Very often, as we meet with people in public or in individual or group meetings, we find that people are frequently looking for answers to the fundamental and basic questions of life. We each ask ourselves some of these questions: “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, or maybe we would express it as “What is my purpose?”. These are questions that are common to most people and helps to explain why these questions come up so frequently. In asking these questions, we are trying to give our daily lives greater meaning and greater significance than the answers that we hear from the world around us.
We may feel like just a cog in the machine of the world. Is that really true?
It may seem that we are just supposed to work, and then when we have grown old and are no longer useful for our work, we retire, move on, and pass away, only to have others take our place. Is that really all there is to our lives?
Is there anything more to life? Is there any greater reason that we are here? It feels like there is something missing, but we have difficulty understanding what that greater meaning could possibly be.
We can sometimes feel like we are on a hamster wheel, running quickly without actually going anywhere.
As followers of Jesus, we must understand what God is doing. We must understand the mission that God is working toward so that we do not find ourselves walking through our lives without any true purpose. We must know what God is doing so that our lives and our activities can align to his purposes and what he is doing. Only by understanding God’s mission can we understand who we are and who we are meant to be.
It would be useless for us to continue to ask God over and over, as many of us have done, what he wants each of us to do if we didn’t first understand what he is doing. Would God give us a different answer from what he is doing? Of course not. God’s intention is that we understand from the Bible, from the scripture that he has already given us, the mission that he is already intending to complete, and we can then join him on that mission.
By doing this, we can begin to answer these fundamental questions. We can understand who we are and what he has intended as the purpose for our lives.
Starting from the beginning
Through these next few posts regarding God’s mission, we are going to understand God’s mission, as we can see it laid out in several places throughout the written course of the scripture. We believe that by understanding God’s mission, we can begin to make sense of the rest of what is written in the Bible because the mission becomes the “big picture”, the whole within which each of the pieces will fit.
What is the mission of God? Is it possible to know? We believe it is, and we believe God actually told us clearly on page 1 of the Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. ”
Genesis 1:26-28
Let’s take a look at this passage one step at a time, asking a few questions along the way so that we can understand God’s mission from these scriptures:
Made in God’s Image
First, we see that God said that he made man and woman in “our” image. What does it mean that we are made in God’s image?
As we’ve asked this question to several people, we’ve received several different answers as well as several more questions in return. Here are a few of the responses that we have received:
- We have characteristics like God.
- We are able to create things like God did. We can make tools
- We are given the authority to rule by God.
- We have language. We have the ability to communicate in meaningful ways.
- Maybe it means that we look physically like God?
I think that most of these could be discussed further and we could explore each of these responses, comparing them to the scriptures. This discussion, and the responses that we have received, help us understand the complexity and challenge to understand what it means that we have been made in the image of God.
However, for our purposes here in this article, we believe that we can understand the idea of being made in the image of God by thinking about it in a different way. Instead of trying to define all of the characteristics of what being made in the image of God could mean, it could be easier to understand the purpose of an image.
Think of any image that you might make, for example a photo or a selfie that you might take on your phone.
Now, ask yourself… Why did you take that picture?
What was the purpose of making that image?
Maybe you wanted to remember that moment. Or maybe you wanted to post the picture on Instagram, on Facebook, or some other social media.
Whether you took the picture just for yourself, to share with your friends, or to share with the entire world, there was a purpose for that picture, a purpose for that image. The plan was that image would represent that moment. You made it so that the image could represent what you had been doing in that moment, the friends that you were with, and the wonderful time that you had together.
That is the purpose of an image. To represent. To show. To tell about something about yourself or about what you have done or have experienced simply through the image, even without a lot of additional words to describe all that had happened.
What, then, was God doing when he made man and woman in his own image? He was representing himself. He was showing himself. We were made as a representation of God. God’s intent was that we were made to represent him. We are not the real thing. We are not God, but we were made for the purpose of representing him to others who do not know God so that they can also know him.
This is the purpose of an image, to represent. And this is the purpose for which God made us in his image, to represent and show him on the earth.
Fill the Earth
Now, let’s move on to the second question: What is the very first commandment in the Bible?
Often, we receive the response that we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And yes, that is the first commandment in terms of importance.
However, here, we are asking with regard to the chronological order of God’s commands: Chronologically speaking, what is the first commandment in the Bible? God’s first command is found in verse 28 that we quoted above:
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. ”
Genesis 1:28
God’s very first commandment is that man and woman should be fruitful. They should fill the earth.
In short, God tells them – in fact commands them – to go and make babies!
They are to go and multiply, but we should ask ourselves yet another question… what is it that they are supposed to be multiplying? They are supposed to multiply God’s image! God has made Adam and Eve, man and woman, in his own image and now he tells them to go and fill the whole earth with his image.
God’s intent is that his image would fill the earth. He would be represented all across the world, all across the face of the earth.
Has God’s Mission Changed?
This is the mission that God has been on since the creation of the world. His plan, his mission, is that his image would fill the earth, that we would “image”, that we would represent, that we would reflect him everywhere that we are and everywhere that we go. God has a purpose for this mission, although we will leave this for a later article, to understand further why God is doing what he is doing.
As we continue forward over the next series of articles related to the mission of God, we want to continue to ask ourselves this question: Has God’s mission changed? Did the fact that sin entered the world change God’s plan? Did the fact that the people of Israel broke God’s covenant change God’s plan? Did Jesus change God’s plan? Was he on a different mission, or was it the same? Is God’s plan for us the same or different?
These are important questions to help us understand the answers to the fundamental questions of our life:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
If we do not understand God’s original plan nor understand how that plan has changed for today, it will be very difficult to answer the questions above. However, when we understand God’s plan and we understand how God has called us to be part of that plan, we can answer these questions and find both peace with God and peace within ourselves as we are aligned with God’s plan for our lives.
