What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (3 page)

The bizarre part about His searching is that He formed the earth and the inhabitants therein, and He knows them intimately. From the edges of Creation to the core of man’s thoughts, God is well acquainted with the work of His hands, yet He searches. When He designed the earth in all of its beauty and frailty, what was He thinking? When He created Adam in the garden, what was He wanting? He could have written this script in any way that He desired, and that’s what He did. We are not flailing through history in randomness or monotonously spinning in space. We are on track with His desire, but what is it?

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The fact that God is eager to find something is shocking, because He is sovereign, yet in His sovereignty He designed humans with a free will. It is here that we get the first glimpse of what it is He is after.

When we are first introduced to God and His story, we see Him creating the heavens and the earth. We see Him creating man and woman in a garden. He then entrusts the earth to them, giving them dominion and authority over it (Gen. 1:26). Next we see the Lord walking in that garden with the man He created in unashamed, unhindered exchanges of thought, emotion, dialogue, and partnership.

Right from the beginning God has made His intentions known. The picture is perfect: God is walking in the garden, ruling in partnership with man. And mankind, with dominion over the earth, inhabits it in perfect harmony and beauty. There is a vibrant relationship between the Lord and the humans He entrusted the earth to. The Lord is not distant in this scene. He is near. He is right there with them in partnership and relationship. Then, there is this odd, perplexing command from God. Adam and Eve have dominion of the entire earth, but there is one tree that they cannot touch.

Immediately we see the free will at work, and instantly we recognize that God did not want only a seemingly perfect scenario; He wanted to be deliberately and personally chosen. And to be chosen, there must be a genuine free will. In this way we are created in His image. He has given us the dignity of turning from Him or turning toward Him. The one thing that He doesn’t have automatically is our
volunteer
love. This is the one thing that we have to give Him, and it is the one thing that He wants. All of life comes down to the free will of man. The purpose of life is to choose to give the originator of our lives His desire.

He created mankind in His own image to have deep fellowship with Him, yet in that same beautiful garden where He walked with them, He put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in the center of that man, He put a free will. Adam, made in the image of God, had the power to choose.

The fact that we are made in God’s image with the ability to choose and the capacity to have deep affections sets humans apart from all other species of life. We have severely underestimated the power of our will and the dignity that has been given to us to choose our destiny. This is the dignity and the peril of being human, and I believe it is the primary thing that God wanted in creating us.

In the garden we also see the original intention and plan of the Lord to not only have angels worship Him telling Him how beautiful He is, but He also wanted to “do something” with people. He not only wanted them to worship like the angels, but also He wanted love and relationship. He wanted to be with them, to be in partnership with them. He displayed the intention of His plan by literally entrusting the earth to them, giving dominion of it over to them. His desire for relationship and partnership was so strong that He set it up so that man could do whatever he willed with that earth, righteous or unrighteous.

This freedom to choose good or evil had to be built into the plan in order for it to be rooted in love. A love that cannot be shunned is not love at all. Without the chance and the risk of giving man a free will, there could be no true love. He already had the angels worshipping Him, but there is no indication that the angels loved Him. They do not call Him Father, and they do not call Jesus Bridegroom. (See Revelation 22:17.) They cry holy and sing of His beauty, worshipping Him both day and night, and they serve Him, but they are not in the same kind of relationship that we see the Lord had with Adam in the early days of Creation.

Very early on in the story of God we see His love was shunned as mankind operated in his free will and chose to disobey the one command he had been given, by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:1–7). Instantly a shadow was cast. The perfect scenario was gone as death entered the world and Adam and Eve were left in a wilderness.

God didn’t kick Adam and Eve out of Eden just because He “got His feelings hurt” by their disobedience. Rather He had to keep them from the tree of life until the redemptive purposes had been fulfilled in Jesus (Gen. 3:24; Rev. 22:1–5). He knew from the beginning that the human story would be a process, and He was not shocked when they fell. Redemption was His plan before the foundation of the world, because He was Redeemer from eternity past. He knew that the fall of man would create the context where we would be refashioned in love. And this love would create both humility and gratitude in us that would keep us secure in giving Him our voluntary love for all eternity.

One of the primary ways of sustaining eternal, voluntary love would be through the remembrance of how much we have been forgiven. Jesus taught, “It is the one who has been forgiven much that loves much.” (See Luke 7:47. God would not violate our free will, but He ordained that we operate in it both in this age and in the age to come where we will never die. In order to secure an eternal companion for His Son, one who would love Him freely, and in order for her to be crowned with such beauty and power that she will have in the age to come, it had to be on the foundation of humility or else love would cease.

The entirety of human history is working toward God’s original intention, and He is not thrown off by the process. The process of fallen humanity would further reveal the knowledge of His character and personality. He would be even better known through the story of humanity that fell away from Him, only to be purchased back by Him. We would never know His vast mercy if we did not know our vast sinfulness. We would not know Him as gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, rich in love, and delighting in mercy (Exod. 34:6) if we did not see the great divide between Him and us that was caused by our sin. Without the forgiveness of sin in the story, we would not have gratitude, and much of what we know about God would be left unknown. It is all working to reveal God, and we are wrapped up in His story. The human story tells God’s story, and the purpose of humanity, as a whole, is to reveal the knowledge of God. It is here that we find meaning and purpose for our lives. His story is stunning, and we must get caught up in it if we are ever going to understand humanity and our own individual lives.

