Jesus is the Answer to the Question – Why Do We Exist?
A Question – Why Do We Exist?
“We have come to know and trust the love that God has for us. God is love; and those who remain in this love remain united with God, and God remains united with them. (1 John 4:16).
Why did God create mankind? He didn’t need to, because He is utterly and eternally complete within the intimate communion of the Trinity. So He doesn’t really need us as if we could complete Him in any way. One simple way to look at this basic question is this… God created humanity because God is love, He wanted to spread around His love. He is so full of love that He wanted to create people in His image with whom He could enjoy friendship. God created us to have deep fellowship with Him, and He gets great joy out of that fellowship with each of us. He didn’t create us because it would complete Him in some way, He created us knowing that friendship with Him would complete us! The Trinity is so full of love that they couldn’t resist sharing their love with beings made in His image.
So What? Why does this matter to us? What difference does this make in our daily lives? Here’s why it matters… If we are incomplete without God, if we have a hole in our soul that can only be filled with a relationship with Him, then we now have a giant clue as to the meaning of our existence. When we have a hunger and a thirst for meaning, then we will be unsatisfied until we eat of the Bread from Heaven and drink the Living water. When we do so, we can live into the idea that our life has purpose, which is a friendship with God. With our being re-bonded with God, life is no longer pointless. If we are intended by our Creator to renew our relationship with Him, and that was why we even exist in the first place, then we have discovered our life calling and our most valuable identity. We have found what will give us a meaningful life, a life with deep purpose and fulfillment. If we can only truly be fulfilled in God, then our lives need to be filled full of Him.
The Mississippi Mass Choir Feat. Paul Porter – Only One Way Home [Official Video]
A Friendly Stroll in the Garden of Eden. Creator God tipped His hand right from the start after Adam and Eve were created. He could have simply gone rogue and kept a distance from His creation. He could have been a basically impersonal caretaker of the universe. But He didn’t. God made the universe, and then He wanted to get personal. God personally keeps track of everything in the world, including us, with whom He desires a friendship, a meaningful personal relationship. In Genesis 3:8, we find an amazing passage, “Adam and Eve heard the sounds of God’s voice as He was strolling through the Garden in the cool of the day with its fresh breeze. But the man and woman hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the Garden.” It is truly astounding that Creator God simply wanted to enjoy Himself with His friends. He wanted to have intimate fellowship with them and develop a deep friendship. That’s what He has always desired from the very beginning.
Hiding in Shame. But the parents of all mankind knew they had disobeyed God by listening to Satan and doing his bidding. So they hid from God in guilt and shame. They knew they would be fully exposed in their sin before God, and they hid themselves from His presence. God then mysteriously called out, “Where are you?” Of course, God knew very well where they were hiding, and He wanted to give them a chance to voluntarily come to Him and confess what they had done. They were well aware of what they had done… They broke God’s trust, they were unfaithful to the One who made them. The result of their disobedience was a stain in their relationship with God, it was a loss of the intimacy they once enjoyed with their Lord. No longer will they enjoy a friendship with God as a loving parent. And God expelled them from paradise. But God didn’t give up on them, He actually exiled Himself and followed them out of the Garden in order to remain a presence in their lives. God loved them too much to desert them.
Our Destiny in God. The Lord mapped out His intended destiny for all of humanity. Creator God wants us to know Him as intimately as He knows us. Knowledge is a relationship word in the Scripture. The Bible says that one can only know something through personal involvement, through an intimate experience with whatever or whoever is known. Knowing something involves a heartfelt focus, an intense investment. To know something is to care for it, to give oneself over to it. Knowledge is a personal union with whatever is known. To know is to have a committed understanding of something or someone. One doesn’t know something unless it has changed the knower. Knowledge of Scripture is like this, or knowledge of someone. When Jesus talked about knowing Him and thus knowing the Father, it is this very experience He’s talking about. A knowledge of Him that is personal, intimate, committed. Knowing Him in a way that changes us. Knowledge that involves giving ourselves over to Him in a deeply personal way. Head knowledge is not sufficient, because it leaves the knowledge in the abstract. Limiting our knowledge to religious principles, doctrinal statements or theological propositions doesn’t go deep enough. Too many of us stop at talking about God, instead of talking to God. Intellectual knowledge is a dead end if disconnected from a personal relationship with God. Knowing God requires a personal investment, an intimate involvement. Otherwise it’s all just an idea. And God can tell the difference. The worst words any of us could possibly ever hear at the End is, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” (Matt. 7:33).
“I AM the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6).
Repairing the Broken Friendship with God. There is only one way to mend our fractured relationship with our Creator God. There is only one bridge that would unite us again with the Lord. Ever since the Garden, we human beings have tried just about everything to find our way back to God. But God’s Son is the only way to renew our intimate connection to God.
The Way. The Person of Jesus provides the only way to reach the Father. He is the only road to God. He is the pathway to Yahweh. Access to the Father is only through Him. As spelled out in the Gospels, Jesus is the only way we can reach Him and renew our relationship with Him. Christ is also the way in the sense that there is a Jesus way to do things, a Jesus way to live life. His way is energized by and rooted in love. Love is the Jesus way. He began His Farewell Discourse with this declaration, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35). Love is the distinctive way of life for Jesus-followers. Love is the defining lifestyle, now, and as it was in the early Christian community. In fact, members of the Christian Faith were even called people of The Way before they were called Christians (Acts 9:2). Early believers adopted the Jesus way, and were known by their love for each other. So Jesus is the way to reconnect with the Father, to repair our friendship with Him, and to find our purpose and meaning in our lives. And on the way to the Father through Jesus, God intends for us to follow Jesus as the way of life that will reflect our mended relationship with Him.
No Longer Empty and Meaningless. Solomon was right when he laments about life being pointless and futile without a relationship with God. “Vanity of vanities,” he said in Ecclesiastes 1:2. Life without the Lord has no meaning to it, no purpose, and is more like a fleeting breath or short-lived vapor. With God in our lives, no longer do we need to ask more of life than what life can offer, or to try to gain meaning in a world that can only take us so far. If not for our reunion with God, Solomon was right. But when in union with God through Christ, our meaning and purpose lead us to a life filled with joy and peace and satisfaction. With Jesus, we have found our reason for existence.