The Answer to Life, the Unverse, and Everything

Why are we here? This seems like a question only someone without a knowledge of the truth would ask. Obviously we as Christians know, right? God made us. Why the question is...why? What are we put on this earth to do?

Many would say we are put on this earth to spread the gospel--to witness. Without being harsh I answer to that an emphatic no. Man cannot be created to witness because without sin, a result of man's own disobedience, there would be no need to witness. Eden needed no evangelists, and neither will heaven. Also, God can (and often has) brought men to Him entirely without our help. Witnessing is a blessing for us in participating in God's plan, but it is not our chief end.

Our chief end, the reason we were created and still exist, is to glorify God. This is why we were made. This is why He gave us a will--because we can praise Him better than any animal.

I've been thinking about this as we discuss Worship in the class Foundations of Church Music. Since worship is our purpose, it must be pretty important to God. But why?

When I was a little kid the hardest part of prayer for me to understand was praise. How do you praise God? I started by simply saying, "You are a Great God." But, I thought, didn't God already know this? How can it satisfy God to hear us telling Him what He knows infinitely better.

This leads to another important fact I have come to believe--Our worship does not benefit God. It pleases Him, yes, but it does not improve Him or change Him at all. God cannot grow, cannot be made greater by our praise or anything else. What do you get the God who has everything?

So why does He want worship? It often strikes us as strange how much God likes to focus on His greatness. He commands us to praise. As I said in an earlier note, He often even breaks us down just so that we realize how much we need Him. Is this pride? Obviously not, because He deserves it. But still, it sometimes seems petty, like something a pagan god would demand, to demand our praise. How can our praise mean anything to Him?

I submit that He wants our praise more for our sake than His. God is a God of order. He desires things to be as they should be. The natural order is for the weak to praise the Almighty. Even the rocks and trees know this--as they are all prepared to sing if we slack off. So He created us--vessels to praise Him, because that's the way things are supposed to work.

That's why He likes to break us--not so He can stand over us and say, "I told you so. I told you you needed me." But because when we are lying on the ground, our back broken and face crushed in the mud, we can finally have peace. We can stop trying to do things ourselves and let Him take care of it. It's much better for us to rest in the medical tent than to try and run into a battle only He can win.

Worship should never be done with a selfish attitude. Our goal is to praise God, not to benefit ourselves. But as we worship Him, we find ourselves overwhelmed with the peace that comes from things being as they should. And somehow, in some inexplicable way, the refuse that we offer up as praise is a sweet smell in His nostrils, and our feeble attempts to do Him justice put a smile on the face of the God who cannot be improved upon.