Why God Created Us

Why do we exist? I do not think there is a more basic question than that. When I say basic, I do not mean the least important; I mean the core. We live, and we ask what the point of our existence is. That question has run through the centuries, and many philosophers have put their heads together over it. Some of them have come up with no answer at all, except a bleak one: we exist for nothing, and our existence is meaningless. Atheistic existentialism puts it most starkly. The human being, it says, is thrown into existence, into a hostile universe, to suffer and die. Today we hardly ask the question. The world is moving so fast that we are caught up in the moment, and we have no time to sit and think about our lives.

The Bible answers the question right at the beginning, and the answer is beautiful. Moses wrote Genesis for the people he was bringing out of Egypt. They came from a polytheistic society, and they had to be taught a few core ideas that were very different from anything their old religions had taught them. There is only one God. He created everything, and He created it beautifully. And He created human beings not for His own sake, but so that they could have a wonderful life in the world He had made (Genesis 1:31). That is the opposite of the existentialist’s picture. We were not thrown into a hostile universe. We were placed in a world prepared for us, so that we could live our lives to the fullest: joyful, happy, living in harmony, with everything we need.

How Other Creation Narratives Tell It

Many religions have no creation narrative at all. They may say that God created, but there is no text that says how, or why. Where a religion does have a creation narrative, the same idea runs through it. A god, or several gods, created human beings for their own purposes. Look at Greek and Roman mythology. The gods want something done, so human beings are created to do it. Human beings become pawns, useful to the gods and nothing more. Sometimes the motive is status: a god wants to show the other gods how big he is, so he creates a group of people to follow him. Sometimes it is power. Sometimes there is work to be done that the gods do not want to soil their hands with, so they create people to do it for them, almost as one would keep slaves. One way or another, every one of these narratives has a selfish motive. Human beings are created to serve, and the gods are the beneficiaries.

That should not surprise us. Gods made by human beings are modelled on human beings, and human attributes are given to them. Think of what we ourselves create. Anything we make has a utilitarian value: it is going to be of some use to us. Someone invents a mobile phone so that people can use it. Even art, which we value for its beauty rather than its usefulness, serves its maker in some way. A poet writes a poem, and in it he expresses an emotion and finds a vent for it. A viewer looks at a painting and experiences something cathartic. In almost every case, the one who creates is the beneficiary of what is created. So when people imagine gods, they imagine gods who create for the same reason.

The Bible reverses the whole idea. God did not create human beings for Himself. He created everything else for human beings. Right at the outset, the value of human life shoots up. God gave human beings a position almost right next to Himself. He loved them so much that He created everything before He created them, so that when they came into the picture they would already have a beautiful world to enjoy (Genesis 1:1–2:3). He created them as His masterpiece, in His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26–27).

What is more, God never states a reason for creating them. He never says, “I find I need some human beings. Let Me create some.” The narrative begins with God already there, already sovereign, His Spirit hovering over the waters (Genesis 1:2). Then He creates the world, creates human beings, puts them in the garden and, in effect, says, “Enjoy.” Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it, not in the sense of exploiting or destroying it, but of using it, so that you can have a wonderful life (Genesis 1:28). Eat from any tree in the garden but one (Genesis 2:16–17). Enjoy your relationship with each other (Genesis 2:18–24). Nowhere does God say, “I created you so that you could do something for Me.” What He does tells us why He did it. He wanted them to enjoy His creation; He did not want to get something out of them. There was no ulterior motive.

God Lacked Nothing

Some imagine that God created human beings because He was bored and needed someone to play with, or because He felt alone. Neither is true. God was complete, and He is complete. He was never lonely in the first place. The Bible speaks of God as triune. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are perfectly united and in sync with one another, and Jesus Himself speaks of that union (John 10:38; 17:21). Theologians call this mutual indwelling perichoresis. Within that union there is perfect peace and perfect joy. God needs nothing outside Himself to be happy.

Whenever we say that someone needs something, we mean that he is incomplete: there is a vacuum, a missing piece. Was God incomplete? Was there a vacuum in His life, a missing piece? Definitely not. Nor does He need validation. As human beings we do. We want someone to tell us we are good, and then we feel good about ourselves; today people even ask the world to “like and subscribe”. We need validation because we are petty beings, with our insecurities and inferiority complexes. God is not insecure and has no inferiority complex. He knows who He is. He is good by nature, not merely in His actions, and He does not have to prove His goodness to anyone.

