Why God First Created The World & The Final Timeline

While no human mind can imagine how and why God created mankind and this universe, I can only conceive through my limited mind the great awesomeness and mystery of His purposes.

Still, I think every believing Christian should, at one time or another, consider the Creator’s plan when he decided to create the world. And it is not simply a battle between good and evil.

There are five truths which I can draw upon based on my Bible knowledge. There could well be a sixth truth hinted of in the final book of Revelation and I believe it will be fully revealed in our lifetimes.

1. He created man in His image. This means man has an inner conscience and has the qualities of creativity in him. 

  

2.    He gave man Free Will: This is the most perplexing and frustrating part of his creation. If he did not give us free will, then the first man and woman would not have sinned. By giving us free will, it is as if we were being tricked by our creator. If man can be free to do as he wills, why punish him for using his free will to commit moral sins (lust, adultery, hate, rage, envy, theft, etc some of which are punishable by civil law whilst others are not) ? 

So the problem, which God himself had most probably foreseen, is that man did commit the original sin and paid the price of eternal death for it. Before we go to the third truth, let us digress a bit on this free will dilemma.

Isn’t this like some kind of unfair trick? Not exactly. It is somewhat like a chess grandmaster who invites you to play chess with him for a 100 games as he wants to train you to be a champion player. If you win, He will reward you with a grand prize the value of which is beyond anyone’s imagination. 

You know quite well that its a tough challenge and you have a choice to walk away to live a humdrum life. In this metaphor, there are three kinds of amateur chess players:

(a) Those who just play the 100 games without much enthusiasm for the game. They go about life one day at a time, year in, year  out, without asking deep questions about their purpose on earth. For them, what is is "what it is". Life is just something to experience and we are to make the best of it. (These types of people make up about 30% of the world's population)

(b) Those who take up God’s challenge to be champions. They train themselves with each game and learn their mistakes from every defeat. To them, it is not just an intellectual challenge but a moral responsibility to win the game and collect the prize. (20% of the world)

(c) Those who decide not to play at all or who give up after a few defeats. These are the ones who think that since God gave them a free will to walk away, they choose a self-made life which has little meaning (apart from their own achievements) until the day they die. They even invent their own games in which they reward themselves. (50% of the world)

Now the third group of people (atheists, agnostics or New Agers) do have a strong argument against playing according to the rules set by God. 

Despite the fact that the Creator has gently whispered to man's conscience, given His Word as set forth in the Bible over centuries telling how and why the world was created, there is still the problem of free will. We have a Hobson's choice to walk away and not accept His rules nor His invitation. 

More precisely, the argument of the non-believer posed to God is this: “How do we know it is not all a trick of Yours, that we are not mere pawns in Your game of chess, that the contest is actually between You and Satan, your arch enemy angel who was kicked out of Heaven on account of his rebellion? 

And if we won this game, how do we know the prize is as good as you promised?"

These existential questions have been asked by the most intelligent minds who are outraged and critical of God’s seeming silence in the face of not only cosmic injustice but the gross injustice of man’s cruelty towards the innocent. If God exists, how can a loving God allow massacres of helpless women and children to happen, how can He allow crimes of senseless brutality at the individual and the genocidal level? 

Does the Creator need to respond in words or does he have an ultimate answer?

In Dostoevsky's masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan asks his younger brother Alyosha the ancient question (If God exists, whence evil?):

"If the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price." 

3. The savior Jesus Christ: And this brings us to the greatest act of God in His creation plan. God's reply is simple and profound as encapsulated in John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believe in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."
   
  So this life is clearly not a game. There possibility of losing eternal life after death is too much to bear if it is true. 

Two thousand years ago, God brought His son Jesus Christ, supernaturally borned of a virgin, to live as a man on earth, teaching us how to live and overcome our struggles with evil and finally giving us the salvation of our souls through belief in His divinity who gave His life as a penalty for our sins.

