Made For More
By Jacob Hess
Have you ever wondered what your purpose is? We have so many priorities battling for our attention, but in all the noise, what does God want from us? My wife has a love-hate relationship with baking bread. When a loaf turns out great, she loves it! When it turns out dense and unusable, she absolutely hates it. She couldn’t tell you all the scientific explanations for why a loaf might fail or succeed on any given attempt, but she knows better than any scientist who made the loaf and for what purpose. Like my wife with her bread, God knows far better than we do what we were made for. As we turn to the first book of the Bible, we find our purpose is far greater than we often imagine!
Made with a Purpose
Genesis chapter one declares that God creates everything out of nothing, fashioning life and light with the power of His word. The culmination of this grand creative act is the creation of humanity. Genesis 1:27-28 states,
“So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.’”
Humanity is unique among God’s creation for we are made in God’s image, reflecting back to the world something of His character and giving voice to the praises of all creation. According to the text, the special stamp of God’s image is closely tied to the purpose for which God made us: to be His representatives on earth. The words “subdue” and “rule” from 1:28—along with further details from chapter two—can help better define what this means.
The Hebrew for “rule” means to have dominion over something. “Subdue” on the other hand, carries different connotations. It means to bring something into bondage by conquest. Why would God give us such a violent task? Some believe this gives us license to do what we want with the earth, bending it to our will for our own benefit, but I believe Genesis two gives a different picture. Genesis 2:7 says,
“Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.”
The word “formed” carries connotations of a potter molding a pot out of clay. This shows God’s creativity and nearness to His creation. The same word is used to describe God’s fashioning of His other creations, most notably the animals in 2:19. What is unique about humanity is God breathing into man “the breath of life.” We are unique among God’s creations, for we are made both from the dust of the ground and the very breath of God. We are both spirit and flesh, a unique combination of heaven and earth. Why would God create such strange beings? I believe it’s intimately connected to our purpose to “rule” and “subdue.”
Bible scholar N. T. Wright notes in his book, Simply Jesus, that heaven and earth are “twin halves of God’s created reality, designed eventually to come together.” As creatures of heaven and earth, we were always meant to be the agents through whom God accomplished His goal of uniting heaven and earth. It began with His creation of the heaven-and-earth place of Eden, but it was always God’s plan that this task would continue through His image-of-God creatures. Taking this all into consideration, it becomes clear that subduing creation was never about bending it to our will, it was about partnering with God in spreading the light and life of Eden across all the earth, and so fulfilling our innate purpose as images of God.
Living as Creatures of Heaven and Earth
Not only did God provide a place for us, He provided a purpose. God is so generous that He shared with us rulership over the earth, and gave us a part to play in His mission to spread His life and light. Yet so often we miss the beauty of our innate identity and purpose. With the many distractions of life, it can be easy to lose sight of the adventure God is calling us into. “I don’t have time to sign up to serve at church,” we may say. Or “I’m too tired to reach out to a lonely neighbor." That may be true, but if we’re missing out on the people God gave us to love and serve, perhaps we need to ask the question: “Do I have my priorities straight?” Are we looking back to the Maker to answer the question: “What am I here for?” Serving God, His people, and a world in desperate need of Him should not be one more thing on our to-do-list, it’s what we were made for!
Thankfully, we don’t do this work alone. God not only gave us a purpose, He fulfilled it in Jesus, the Perfect Image of God. Jesus lived the life we were made for—perfectly spreading God’s life and light—and He died the death that we deserve for seeking to serve ourselves rather than our Maker. In Jesus, heaven and earth have crashed together! We have redemption and new life. And the purpose we were made for is given back to us anew. As we follow Jesus in a life of service, we can have peace knowing He paid for the sins of the past, strength knowing He goes with us in the present, and hope because He has already won the victory and, one day, He will come again to bring heaven and earth finally and fully together.