What Is My Mission?نموونە

God’s Purpose in Creation

Why does the cultural mandate matter? What does your work have to do with it? What’s the point?

In the first five days of creation in Genesis 1, God “saw that it was good.” Yet, at the end of the sixth day we read, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Why is there this difference on the sixth day?

At the end the creation story, God was delighted in all of his work. It gave him great pleasure, and everything worked exactly as he planned. There was a “very good,” complex interdependency throughout all of creation.

We read in Revelation 4 that the purpose of the creation is to glorify the creator. Just as a great painting reflects the glory of the master artist, creation reflects the glory of God. God is most glorified when his creation works like it was designed to work. This design is epitomized by the Old Testament idea of shalom – full, universal flourishing in all aspects of life. Shalom was present in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. It’s how creation is intended to operate.

While shalom has been lost, the gospel empowers Christians to be faithful to God’s original calling in the cultural mandate. We reweave shalom by exercising stewardship, subduing the earth, and making it useful for the benefit of others. In other words, you bring about flourishing by obeying the cultural mandate.

Jesus Christ is our model for reweaving shalom on earth through stewardship. His life is the ultimate example of giving people a glimpse of how things could be – of what creation might be when it is restored in the new heavens and new earth.

Jesus’s time on earth took place in the third chapter of the four-chapter gospel. Redemption explains “the way things could be.” When Jesus healed the blind man and fed the five thousand, he was demonstrating that there could be a time when no one is blind and no one is hungry.

As Christ’s disciples in the present age, we should be imitating him by working to bring about flourishing until the he comes back. The work you do here and now is important to God. It serves as a signpost to point others to the new heavens and new earth, where all of God’s children will one day live in perfect shalom. Until then, your calling is to work for shalom in the world to glorify God, by his grace reweaving the unraveled fabric of this broken earth.

How can you reweave shalom in your work?

Additional Elements

Read about a real-life example of one person “reweaving shalom” in a broken urban city in need of Christ in, “Restoration on the West Side of Jacksonville.”