What is God's purpose for creating us? Why are we here? Does he have some use for all who are believers after we die?

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Question: What is God's purpose for creating us? Over all the centuries there have lived many billions of people. Why are we here? Does he have some use for all who are believers after we die?

PP

ATP: PP, the question of why God created us is one of the great mysteries of history.

Some suggest that God was lonely and wanted fellowship. But God is perfect, not lacking in anything. There never was nor ever is anything deficient in him that needs filling by something outside of him. No, God was not lonely.

Others suggest that God created us to glorify him. There is a sense in which that is true, but not the sense which is sometimes meant by the person giving the answer. God doesn’t have an ego problem, such that he created us so he could be worshipped by some one. The Bible is very clear that Jesus who is the same yesterday, today and forever is humble.

So it was not to fill some prideful need that God created us.

Why then?

To be honest we don’t fully know. Surely it would have been easier for him not to. We have made such a mess of things, and continue to do so every day. To think as a human being would, it would make sense if he were to simply destroy us and get back to what we suppose must have been a quiet universe before we came around.

A question perhaps equally as mysterious as "Why did he create us?" is "Why does he keep us around?" To that question we do have an answer that may tell us something about the answer to the original question of why we were created.

God is love. A cliché. A phrase that can be bent to mean things that the Bible doesn’t mean. A phrase that people say in a derogatory way when they mock religion. But a true phrase. The nature of God’s very being is love.

That’s amazing really, and though still inadequate as fully the reason for God creating us, may be part of the equation.

Why do couples not yet parents, choose to have children that in many ways are going to cause them grief, disobey, be expensive to raise and who disrupt their lifestyle? Is it love? Or the anticipation of love and wanting to pour out love on another person? Yes, I think it is.

Is the reason God created us a similar one? It would seem so, but it is more complicated than that, and not fully knowable.

While in this life we will never fully unravel the mystery of why God created us, what we can be sure of is that he did create us, and he loves us with a love that we cannot even imagine.

In John 3:16 the Bible says,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

There is no love in all the world like the love of God for us. Apart from the fact that God’s very nature is love, it would be another mystery. Thank the Lord that he has told us of his love, and continues to do so repeatedly. One day in heaven I believe he will tell us why he went to the trouble of creating us in the first place. Until then we’ll just have to wonder.

The second question you asked, "Why are we here?" is one that is answerable, if we take its meaning in a slightly different direction than the "why did God create us" version. I’ll answer that in the next blog entry, hopefully tomorrow.