Why We Are Here

 “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”—Genesis 2, verse 15,

This is the verse of the Bible in which we are told why we were created. We were created to be gardeners.

There are two kinds of gardens: vegetable gardens, and scenic gardens. There are gardens to produce food, and there are gardens to produce beauty.

There was clearly no need, in this case, to work to produce food. This was the Garden of Eden. All plants there, but one, were edible: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” There was no reason to worry for the welfare of animals either. They too could, the next verse specifies, eat every plant, and did not eat one another. The lion lay down with the lamb. The need to labour for food, clothing, or shelter came only with the Fall: 

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
...By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,”

It would be tautological, in any case, to create man only to feed man.

Therefore, our life purpose must be to create beauty, as in a flower garden. Our job is to take the raw material God gave us, “nature,” and transform it into art.

We obviously do not do this by leaving it alone, as in a nature preserve. And it is not about advancement in material comforts. Life is about making beauty.