And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.— Genesis 1:31
Nothing names its own purpose. A cup never decided to hold water. Someone was thirsty, shaped clay around that thirst, and the purpose existed before the cup did.
This is why the question of what we are for can’t be settled by looking inward alone. None of us chose to be born. We arrived already made, and the reason was in place before our first breath. If we want to know it, we have to ask the One who made us.
Genesis answers by the way the story slows down. Six times God looks at what He has made and calls it good. Just good. Then He creates humanity in His own image (Genesis 1:26–27), looks at everything together, and the word changes for the first time. Tov me’od (טוֹב מְאֹד). Very good.
The verdict covers the whole creation. But it reaches its highest note only once there is someone in that creation who can love Him back.
Go back to the clocks for a moment. A clock on the wall serves everyone in the room. A wristwatch goes where we go. An alarm clock drags us out of bed. They have different shapes and different jobs, and one thing underneath all of them. If a watch with a cracked band still keeps time, we keep the watch. If one has stopped, we say it is dead. The case is intact, the hands are still there, but a clock that cannot tell time has lost the only thing that made it a clock.
When people are asked what they are living for, most of us answer with the extras. Nurse. Teacher. Parent. Painter. These are good callings, and God gives them. They are also the strap and the alarm.
Jesus was once asked which commandment mattered most. His answer went straight under everything else: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). He called it “the great and first commandment” (Matthew 22:38).
This was not new information. Jesus was reaching all the way back to the beginning, to the reason we were made in the first place. The God who looked at creation and said “very good” made us to love Him and to love one another. We were made for love. And it is possible to go a long time without remembering that. We can account for every hour of a full day and still not know what the day was for. The watch looks fine. It just isn’t keeping time.
God did not need us. He is the One who simply is (Exodus 3:14), God “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2), lacking nothing before the world began and lacking nothing now (Acts 17:25).
Love, though, has never run on need. Anyone who has held a newborn knows this. The baby brings nothing, can do nothing, and is wanted completely. Love looks for someone to give itself to. Seen from inside that world, the reason a self-existent, eternal God made us turns out to be simple, and almost too much to receive. He wanted us. He wanted to love us. Before we were made for anything else, we were made to be loved.
And love that is given wants an answer. We were made to be loved, and then, knowing that we are loved, to love Him in return. When the first man and woman hid among the trees, God’s first words were a question: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). He knew where they were. What He was grieving was distance. At its heart, the Fall was a love that stopped answering.
Jesus told of a shepherd with ninety-nine sheep who still went out after one (Luke 15:4–7). Ninety-nine were not enough, because none of them was that one. Somewhere in God’s heart is a place that only one particular person’s love can answer, and nobody else can stand in for them.
Near the end of the fourth century, Augustine opened his Confessions with a prayer that still reads like a diagnosis: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
When love is answered, joy follows, and Scripture says God feels it too: “he will rejoice over you with gladness” (Zephaniah 3:17). “Very good” was the first sound of that joy.
Loving God does not come naturally to us. We drifted far enough that the affection has to be relearned, and we cannot manufacture it. It is given, as “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5), and it grows slowly as we keep returning to His Word.
So here is a question worth turning over. When did we last wonder what would make God glad? We know what would make our children glad, our spouse, our closest friend, because we think about them. How often does He cross our minds that way on an ordinary, unhurried day, when nothing is urgent and no crisis is driving us to our knees?
If you are reading this and someone, maybe yourself, has told you that you add nothing, there is a place in His heart no one else can answer.
We were made to love Him back. Everything else is the strap.
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