So why did He create us? Because His joy is so complete that He wanted others to share it. He created human beings so that they could enjoy the same joy and peace that He enjoys within Himself, be united with Him and enjoy that privilege. He placed human beings in the world He had created, so that they could enjoy that world and a relationship with Him. The motive was that we might have a fuller life, a complete life with Him and with His creation. If that does not blow your mind, nothing will. It is not how we usually think about creation, because human creations do not work that way.

The Songs We Sing

Unfortunately, the opposite idea has seeped into Christianity. Ask many Christians, “Why did God create human beings?”, and they will almost always answer, “He created us for His own purposes”, or “so that we could praise Him and worship Him”. Our songs say the same: “You created us for Your purposes”, “You created us so that we could worship You”. That is the wrong answer. It is an unbiblical answer, and I would go further: it is an anti-God answer. It makes God a selfish being who created everybody else so that He could somehow feel better about Himself. It is a pagan understanding of God. We need to change our language, and we need to change our songs.

Think about what such an answer implies. When people tell me how good or great I am, it boosts my ego, and I enjoy it. But that only shows that I am a vain being: I want my validation to come from someone else. Imagine a God who created billions of people so that they would bow down before Him all the time. He looks at them and says, “How great it is!” That would be a vain God: superficial, needing validation all the time. And imagine a God who said, “I made you so that you could call on My name. You have not called on My name, and I feel very bad about it.” That God would be selfish.

People find verses to support the idea. God says to Israel that He formed them so that they would proclaim His praise (Isaiah 43:21). But that is said to Israel, the nation He formed. Israel was to take God to the other nations, so that they too could become theocratic nations. That is how Israel was to proclaim His praise. It is not a statement of why God created human beings.

Then people jump to the book of Revelation, with its picture of everyone bowing before the throne, night and day, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Revelation 4:8–11). So did God create you to bow down before Him all the time? That picture is metaphorical. Taking verses from here and there does not give us the biblical answer; we have to look at the whole of the Bible. Jesus never said, “In eternity you will bow down before Me, get up, and bow down again.” He said, “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). You are united with Me. If that is the case, who is bowing down to whom?

Who Is Serving Whom?

Moses tells Israel, “Fear the LORD your God, serve him only” (Deuteronomy 6:13). How can anyone serve God? To serve someone is to supply something he needs, and there is nothing in God that is incomplete. So when the Bible speaks of serving God, it does not mean what we usually mean by the word. On the contrary, God serves human beings. He created everything, and He created human beings so that they could enjoy this world and a relationship with Him. So who is serving whom? Who is looking after whom? Who is given more weight in this relationship? That is the beauty of the way the Bible speaks about God.

The “service” God asks for is obedience to His commandments, and that “service” is not for Him. It is for us. None of His commandments, analysed logically, benefits God. All of them benefit humanity, and His creation at large. When we obey them, we become the beneficiaries. A benefactor is someone who does good; a beneficiary is the one who receives it. In our relationship with God we are always the beneficiaries, and He never is. Nothing we do completes Him or adds to His wholeness. Yet He counts the good we do to ourselves, by obeying Him, as “service” done to Him. When He sees us live a righteous life, He is happy. That shows the magnanimous heart of God. Worship, rightly understood, is obedience to God,† and so worship is for us, not for Him.

Obedience is the only worship. The Hebrew words translated “worship” in our Bibles, shachah and avad, mean to bow down and to serve, but what they imply is obedience. When Abraham told his servants, “We will worship and then we will come back to you” (Genesis 22:5), his worship was his obedience to God in offering his son. When God told Pharaoh, “Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness” (Exodus 7:16), Israel’s worship at Sinai was to receive the commandments and be taught to obey them (Exodus 19:3–8; 20:1–17).

Suppose I refuse to call Him God. How does that hurt Him? Suppose a whole generation refuses to call Him God. Does that hurt Him? Here we cannot compare God with a human parent. If you are a parent and your child disowns you, it hurts you, and there is nothing you can do: your children are your children, and you cannot replace them. God is not in that position. He could create another people with a word. So when Moses says, “Be careful that you do not forget the LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:12), it is not an egoistic statement, and it does not come from insecurity. It comes from God’s love for people. Those who forget Him are the ones who suffer.

