I

Because of the Creator's sovereignty and predestination, a lonely soul that started out with absolutely nothing gains parents and a family, gains the chance to become a member of the human race, and it gains the chance to experience human life and journey through the human world; it also gains the chance to experience the Creator's sovereignty, to come to know the wonders of the Creator's creation, and more than that, gains the chance to come to know and surrender to the authority of the Creator. Yet most people do not truly seize this rare and fleeting opportunity. People exhaust a lifetime of energy fighting against fate, and spend their whole lives bustling about trying to provide for their families and rushing back and forth for the sake of prestige and profit.

II

The very things that people hold as treasures are family love, money, and fame and gain, they view these as the most valuable things in life. All people complain about being ill-fated, yet still they push to the back of their minds the issues that people should most understand and explore, such as why man is alive, how man should live, and what the value and meaning of human life are. They spend their entire lives, however long they may last, merely rushing about seeking fame and gain, until their youth is gone and they have become gray and wrinkled, until they realize that fame and gain cannot stop them from getting old, that money cannot fill the emptiness of their hearts, and until they understand that no one can escape the laws of birth, aging, sickness, and death, and that no one can evade the arrangements of fate.

III

When people are soon to bid farewell to the world, they arrive at the gradual realization that everything in the world is drifting away, that they no longer have the strength to hold onto anything that was originally theirs; at this time, they truly feel that they are just like a newly born, wailing infant after all, still possessed of absolutely nothing. At this point, they're compelled to begin to ponder what they have done in their life, what the value of being alive is, what the meaning of being alive is, and why people came into the world. And it is precisely at this point that they increasingly want to know whether there really is a next life, whether Heaven really exists, whether there really is retribution….

IV

Only when someone has actually come to this point do they realize that when a person enters this world, they must first understand where human beings come from, why people are alive, and who holds sovereignty over human fate, and who provides for and has sovereignty over human existence—this understanding is the capital by which a person lives, and it is the essential basis for a person's survival. Though the various survival skills that people spend their lives mastering enable them to possess an abundance of material comforts, those skills never bring true consolation and steadiness to their hearts. Instead, they make people constantly lose their direction, have difficulty controlling themselves, and miss opportunities time and again to learn the meaning of life, and they give rise to hidden troubles in people about how to face death correctly—people's lives are ruined in this way.

from The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. God Himself, the Unique III