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As the story of God continued, the Lord made His will known, drawing men to His creative purpose and their original design. Over and over He beckoned them to become what they were created to be, and when they refused and chose sin, it caused “distortion” and “unrighteous.” This is where the tension of life comes in as we see the struggle between God and man. When men refuse to come into agreement with the Creator, it is a “distortion” and it is not right. He cannot let it go on and on with men refusing Him, because the earth itself cannot bear this refusal and mankind cannot survive under this refusal.

His plan would have been be lost if He didn’t address the rebellion of man. The Creator is not going to miss the mark and come up short of what He originally wanted. Love is a two-sided coin, and He is jealous and exclusive—not because He is insecure, but because, by design, we are fashioned for Him. When we turn from Him to humanism, secularism, or any other religion, we become distorted and it leads to our destruction. He loves us too much to let that happen, so He often will create a scenario that makes us run back to Him. Even His chastisements are about His primary motivation, which is to have relationship with humans, in partnership and love (Heb. 12:6).

Throughout the centuries God has not been silent as men have accused. He has not been disinterested or even hard to figure out. He has been shouting, and even creation itself has been telling us who He is, what He is like, and what He desires. Yet in the midst of the Creator’s vehement pleas and loud beckoning, so few will ever respond and look back at Him.

This is the mystery, not of how hidden God is, but of how quickly we tune Him out. We are like children with our fingers in our ears screaming loudly with our eyes tightly shut, “I can’t see You! I can’t hear You! Where are You?” All the while He is right in front of us, if we will just open our eyes and ears and respond.

Of the billions of people on earth throughout history the majority have refused Jesus. They have denied heaven’s pleas and have shut their ears to their own heart’s cry for a purpose that is eternal. They have chosen to live in the delusion of today, or they have turned to other gods in an attempt to appease their questions of death and life without being held responsible to the true God.

We see that this is the tension that rose to a boiling point throughout the Old Testament. By the time we get to the end of the Book of Malachi, we are left wondering what will happen to God’s plan. It seems to us, at this point in the story, that humans will never choose Him in a consistent way. It seems His beauty is not sufficient to draw them or His judgments not severe enough to convince them to return to Him and stay with Him. Yet again God is not thrown off. It’s all working.

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During the first four-thousand-plus years of human history God was telling His story, and little by little He was giving hints of His personality. He spoke in the poetry of nature, in the riddles of prophecy, and on the canvas of Israel, but all of it was culminating to a point in history where He Himself would step into the canvas and declare Himself openly. He spoke through the patriarchs, He spoke through the prophets, He spoke through the men of old, and then the great artist of life stepped onto the canvas and took on the form of man in order to speak plainly in the language men can understand. He Himself came to plead with us. (See Matthew 21:33–43.)

I heard David Pawson, one of the most well-known and respected Bible teachers in the United Kingdom, give a teaching once on Jesus being the Word of God. He said something that really struck a chord in my heart, as a seeker of purpose. He said:

When John wrote his Gospel after knowing Jesus for sixty years, he had a problem: What do you call Jesus before He was born? He thought up a brilliant answer, and in Greek he called Him
Logos
. Among other meanings, this means, “Word.” He called Him “the Word.” In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, face-to-face, and the Word was God. He is writing, “In the beginning was the Word.” Why did he choose that? Because in Ephesus there was a Greek scientist called Heraclitus who invented science, and he taught his students to observe and analyze and said, “Try and find the reason why nature behaves like it does. Study nature and animals and try and find the reason why it happens like it does.” He called the reason why
ho logos
, so all science is called an “-ology,” trying to find the reason why.

Science is dedicated to finding
ho logos
, and in choosing that word as the name of preexistent Jesus, he [John] is saying, “He is the supreme reason why.”

. . . Science becomes more specialized and knows more and more about less and less, but scientists don’t stop to ask, “What is the reason of the whole of nature operates like it does? Why is it all here?” John is saying, “Jesus is why it is all here. God made it all for Jesus, and He will inherit it all,” and we shall inherit it with Him. The meek inherit the earth. He is the reason why. I love that title . . . Jesus is the reason why everything happens as it does.

Logos—oh! How I love this title for Jesus! The purpose of Creation is Jesus! The beginning of life is Jesus; the purpose of life is Jesus; the meaning of life and the ending of life is Jesus. He is God, and it is His story we are wrapped up in. Creation itself was made for Him, and He will inherit all of it (Col. 1:16). Jesus is the reason we exist. Jesus is the purpose of our lives. He is the beginning, middle, and end.

Jesus is not a hippie, laid back and hanging out without a vision. He isn’t some kind of guru who walked around barefooted and passive. No, He is God. He is the one who appeared in the burning bush before Moses. He’s the one who shook Mount Sinai causing the children of Israel to be terrified and to beg Moses to talk to Him for them. He’s the same one who caused both the temple structure and the prophet Isaiah to shake before Him (Isa. 6; John 12:41). He’s the same one Ezekiel saw in that great vision he had of God as a whirlwind of raging fire. In the midst of that whirlwind, he saw the Man who is fully God yet fully man (Ezek. 1:26). He saw Jesus and trembled in awe. He could not believe His eyes. This is the same Man whom John the beloved fell in front of like a dead man when He appeared to him in His full glory (Rev. 1:17). This is the same God who hung the stars in space, who numbered the hairs of your head, and who is upholding you by the word of His mouth (Heb. 1:3). Let us not forget who we are talking about when we so flippantly say the name “Jesus.”

If you do not believe Jesus is God, you will spend your life searching for purpose and come up empty. I challenge you, even now, to ask Him to reveal Himself to you, then wait and see what He will do. Many men have tried to define life’s meaning outside of Jesus, and all their attempts have ended in futility and vanity.