THE
PURPOSE OF GOD
Everything that God does in His ransomed children has as its long-range purpose the final restoration of the divine image in human nature. Everything looks forward to the con-summation.68
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God never acts without purpose—never. People act without purpose…. A great deal of what we do in the church today is purposeless. But God never acts without a purpose. Intellect is an attribute of the deity. God has intellect and this means that God thinks; and so God never does anything without an intelligent purpose. Nothing in this world is without meaning.69
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God put the universe together with a purpose and there isn’t a single useless thing anywhere, not any spare parts; everything fits into everything else. God made it like that. Science of course deals with the relation of things and their effect upon each other. But the plain people, the simple people, the people who would rather believe than to know, and who would rather worship than to discover—they have a simpler and a more beautiful view of the world. They say that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and that God made everything and put it in its place and gave it meaning and purpose and a task to fulfill in relation to all other things which He also made.70
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But God saw that the world wasn’t complete, so as the poem has it, this great God who threw the stars into the sky and made the sun and holds all the universe in His hand, this great God stooped down by the riverbank and took a piece of clay and, like a mammy bending over her baby, He worked on this clay until it became a man and into it He blew the breath of life and it became a living soul. Amen! Amen! That’s what we believe. We don’t think about it in quite such a physical way as that, but we believe that God in His intelligence created the universe with intelligent purpose back of it.71
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God made man for a purpose and that purpose is given by the catechism; the answer is, “To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” God made us to be worshipers. That was the purpose of God in bringing us into the world.72
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God seeks out those who are willing that their lives should be fashioned according to His own grace and love. He sifts out those who cannot see God’s purpose and design for our blessing.73