Why Did God Create Us?

1 John 3:1

Why did God create us?

Well of course anytime you ask a question that starts with, “Why does God . . . ?” you can always answer it with the right theological answer, “For his glory.” Everything God does, he always does for his glory.

But how did creating humans bring God glory? To answer that, we need to remember what the glory of God really is. In short, one basic definition of the glory of God is when the invisible qualities of God are made visible or knowable.

With this definition, it’s not hard to connect the dots: If God is glorified through making his qualities visible, he would then glorify himself by making beings in his image. Because we bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27), we thus glorify God (Isaiah 43:7). Sin has marred this image, and thus the more we sin the more we “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The more we are sanctified and remade into the image of his Son, the more we glorify God as he originally intended (Romans 8:29-30).

But I’ve talked about all that before. Let’s take this a step further. How else did creating humans reveal God?

God revealed his love and fullness through creating humans just as a healthy marriage reveals its love and fullness through producing children. Let’s dig deeper into this idea.

God Created Us Because He Is Not Selfish

If a healthy marriage chooses not to have kids simply out of selfish reasons, that’s not loving. If a husband and wife are able and stable, and yet they love going on vacation so much that they decide not to have children, that’s selfish.

Certainly there are valid reasons that are not selfish which can influence a healthy marriage to decide not to have children. But doesn’t something inside of you cringe to see a married couple with a big house, extra time, enough resources, and no valid reason to not have children other than that they know children will inconvenience their lives greatly?

Likewise, how could God be a God of love if he had everything – all the happiness in the world he possesses – and yet he chose not to share his love by not creating humans because he knew how much trouble we would all cause him?

If God would have kept his love to himself because he knew humans would eventually sin against him and ruin the world, that would not have been loving.

In fact, because he is so filled with a sacrificial love, this is what allowed him to make humans in the first place. God knew we were going to sin before we sinned, but he created us anyways because his love would not be scared off by the pain, inconvenience, and sacrifice we would inflict on him. God was willing to sacrifice his own life for us before he even created us. Like a healthy marriage which knows in advance having children will change everything (and not always for the best) God decided to create us because he is not selfish.

God Did Not Create Us Out of His Emptiness

On the flipside, when parents have children to make the marriage better, the marriage actually suffers more when the kids arrive. In this scenario, replace the couple who is stable but selfish with an unstable marriage who is also selfish.

They know their marriage is missing something. They know they are not joyful and happy between the two of them. And so they have children with the hopes that the kids will be the missing link in the chain of bliss. Rather than have children as a way to give the love and fullness they already have, this couple tries to have children as a way of getting love and fullness.

When parents place their hopes, dreams, and desire for fullness on their children, the kids will grow up feeling a pressure they run from. Because the children know they can never fill their parents emptiness like the parents want them to do, they don’t even try and run away emotionally and sometimes physically. They know they are not the perfect God their parents are asking them to be, and so they rebel to prove their point.

If the children don’t respond by running and rebelling, then the kids grow up to become self-centered, spoiled children who think everything really does revolve around them. These kids grow up believing they really do have the power to make everyone happy, as long as everyone will revolve their worlds around them as their parents have done all their lives. These people become the manipulators who control others through giving and taking away love, making their entire existence all about themselves because their parents have taught them they alone hold they keys to everyone’s happiness.

A healthy marriage does not produce children out of a need, but out of a fullness of a love that already exists. Because the husband and wife have such a full love between the two of them, they create others to share in their love that already exists.

Healthy marriages produce healthy children because healthy couples won’t try to fill themselves through parenting. Healthy marriages allow selfless parenting, where the husband and wife choose to put their children before their own needs because that’s what real love does. And healthy parents can discipline their children and teach the kids that the world does not revolve around them because the parents don’t allow their children to have that much power over the parent’s self-worth.

When a couple is secure in the love between themselves (and ultimately in God’s love), they will not have less love to give their children but more. Out of the fullness of love within the marriage can flow a selfless love into the parenting.

God Created Us Out of His Fullness

Likewise, God was perfectly happy and fulfilled within the relationship of the Trinity. However, it would have been selfish not to share their love, and so God created humans to enjoy his love too. He created us out of his fullness, not his emptiness. If God needed us, we would be crushed under the pressure of this great need.

Just as children rebel when their mother or father smother them, we too could not handle a God who sought to draw life from us rather than give life to us. And if God came to us with needs, we would also become self-centered and spoiled, like a child who knows they can get anything from their parents by only doing what the parents want once the child first gets what she wants.

A healthy marriage produces healthy children because the kids grow up feeling and knowing that there is something bigger in the house than themselves – mom and dad’s marriage. Imagine growing up in a world where you felt you were the biggest, most important being in the universe. This would not bring comfort but fear. As humans, we want to know that Someone is out there that is bigger than us, that has this whole thing figured out. The fear caused by living in a world where God was not supreme is how children feel when they grow up in a home where their parents do not prioritize their marriage. It seems selfish to put your marriage above your parenting. But out of the fullness of love within the marriage should flow a love to parent selflessly.

Children need to know they are not the most important thing in the house. When children know that mom and dad put their love for each other above the kids, the kids don’t resent this, they are comforted by this bigger love. They know that they, the children, are not an afterthought or an unwanted distraction; rather, they know that as mom and dad’s children they will be loved and enveloped by this fullness of love that exists with or without them in the equation. A healthy marriage brings a stable, bigger, overarching love within the home that children can feel secure and protected under.

God Created Us for His Glory and Out of His Love

So God created us for very similar reasons that a healthy marriage produces children. God created us because it would have been selfish to not create humans to share in his amazing love that already fully existed in the Godhead. God didn’t create us because he was empty. He created us because he was and is so full of love to give. God loves us by not needing us but choosing to want us. We are protected and comforted by this bigger love that does not start and end with us.

It’s one of the greatest expressions of love ever for a man and woman to produce and raise children together. True love always creates life. And since within the Triune God lies the truest love of all, is it any wonder why he created humans?

God created us for his glory. And God glorified himself through creating us out of his endless, selfless love.