Worship, Worship and Worth

Rev 4:11: Thou art worthy, O our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honour and power; for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created.

If we only could answer the most fundamental questions in life? We would at least make sense of it all, right? Where did we come from? How did we come to be and for what reason? Were we somewhere else before we arrived? I am not attempting to present new answers or a convincing explanation in this piece. Generations of men from the beginning of history have suggested and affirmed many explanations for our existence. The modern scientists are convinced that we are a result of a cosmic catastrophe: the big bang. Medieval mythology traces our roots to other worldly beings and evolutionists claim that we came from apes. Some more elegant conspiracy theory describes an alien civilization which, facing the inevitability of absolute extinction, sent the first human DNA aboard a spaceship on an intergalactic voyage to earth! How interesting, how intriguing, how clueless, how unscientific! None of the above theories have been convincingly rationalized with impeccable evidence. And unsatisfied humanity, in her quest to find answers, has been compelled into the exploration of the irrational.

Logical answers are constrained by the requirement of reasonability, but religious answers are not. At the last count, there were over one hundred of them each having a unique approach to men’s confounding predicament. The foundation for religious proliferation is not mankind’s genuine thirst for the absolute and accurate truth, but a desire to find an appealing, acceptable, convenient and placating explanation. In a world were nobody knew the truth and no avenue for discovering the truth existed, religion would be morally justified, and we would be guiltless if we all chose an answer that suited our style.  In a sense, if you could imagine it, whatever it was and however you came about it, then it could be true.  Fortunately, or perhaps now unfortunately, this is not our world.

The absolute truth does exist and is accessible. The explanation to the fundamental is not a theory but a person. Yes, we came from God, were created by Him and for His purpose. The scientific and yet religious explanations to the rudimentary quests of humanity, and our longing for primary awareness must begin and end in the God of the bible. God is, and then everything else subsists from His being. This is the intellectual foundation upon which any genuine thought must be constructed. Satan, the chief purveyor of a probable exception to this all-encompassing model, will be afforded all of time to prove his doubts. It is at the end of all the satanic experimentation and prodding that we find the above quotation. This portion of scripture is an eternal verity that has held from the very outset of time but sadly would only be universally accepted at its conclusion. Eternity would thus awaken and resume from the present temporal intermission after the divine debate has been finally and permanently laid to rest.

 It is wisdom to realize that the purpose of God in making man in His own image is to prepare us for the satanic temptation to doubt His existence or even our subsistence from Him. If the mystique of the evil one were removed, all anthropologists will quickly become theologians, and all theologians will become Christian. The wisdom behind everything can be simply put: God is desirous of worship, and we earn our worth and existence from his choice to have us serve this purpose. When God, in His absolute but merciful sovereignty, desires to transcribe divine script into natural consequence, He picks up a human pen.

Therefore, the genesis and destiny of humanity lie somewhere between God and His divine plan. The supreme relevance of this statement is not because it attempts to answer our fundamental questions. No, the truth does not exist to satisfy our curiosities, nor can it satisfy our curiosities. Rather, the purpose of truth is to certify the illegitimacy of our curiosities: to expose our questioning as an echoing of the satanic affront on God. To search for knowledge in itself is to automatically drift away from truth. The truth, being divine, would not lend itself to wrestle against satanic lust in the minds of men. The purpose of God in revealing truth to man is to bring conviction in our hearts towards the rejection of questioning. God’s light of truth does not resolve the puzzle of curiosities; it dispels the satanic darkness of questioning. Let God present profound and conclusive answers to all our questions, and we will still be as hapless and helpless as we earlier were. By design, man will only gain fulfillment in the genuine worship of the biblical God through the path of Christ.