Confronted with this narrative, the intellect of man may or may not accept it wholeheartedly. 

It is a logical and awesome story but the full weight of this truth is in the power of the Holy Spirit to convict a man’s inner being, to spiritually awaken us to see the truth of Jesus as our saviour and redeemer of our fallen souls.

But how do people get convicted? It is different for each person: most are convicted through a tragic or traumatic event, others are convicted by the reading of the Word or the power of a sermon.

For me personally, I have always sought for the meaning of life and this search through philosophy, books and religion prepared me for my conversion in my late 30s. There were clearly people who prayed for me along the way and finally my wife who was a Christian brought me to Christ.

4.   The battle for man’s soul heats up in the End times: We are now in the endgame as the world is beset by great chaos created by pandemics, economic turmoil and geopolitical tensions that raise the prospects for a third world war. 

 This is the end of the timeline of the world when everything reaches a climax in the return of Christ to judge the world, separating the good from the wicked. It is a time of great tribulation as the enemy of both God and man makes his final stand to battle for our souls that we be condemned and evade the salvation offered by God.

According to the book of Revelation, this battle will finally end with Satan ending up in the lake of fire. But his modus operandi of destroying man is like a self-mutating computer program that evolves with increasing complexity and cunning. 

Despite his cunning, his intellectual flaw is he is an amateur con-man philosopher: he has nothing to offer mankind beyond this life except damnation. So he attracts only those who are drawn to darkness, to the hedonistic pleasures that cause countless pain to others. In effect, he draws the spiritually lost in man.   

But it seems that the ordinary Christian, myself included, is not totally spiritually prepared for this end time even though we mentally know we are living in this stage of God’s timeline.  

The toughest part of being a Christian is to be sanctified, totally dedicated to the will of God and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. For though our spirits are redeemed, our flesh and soul are not completed redeemed. 

We need to continually be separated from all worldliness, from the occupations of the mind and rely completely on the Lord, hearing His voice and spending time with Him.

5.  The Rapture of the Bride: Just as the Creator gave a way of escape from the sins of the world by giving us His Son as a the Truth, the Way and the Life, God will also offer a way out of the darkest part of the tribulation when the Anti-Christ comes to rule the world and enforce his system of control. And I believe the escape plan is the Rapture, the catching away of the Bride, the remnant marked by God to be taken out of the earth.

So in conclusion, when we look at these five truths in God’s creation agenda, the question still remains: why is it so important for the Creator to allow mankind to go through these events? Is God so demanding that He puts us in harm’s way, faced with the evil of the Anti-Christ, who has yet to emerge on the world scene but is said to be waiting in the wings?

As I said earlier, this is a test of faith and spiritual strength. 

It will be the toughest test we shall ever have to take and we all have to go through it, like gold being melted in the furnace to bring out its purity. 

Everything else does not matter except that we are pure in the sight of God. And why does he want us to be Holy as Jesus is holy? The answer is that we are to be betrothed to Jesus, our bridegroom.

And this brings us to the pandemic virus that has shaken the world since January 2020. Some say it was released in a bio lab in China or originally created in America, others say it came from bats or from sea creatures. 

Whatever the origins, it is clear to me that God allowed the pandemic as a warning, a wake-up call to stop the cycle of sin in our lives and among nations. 

We are to be woken up from spiritual slumber and be prepared for greater upheavals. We shall soon know as the events of the year continue to shake our lives.

How are we to respond to what the prophets say about this year, that everything that can be shaken by God will be shaken? 

From the limited knowledge that we can gather from God's creation purposes, we can only respond by preparing ourselves to His calling, keeping our eyes on the heavenly crown and the highly anticipated marriage to the Lamb of God. 

Perhaps that will be the sixth truth that we shall only know either in the thick of the battle or in the aftermath. The winner will ultimately be the Creator Himself and we, his cherished soldiers, shall decide how well we battle along with Him.