Thursday, August 20, 2009

Why Nothing Out of Something


Why Nothing out of Something


Why do we have children? Because there is within us an innate desire and generosity to begin life. We want to relive our lives again through our children. It might be about 2nd chances. We hope they won’t make the mistakes we’ve made. We hope they

will have more prosperity and more success than we have had.
Why did God create us? To say he created us simply to bring glory to himself hints that he is selfish instead of selfless. It wasn’t because he was lonely! The trinity is complete and the separate entities complement themselves perfectly so that to suggest that God was lonely seems certainly absurd. Might he have created us because of his abounding generosity?
Someone asked theologian Paul Tillich is his youth, “Why something out of nothing?” What was God thinking when he decided to spawn new life from nothing? That question prompted Tillich to launch out on a long quest to understand the nature of God.
Long ago, when there was nothing but God, God must have been prompted by his own generosity, his own goodness. The wonder of his existence was too good to keep to himself. So, he created. He emanated from himself the gift of life. He created man in his own image. He wanted others to know the wonder of existing, of thinking and being and doing.
I find myself struggling sometimes with the unfairness of life, the injustices of the world in which I live. Sometimes, I even struggle with the apparent unfairness of God himself. My problem is that I frame the terms defining fairness with a finite mind and apply them to one who is infinite. The injustices of this world are more than neutralized by the grace of one who gave me the wonderful gift of existence. When we learn to simply appreciate the fact that we have the gift of life then we can minimize the unfairness and begin to share life generously with others as God chose to share life with us.

1 comment:

  1. This is collin, i too wonder why God created us because he knew that sin would enter the world and that we would fall into it. He could have made us perfect like Him, but he didnt. That could be because if we were we would question why he is God and we aren't. We want to have children because we want to like you said have a second chance or just want to create another living person. I agree with your opinion.

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