CREATED FOR A PURPOSE
God made us, each one of us, on purpose, to live for him, to know him, and make him known. It’s easy sometimes for us to get caught up in the ins-and-outs of life and forget that we have a purpose and that God intends to do great things in us and through us.
The Bible from beginning to end communicates this vision of life: God created us to know him, to live for him, and to be a holy people in a good place serving a perfect God. We have separated ourselves from him and his purposes through our sin, bringing death upon ourselves and this world around us. In order to bring us back to himself and rescue us from sin and death, to make it possible for us to be his holy people living in a good place serving him, God the Father sends God the Son, Jesus Christ, to live a perfect life in our place, to die the death we deserve as a just penalty for our sin, and to rise from the dead to bring us life. When we believe that Jesus did this for us, turn from all other ways of living, and follow him as our Savior and King, our relationship with God is restored and we are rescued from sin and death. We become citizens of God’s kingdom, meant to live with him and for him in all things, anticipating the time when Jesus returns and his plan is fulfilled. We are then brought into the church to help one another live this kind of life and to lead others to do so as well.
Living this out, remembering the fullness of the gospel and how it impacts our lives begins with remembering that we are created beings, made by our Creator, God, in a world that he also created. This is why the Bible begins this way, reminding us that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). When John begins to point us to the reality of who Jesus is in his Gospel, he begins by reflecting on this truth, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:1-3).
For the next several weeks, we are going to spend some time together in the opening chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1–3, to consider what it means that God is the Creator, and that he made us in his image to live for him in a world he created. God’s creative purposes are just as significant and in force today as they were the moment he brought this universe into existence, and they will be fully realized in the kingdom of God and on into eternity. We take part in those purposes, in what God is doing, as we follow Jesus in this world and anticipate the world to come. That is what we were made for, and that is what we are saved to do.
