Doctrine of the Day: The Gospel - Part 3

So... Last week we learned that God does everything for his own glory. It is necessary to understand this about God if we are to understand what He expects of us and therefore why the gospel is so necessary. Now we move to the next part of explaining the gospel:

• Man
  

God's purpose in creation is to magnify his own glory. This means that He created mankind for the same purpose. When Adam and Eve were placed in the garden, it was not merely for fellowship that God created them as if He was somehow incomplete and needed someone to talk to. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were perfectly happy and fulfilled in the love relationship they shared in the Godhead before we ever came to be. No, man was created as part of a great prism. 

A prism is a clear piece of glass shaped like a triangle. When you take pure, white light and shine it through the prism at the right angle, the prism will refract the light into its component colors... the full spectrum of Roy G. Biv. You remember him? Red, orange, yellow, etc. 

Creation fulfills the same function for God's glory. If you want to see the beauty of "blue" in God's brilliant white, hot glory, then see how He has refracted the glory of his mercy in forgiving our sins. Or see the "green" of his grace in his provision for our needs. Or see the "yellow" of his joy in the sweetness of Christian fellowship. But we see all of these glories in his creation and how He interacts with us.

The point is that we were created in order to fully glorify Him. We are meant to reflect and refract the many "colors" of his glory for all creation, on earth and in the heavens, to see and exult in. The only way for us as limited and finite creatures to appreciate the fullness of that blinding, white glory is for Him to refract it through creation to help us see the individual "colors." 

This is what 1 Corinthians 10:31 means... in every aspect of our lives we are to display how glorious God is. Even in something so mundane as eating and drinking, God is to be magnified and shown as wonderful. This is our purpose. Every little thing we do is supposed to be done out of hearts that love and cherish Him and therefore honor Him for what He is worth. We were created for worship. 

This sets us up for next week when we talk about the next word, "sin." Now when we share Romans 3:23 there will be a specific context that gives serious meaning to sin as we understand that EVERYTHING we do is supposed to honor and glorify God for who He is.