Why God Made You

The life God has for each one of us is a life of perfect love, one that eternally unites us with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is why God made us. It’s what we long for, to love and be loved.

However, things like the love of the Trinity are not part of our normal language. So let’s unpack this a bit.

The great pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards painted a portrait of the Trinity in which the love and joy of the three divine persons was so full and intense, it simply could not be contained. God’s fullness thus yearned to be expressed and replicated by sharing it with others. So this fullness overflowed as God brought forth a creation that mirrored his triune beauty.

The pinnacle of this creation is human beings, those who reflect, in a small way, the yearning to participate in the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The God of overflowing love longs to pour his love into others, so he creates beings that long for his love to be poured into them. This is why you were created. However, because of our rebellion, living without the fullness of God is a reality that shapes our daily lives.

It’s a state that is completely unnatural, an emptiness that points to our true purpose.

Jesus reveals this purpose when he prays to the Father that his disciples and “those who will believe in me through their message” would be “one as we are one.” (The entire prayer can be read in John 17.) Then he prays that he would be in us in the same way that the Father is in him. God apparently wants the loving unity of his own triune being to be replicated in the way we relate to one another as well as in the way he relates to us and dwells in us.

Then Jesus proclaims to the Father that he “will continue to make you [the Father] known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and I myself may be in them.” And he essentially says the same thing when he says to the Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me” for the “glory” that the Father gives the Son and that the Son shares with us is simply the weighty, brilliant radiance of the self-giving love of the three persons of the Trinity.

This means that God’s ultimate goal in creation is nothing less than for the very same perfect love that the Father has for his own Son to be given to us and to be placed within us.

We become the recipients of the Father’s eternal love for the Son because we are in the Son as he is perfectly loved, and the Son is in us, as he is perfectly loved.

This is the true life that we created to experience. It’s what we thirst for. And nothing else, no other purpose, can quench it. While some of us may be blessed with loving people in our lives, with worthwhile work, and with some measure of security, no one, and nothing, could come close to meeting this need.

Only God can satisfy your longing for perfect, unconditional love, unsurpassable worth, and absolute security.

—Adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 58-60 – Greg Boyd