This is for session 2 of a study on "God Speaks To/Through His People, the story of the Bible as a drama in five acts" for the Koinonia Class at Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, CO.
Recently I’ve seen several things which bring to mind the complexity and miraculous nature of Creation: NASA photos taken with the Hubble Telescope—sights so beautiful, awesome, and inspiring that it’s difficult to believe they are really of galaxies so many light-years away; a program about how the Rocky Mountains were formed by some tectonic plates subducting under others and pushing up the mantle of the earth; and another program about archeological discoveries giving evidence of people over 15,000 years ago inhabiting what is now America.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in the Prologue, Part 1 of this Bible study entitled “God Speaks To/Through His People” that we seek answers to the questions Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when this life is over? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil? Why do I do things which I know are evil? Is there any hope for forgiveness and for a happy future? Is there a solution for this human condition that I myself am in?
This week we are looking at two of those questions—the one that asks Where did I come from? and another one, Why am I here? From astronomy we might get an answer that tells us something about all matter on Earth having come from exploding stars. Even that fact is predated by the formation of the stars from the Big Bang billions of years ago. Biology might say we are here because of our ancestors having evolved over millennia to produce the species homo sapiens.
A number of the sciences might together be able to piece together a partial explanation of how we physically got here. It can only be a partial explanation, though, because none of them can get prior to the theoretical Big Bang. That, they say, is for metaphysics (or religion) to propose. One theologian/philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, offered five “proofs” for the existence of God, one of which (expanding Aristotle’s concept of an “unmoved mover” is that since there is motion, there had to be a prime mover (that is, something or some being that started it all in motion), and he said that the One we call God was that prime mover.
None of these arguments answers the “why” question though. That answer we can find in the Bible. Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, tells us that God created all that is, including us; and that He created us for fellowship with Himself. Being created “in the image of God”, we find our ultimate happiness and purpose relating to and working in partnership with God.
If you’ve been wondering why you are here, perhaps a re-reading of Scripture can give some clues—especially if you ask God to show you what He wants of you. God didn’t create us in His image without a reason for doing so.
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