Our Purpose: God's Point of View

A huge question: Why did God create man? There is a wide discussion between Christian denominations as to what our purpose is during our time on earth, but they all agree with the same ultimate goal: salvation. God created us so that we may choose to join Him in His Heavenly Kingdom for eternity. We have the free will to choose whether to believe in Him or not. If we acknowledge Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, the gift of salvation is ours, but if we choose any other path of life, we are doomed to eternal torment.

So, I’d like to try to take this from God’s point of view… God is claimed to be omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing). We cannot even begin to understand His ways or His intentions (which is why Christians resort to calling Him ‘mysterious’ when tragedy strikes). So, in terms of intelligence and understanding, let’s make the analogy that Homo sapiens are to God like ants are to Homo sapiens… As a Homo sapien, do you bother yourself with judging the actions and thoughts of the colony of an anthill? Do you create a set of laws for them to follow, or else they are to be punished? Do you attempt to maintain a personal relationship with each and every one of them? I’m going to take a wild guess and say no.

Now try to put yourself in God’s shoes (we were created in His image, right?). He must be quite lonely if He decided to conduct this experiment of engineering carbon-based life forms with the sole purpose of worshiping Him as their Lord and Savior (because, again, the ultimate goal is to be with God in Heaven). It would be like me engineering billions of avatars in a computer simulation in the hope that they would acknowledge me and pray to me and worship me and love me before they die there and pop into my reality. They would be capable of free will somehow (it’s not a perfect analogy, but go along with it), but the first time one of them disobeys my rules, I could upload into all of them a virus that tempts them with impulses of violence, greed, and lust. Then I could really test their devotion.

If things don’t go as planned, I could just delete the defective ones or command my followers to destroy the others who become confused and worship some other Creator that they come up with. I could instant message my rules and commands to a select few of them as to how they could be rewarded in the ‘next life’. I would hope that they share the message with others. I could upload many other viruses that create creatures/parasites who want to eat them, harsh conditions of hot/cold/quakes/wind/lava, you know, the works. And I would only help the people in need and interfere if they send emails directly to my address.

Then I could fast forward a few thousand years and upload myself into their reality and tell them more clearly who they should be worshiping and that I will save them from my own previous rules that I had laid out for them. And then I could justly, but mercifully, evaluate how well each of them worshiped me, how well they followed my rules, and how much they prayed to me. It doesn’t matter how well they treated my other creations if they didn’t do it in serving my will. I would decide whether or not I should reward them and let them into my VIP lounge, where we could hang out and laugh about how crazy life in the computer was and how that life doesn’t matter anymore because they weren’t in the actual reality...

I think I got my point across...

We could only be God’s test subjects because He only allows those who acknowledge Him into His Heaven. He must have created us for His own amusement and His own narcissistic desires. You cannot say He cares whatsoever about the souls He condemns to eternal separation from Him. He is omnipotent, so He could be around sinners if He wanted to, right? ‘God hates sin, but loves the sinner’ carries no weight because He condemns the sinner to Hell, yet allows sin to carry on and to thrive.

God is claimed to be eternal, omnipresent (everywhere), and not bounded by space and time. So you could imagine that He needs to find things to occupy His time. He decided to create man. Why? He would have known beforehand that the Garden of Eden would lead to the fall of man, we would all inherit a sinful nature, we would be tempted by the Devil, and that we would need to rely on Him in order to repent and earn our salvation. He knew full well ahead of time that in our 21st century, about 33% of the global population would fill in the bubble next to ‘Christian’ on a survey. And we all know that a much smaller percentage of those who claim to be Christian are actually devoted to the church and to Jesus Christ. So, the reality is that the heavy majority of God’s finest creations are doomed to an alternative eternal separation from Him, which the New Testament outlines as a fiery Hell, yet God is apparently content with this.

The Lord is the Creator of everything, so He created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:9), He created the serpent (Genesis 3:1), He created enmity (hatred) (Genesis 3:15), and He created things such as disease, poor eyesight, and tornadoes. He must have engineered the circumstances of people born into cultures of different beliefs, He must have planted fossils to test our faith, and He is apparently allowing Satan to lure the heavy majority of people away from Him. The Lord created imperfection with our free will, and He now punishes imperfection. He defined imperfection as sin and decided that He cannot be around sin. There is the common reasoning that either God cannot defeat sin/evil, so He is not omnipotent, or He is not willing to defeat sin/evil, so He is not benevolent.

So the following question is: Are we perpetrators of sin, or are we victims of sin?

Next week, I will discuss the story of original sin.