Why, then, is God sad when we disobey? Not because He is personally affected. He is sad because we are affected. We have lost out on the beautiful relationship that could have been, and on the beautiful life that could have been. That is the pain of God. Think about love. When someone you love goes through pain and you are in tears, though you can do nothing about it, that shows you truly love that person. God’s sadness is based on our sadness. God’s joy is based on our joy. So let us never say, “He created me so that I could be of service to Him.” That does God an injustice.

Why Bring a Child into the World?

The closest parallel in human life is parenthood, and it shows how often our reasons are selfish. Why do people have children? Some feel unfulfilled and think a child will make them feel complete. Some want someone to carry on their name after they are gone: “He was my father; she was my mother.” Some feel empty inside and want someone to fill the vacuum. Some think of their old age: who will take care of me when I am old? Some are afraid of what society will think: that something is wrong with them, as a man or as a woman, so they must prove they can bring a child into the world. All of these are selfish reasons. There is even a social philosophy, impressed on the minds of people, that children “complete” a marriage. What an unbiblical, foolish philosophy. The Bible says nothing of the kind.

A man and a woman do need each other. That is the divine design, and that is why the Bible speaks of their oneness and companionship (Genesis 2:18, 24). But the idea that a couple is incomplete until they have children is not biblical at all. Some Christians even claim that God gives people children to rid them of their selfishness, so that they spend their money on their children’s education instead of on a holiday in Europe. I do not think so. With children or without them, we remain selfish.

The biblical reason for bringing a child into the world would be this. Marriage is supposed to be a happy thing. A husband and wife are so happy with each other, companions who complement each other, with so much joy and understanding between them, that they say, “We have so much. Let us share it with someone else.” They bring a child into the world not so that the child will make them happy, but so that a new life will benefit from the joy they already have. That is the ideal. Whether it happens in reality is another matter; the ideal and the real are two different things, and we would want the ideal to become the real. But that should be the only reason. Any other reason is selfish.

This is the parallel with God. God did not create us because He needs us, or because we somehow complete Him, or because He needs someone to call on His name so that He will not feel empty. He created us because His joy is complete, and He wanted us to be joyful and in relationship with Him. He is not the beneficiary. We are.

You Cannot Give God Anything

People say, “I did this for God”, “I gave this to God”. You cannot do anything for God. Anyone who says he does is sorely mistaken; he is deceiving himself. God did not create you so that you could do something for Him. He created you so that you could enjoy what He has already created. People will tell you that a vow is a promise to God, but a promise benefits the one to whom it is made. How could any promise of mine ever benefit God?

I usually give three reasons why you cannot give God anything.

First, God created everything, so everything already belongs to Him: “Has not my hand made all these things?” (Isaiah 66:2; Genesis 1:1). Anything you give Him is something He created. You cannot give God what already belongs to Him.

Second, God is spirit (John 4:24). Everything you could ever think of giving Him, even from within His creation, is physical, and He has no use for anything physical.

Third, God is self-sufficient. He is already complete. As Jesus said, the Father “has life in himself” (John 5:26). If we could give Him something, He would not be complete, and that is theologically wrong. It is blasphemy.

Then what of the offerings in the Law? When the Israelites brought their offerings to the place God would choose, they ate them with their families, and with the Levites and priests, who had no land of their own (Deuteronomy 12:5–7, 12). What they did was a commandment of God. It was symbolically beneficial to the one who offered, and practically beneficial to those who taught and led the people. It was never a gift to God, who needed nothing.

The Meaning of Life

So what is the meaning of life, the question over which so many philosophers have racked their brains? It is this: we live happily in the world God created.† That is the meaning of life, and that is the purpose of life. For that to happen, we must have a relationship with Him, and that relationship brings a responsibility. Without Him it does not work. That is why atheism does not work, why humanism does not work, and why philanthropy does not work: none of them will bring joy and peace to the entire world.

Because God created us to be happy, joy is the purpose of human life, and we cannot deny it. Everything put into the world has been given for our enjoyment: food, air and water, and the relationships God has given. Some things we turn to destruction, using them for a purpose other than the one for which they were created. But the general idea stands. The world God created was not made just to please Him. It was made for human beings to live in and enjoy, and to experience everything His creation has to offer.

