The life God has created for us | Faith and values

In his autobiographical work "Confessions," St. Augustine of Hippo mentions the people who ask the rhetorical question: "What did God do before making the heavens and the earth?" Augustine's response was to to say that God was preparing Hell for people who ask such questions. Humor is probably the best answer because, as the question of whether God can make a rock so big that he can not move it, such questions are irrelevant and ridiculous. Good theology should rather reflect the revelation of God on who He is and how He is at work among us. Such knowledge leads to the conclusion that humans must become co-participants in the very work of God.

When we come to the story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, we discover that the heavens and the earth form the cosmic temple in which God dwells (a habitation not made by humans, Acts 7: 47-50) as king and that all the universe belongs to him (Psalms 24: 1). These Scripture pbadages provide insight into the kind of life for which humans were made.

First, Genesis reminds us that what God has created is good. We must therefore reject any idea about physical creation or our body as something bad. The Bible never teaches that we must hope to escape this physical world for an eternal "spiritual" destiny in Heaven. Instead, we must be careful managers of the fabulous creation that God has entrusted to us: to be fruitful and to multiply; Fill the earth and control it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky and all that creeps on the ground (Genesis 1:28). Humans must reign carefully over all of God's works and produce a world of such goodness that our work glorifies our Creator. It is the very foundation of the Christian life. Christians who live in this way become witnesses to God's goodness, which then attracts those who want to participate and share that kind of life. Jesus prayed for this result when he asked that his Father's will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

Chapter Two of Genesis shows some different aspects of the life that God created for us to live. First, we are told in vv. 15-17, the Lord God took the human and installed it in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and take care of it. The Lord God commanded the human: "Eat your fill of all the trees of the garden; but do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for the day you eat it, you will die! Theologian Walter Brueggemann has identified three characteristics of life that God envisions for humans: vocation, permission, and prohibition. In other words, God created us to work, gives us a lot of freedom to use our abilities, but also imposes restrictions. Second, the male is alone and needs an appropriate "badistant" (vv. The idea of ​​a "wizard" implies no sense of inferiority since, elsewhere in the scriptures, the Hebrew word (ezer) is used to describe God himself as an badistant to Israel, and the Bible never badigns an inferior status to God

The story of the creation of Genesis calls us to imagine ourselves as co-participants in God's ongoing work of creation. Absent here are notions of individuality and autonomy that say that we can live life independently of the help of God or the other. But do we understand what that means?

This question is important because if we are honest, I think we are often more interested in creating a world that fits our own personal vision rather than what God has in mind. In other words, it does not usually bother us to do work to improve this world and we certainly love the idea of ​​freedom. But we often resist the notion of restrictions. Yet, human hostility and horrific wars, toxic pollution and the resulting ecological devastation, the hoarding of wealth by a few and the poverty that results from it, testify that we are often better at abusing ourselves. and destroy the property of God only to use it. and enjoyable lives for humanity and all other creatures, for the sake of our Creator. So maybe it's time to start listening to God again to know how we should take care of His creation rather than play God by letting our desires determine right and wrong.

The Bible informs us of the attitudes necessary to make this wonderful world place that God envisioned and that Jesus prayed for: Love God, love our neighbors, and even our enemies. Is this also what we really want? Or are we more in love with our own desires and vision for this world than the one for which Jesus gave his life?