Have you ever wondered why God made us? What your purpose is?
Depending on your background your answer to that question might be “To glorify God” or “To have a personal relationship with God” or “To love God and love people.” Those are all good answers, and they are each true in their own way.
However, I want to suggest another layer to God’s purpose for us that often gets overlooked. It’s a theme that runs through the whole bible front to back. It is both a major goal for God AND the way he works towards that goal. In one word the theme is “representation”.
Over the next few blog posts I want to show that God made us to represent him to the rest of creation. That was his hope for humanity in the beginning, and it remains his goal even when sinful people get in the way. Not only is his goal for people to be his representatives: it is also the means by which he achieves the goal! As you’ll see, when his first group of representatives fails, he chooses another group of representatives to represent him to the failed group of representatives in order to restore them. (You might get sick of the word “represent” by the end of this series - but that’s because the idea is so important and common through the bible!) And this pattern repeats and repeats. God wants to partner with people.
To see how prominent this theme is, let’s trace it through the major milestones of the bible…
Creation
When God created humanity and put them in the Garden of Eden, it wasn’t just to rest and relax for eternity! Of course there would have been some relaxing, but we were also given a role and a task. Humanity was made as the “image of God.” When you’re reading through Genesis 1 and 2 it’s easy to race past this point because it is brief, but we shouldn’t do that because it is immensely important.
This is God's hope for humanity: to be his “image.”
What does it mean to be made in God’s image? It essentially means we are his representatives! We are his ambassadors, his viceroys, his middle-management. We are to reflect God to his creation. He is the ultimate Creator and Sustainer of the world, but he delegated a significant degree of responsibility to us over the world. Since God is a ruler (the ruler), to represent him means to “rule” over the world (Genesis 1:26, 28).
Because Adam and Eve were placed in a garden, and a garden is all that existed at that point, in their specific case to “rule” on behalf of God looked like being gardeners! We are told they were put in the garden to “work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). This far in the story we have seen God creating, developing, and bringing order to creation, so for Adam and Eve reflecting God would have looked like creating, developing, and bringing order in their gardening.
Fall
Spoiler alert: they blew it! They failed by eating the infamous forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The way the serpent tempts them to eat the fruit is tragically ironic. He claims that God doesn’t want them to eat it because “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Did you catch the irony? He claims that God is frightened that they will become “like God” - but that is precisely what they are! They already are like God because he intentionally made them that way: he made them in his image. Adam and Eve went behind God’s back to grasp at something God had already designed them to be. And in that very act of grasping for the fruit God’s image in them became fractured and their ability to accurately reflect God was diminished.
The rest of the bible - and human history - is the story of God’s mission to restore his full image in them.
Over the next few blog posts we’ll walk through the major sections of the bible to see how God USES representatives to restore humanity AS his representatives.
Read the next post in the series here: Part 2