Perhaps the British super-group Supertramp expressed it best:
There are times when all the world’s asleep,
The questions run too deep,
For such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned,
I know it sounds absurd,
But please tell me who I am.
How incredible that something so basic, so fundamental as life can’t even justify, much
less explain its own existence. Most births aren’t annunciated by a bright chorus of
angels singing praises. We don’t come with instructions, explanations, or justifications
written within the folds of our baby fat, or that can be decoded from our most primeval
cries. We just, one day, are born; eventually we become aware of ourselves -- pain, fear, hunger often being the first sensations of self-consciousness. Uninvited, life is
foisted upon those who never asked for it, and yet remains difficult to give back if we
don’t want it and impossible to retain if we do.
Most folks have seen t-shirts with a drawing of the Milky Way, with an arrow pointing to
a spot that says, “You are here.” Maybe that tells us where we are but not why.
Scripture, however, does. It tells us from the opening pages, that we are beings made
by God, and in the image of God, too. “So God created man in His own image; in the
image of God He created him; male and female; He created them” (Genesis 1:27). This
is a far cry from the belief that we are mere chance creations of an accidental cosmos
that, purely, by chance spit us out and that will one day swallow us into oblivion with no
more thought that with which it spit us out to begin with.
Instead, the same God who created the first heavens and earth will, we are promised,
re-create the heavens and earth but with us in it, and without the pain, suffering and evil
that so permeate it now. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall
be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former
things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4).
Yes, we all have been created by God. And by faith in Jesus, we have the promise of
being part of a new creation, one that begins, even now: “Therefore, if anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have
become new” (2 Cor. 5:17).
