The Meaning of Man

Psalm 8:3-4 “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

Having purchased the new Institute of Creation Research video series on the Universe for our Wednesday evening Small Group Bible Study Group, I came across this uplifting devotion on mankind’s place in the Universe. This question in Psalm 8 has been posed as a rhetorical question by many generations of skeptics, especially in our present generation when the tremendous size of the universe is often used to argue that God, if He exists, could not possibly be interested in such a small speck of dust as our own planet ... the pale blue dot.

But, essentially, the same argument was used against Job by one of his three “miserable comforters” over 3,500 years ago. “How then can man be justified with God? . . . that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?”.This dismal type of reasoning, however, is utterly fallacious. Significance is not a function of size, but of purposeful complexity, and the human brain is surely the most complex physical system in the entire universe, as acknowledged even by such an eminent atheistic scientist as Isaac Asimov. Rather than being insignificant nonentities, men and women have been created in the very image of God and are the objects of His redeeming love.

Philippians 2:5-7 “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.”

The most wonderful measure of man’s importance is the fact that God, Himself, became a man! Christ incarnate, came “in the likeness of men” to be able to take our death penalty upon Himself. Furthermore, God’s love for man is measured not only by His substitutionary death for our sins, but also by His eternal creative purpose for us. He has redeemed us so that “in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” - Ephesians 2:7. There is the meaning of man because God created everything for a purpose.

Praise be to God!