Yet a great deal of Christianity has taught the opposite: that we should not enjoy anything in life, that we should hate the world and renounce its pleasures. That is not biblical at all. Some Pentecostal churches in India even treat anything joyful as a sin. Their members wear white robes, cut their hair short and wear no jewellery, as though that is how God wants them to be. The idea has deep roots. Asceticism was part of Roman Catholicism, where people were taught to forgo even legitimate pleasures. In Hinduism, as it is popularly called, the ideal is the life of the ascetic, the sannyasi, who forsakes every joy and goes into the forest. Buddhism holds up the monk who forsakes everything, because Gautama Buddha taught that we must uproot desire, since desire is the cause of suffering. That sounds profound, but it is not: if there is nothing to live for, there is no point in living.

The same idea was there among the Jews of Jesus’ day, where sadness was associated with “spirituality”. The Pharisees fasted with long faces to show that they were sad (Matthew 6:16). When John’s disciples asked why Jesus’ disciples did not fast, Jesus equated fasting with mourning (Matthew 9:15): “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?” (Mark 2:18–19). Is being sad somehow being closer to God? No. They were to be joyful, because they were with Him.

What is the point of living if we are not living? Life is for living. That is not hedonism. Hedonism makes enjoyment an end in itself, whatever it costs others. Think of the glutton who eats and eats without a thought for anyone else, or the man who drinks and drinks and cares only about himself. He has become so selfish-minded that he no longer cares how his selfishness affects other people. That is sin.

When God speaks of joy, He means that everyone has their legitimate joys in life. Is it wrong for me to want to be joyful and happy? No. That is how God created us. Sin is something else: anything selfish that harms, or has the potential to harm, human beings in particular and God’s creation in general.† If I destroy the joy of another person so that I can be joyful, that is sin. That is where we draw the line. We should enjoy our lives, within the principles God has given. Step outside them, and we are treading on someone else’s toes to enjoy ourselves.

Purpose Is Essential for Joy

Joy does not mean idleness. Suppose everything were given to us and we did nothing at all. There would be no joy in life. Only purpose gives us joy. No purpose, no joy. Adam was given a purpose: the world was created for human beings, and they were to take care of it (Genesis 2:15). We have a responsibility towards each other and a relationship with God. That is the theocratic triangle:* God; the people who obey Him; and the creation that benefits from their obedience. That is what gives us joy and peace in life. When we are responsible, we are intent on doing what is good and just according to God’s commandments, and joy and peace follow. Without a relationship with God we lose our purpose, and if there is no purpose, there is no joy.

This is why the commandments matter so much. God’s joy cannot become ours except through a relationship with Him, and a relationship with Him means obeying His commandments, which are always about taking care of His creation, human beings included. His commandments are not restrictive. They give freedom to everyone. As Creator, He knows how His creation is meant to work. He is the designer, and no creation surpasses its creator in understanding. He knows what will make the world a beautiful place for us, and none of His commandments benefits Him.

Israel was not created as a subservient nation, the manpower for God’s projects. It was supposed to be an obedient nation, created so that it could flourish and have happiness within itself by following God’s commandments. That would give it purpose, joy and peace: not mere existence, not mere survival, but living, and living happily. Nor was the Kingdom of God ever an ego trip, as though God wanted the whole world to call Him King. It was so that the whole world would flourish and prosper. And prospering, as God uses the word, does not mean some people having everything and others having nothing. It means everyone having everything they need, so that everyone can be happy and joyful.

The first human beings had all this and lost it through their disobedience. Israel was given a fresh start, a parallel to the creation narrative: like the first human beings, they were given a beautiful land where everything was already there. With them God was beginning again, so that the world could come back to the Edenic ideal.*

Moses describes what it would look like. The people would bring their offerings to the place God would choose. There they would eat and rejoice in the presence of the Lord: they, their sons and daughters, their male and female servants, and the Levites who had no land of their own (Deuteronomy 12:7, 12). That presence was symbolic, because God is everywhere. The tabernacle was not where He dwelt, but it represented His being with them. Everyone would be enjoying together, and everyone would be happy. Isn’t that why God created human beings? Yes (Genesis 1–2). It had been lost, and now it was within their reach again, if only they followed His commandments.

That is where any conversation about God should begin. If you want to talk to someone about God and the purpose of human life, start here. What we do is not for Him. It is for His creation, and for ourselves in relationship with Him, and He is happy not because it benefits Him, but because it benefits us. What a beautiful truth about God.