course, very unreliable, as we have seen. That is part of the
problem we have. When we find that we are about to lose our job, we find surging up within us a Mr. Hyde
that will do anything to keep the job. If we find someone scrambling over the top of the heap over us, there
is a jealousy and an anger rises up that, of course, expresses that uncertainty we feel. Because we are

beginning to depend on the world instead of the Father’s love for our security.

We’ve discovered that a great deal of this Jekyll and Hyde experience comes from the fact that we are now
living in dependence on the world of things, and people and circumstances, instead of on the love of the
Creator Himself. Let’s talk a little more about that tomorrow so it may shed some more light on your own
behavior and experience.