Since the one God is three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—God did not need to create us. Still, God had a purpose when he created you and me and took good pleasure in his creation (Gen. 1:31). Here are four purposes for which God created you:
1. God created you to know him.
I could marshal an army of passages to make this point, but I will offer only one, my favorite, which is John 17:3. This passage is not immediately obvious. In John 17:3, Jesus prays to God the Father revealing his mission to restore people to their proper relationship to God. Jesus tells us that he came to reconcile a broken relationship. He came to bring eternal life to us who were under a sentence of death. Jesus said, “This is eternal life that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
2. God created you to love him.
When God saved his people Israel out of Egyptian slavery, he gave them a law. At the end of that law, God reveals that the main point of the law is love. God desires for you and me to love him: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart” (Deut. 6:5–6).
3. God created you to glorify him.
Before the throne of God in heaven, you and I will join the hosts of heaven and do what God created us to do: worship. Scripture reveals to us the kind of worship you and I will offer to God:
Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created. (Rev. 4:11)
4. God created you to enjoy him.
God is not opposed to our joy, happiness, pleasure, or desire. God wants these things for us more than we will ever know. Our problem is that we often desire less than we should. We are satisfied with petty, insignificant, fleeting joy when God offers eternal joy. King David, the psalmist, expresses this well when he says,
The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
I bless the LORD who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
I have set the LORD always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. (Ps. 16:5–11)
God offers a life of meaning and purpose to you. Christ lived, died, rose from the grave, and ascended to the right hand of the Father for the sins of the world to reconcile a broken relationship, to inaugurate his kingdom of peace, and to establish a good rule in the beginning of a new creation. When you accept Christ as savior, you receive all that God offers: eternal life.
