Why We're Here

It occurs to me that the Book of Genesis gives us rather clear instructions as to what our purpose is here on this earth; why it is that God created us.

Recall, we are created “in the image of God.”

This does not mean, of course, that we look like Him. He is pure spirit.

No, it must be in the sense that it is our mission to imitate him in his essential nature.

And what is the essential nature of the God of Genesis? Equally obviously, it is Creator.

Just so, Adam imitates God almost immediately on his Creation: as God created all the animals, so Adam names them; as God creates with things, man creates with words. In so doing, he somehow completes the creation. Adam is also charged to be a gardener, working on and improving nature as created.

And Noah, again, the one just man, reenacts the creation. The image of building the ark, despite his neighbours, and his solitude on the waves, is the image of the artist at his solitary work with his inspiration. Noah sending out the dove to find land is man the explorer, but it is also an image of God’s creation of the world, in which “the spirit of God moves over the waters” – the Holy Spirit, the dove—and God then separates chaos into sea and land. What God creates, man is to discover. The mandate of the pure scientist or philosopher.

Noah goes on to become a culture hero, discovering viniculture and inventing alcohol. He perfects in spiritual form what God has made in physical form. And his mocking by son Ham reenacts the fall of son Adam.

And on it goes: our mandate is to explore, invent, create.

It is no accident, then, that the New Jerusalem, the end of Creation, is a city, a work of architecture. It takes the work of God plus the work of man to reach this final goal.

Note how misguided, then, are those eco-radicals who seek a nature untouched by man. Who keep trying to crawl back under that garden gate.