2.
Why
Did God Make You?
Why
did He create us in the first place?
We know
that God wasn't in need of our companionship – He is perfect in
His Trinity-ness. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let Us make man in Our own image,
after our likeness” – Our image and likeness, mind you; not
“Mine”. Remember, He existed in His triune form for all eternity before deciding to create us, and the open-plan
playpen that we live in.
And, from Biblical
reports, He got along perfectly well without us. Acts 17:24-25 says, “The
God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth,
does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands,
as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and
breath and everything.”
So, if He
wasn’t lonely…if They weren’t in need
of companionship – why bother creating us?
†
Well,
we know that God created us for His glory, at least in part, by reading Isaiah
43:6b-7 à “Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth,
everyone who is called by My name, whom
I created for My glory, whom I formed and made.”
We
know that God created us out of love, because He is Love. Read Jeremiah
31:3 à “I have loved you with an everlasting
love” – everlasting meaning “lasting forever”, meaning that love
existed forever, even before YOU
existed! God created us because He loved us.
But
does that mean He had to create us?
What
other reason did He have? (What other
reasons did He need?)
Well,
why do we have children? (Let’s exclude those of you who have children
you refer to as ‘accidents’. You’re deluding yourselves – there are no
accidents in God’s world.) We often have kids because we’re “expected” to,
if you’ll pardon the pun, but that’s not very applicable to God. (Neither are ‘accidents’, but I digress.)
Most
parents, in my experience, look forward to the joy of spending time with their
newborns, playing with them, watching them grow, guiding them along the way
into mature, responsible adults who are able to take care of themselves and
carry on the family name.
Do we really think our Father is
that different?
When Adam
and his mate (as yet unnamed for another few verses) felt the need to hide from
God behind trees in Genesis 3:8, after discovering their nakedness, what
was He doing? “And they heard the sound
of the Lord God walking in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid
themselves…” We gloss over this point because we’re immediately more
concerned about the fate of our initial ancestors, but look at what God is
doing in this scene: “walking (through the garden) in the cool of the day”.
It doesn’t say Jesus is walking, for
Jesus is most regularly referred to as “the angel of the Lord” in the Old
Testament, and while He appears in Genesis 1, this isn’t Him. No, this is our Holy Father Himself, walking
through the garden because it pleased Him to spend time with His children.
(We’ll imagine the pain and betrayal He
must have felt next chapter.) Nowhere else do we find God the Father just
strolling around for pleasure – once humanity fell, He had to pull back
into a more distant posture. But at this moment in time, our Father was hoping to go strolling through the Garden of Eden
with his two children. That’s such a wonderful mental image – God and
Adam and Eve, just hanging out together, walking around the Garden of Eden with
no worries about tomorrow. Probably, that’s exactly what our Father was hoping
for, even while knowing what the serpent would do instead.
And for that
matter, we don’t know how much time
passed before the events of Genesis 3! It is quite possible that the three of them – the Father and His two
beautiful children – walked that very walk before. Maybe – hopefully! – they had enjoyed that stroll and others like it
dozens of times before the two human beings were tempted by the serpent!
I’d sure like to think so.
†
About the
other reasons to have children we’ll have more to discuss along the way, but
even in the very first interactions with us, God the Father demonstrates the same universal feelings about His
children that we have about ours: the desire to play with us, to spend time
with us, to simply enjoy the interactions with His children that come about.
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