Of Man and God’s Work

On the sacred mountain, made sacred by the personal presence of the Divine, Moses spoke face to face with God, without whom “was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:3)  Moses beheld in vision the many creations of God and many worlds on which God had placed His children, much as with this creation.  The Lord explained to Moses that, “as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.” (Moses 1:38)

That creative work is what God does and has been doing and will continue to do.  Then God explained to Moses the “Why” behind it all:

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.  (Moses 1:39)

That is to say that what God does is entirely purposeful, the “what” of His work intrinsically tied to the “Why.”  And why He does what He does, and what He does, is all related to man.  We are His children, and the Father is literally our Father.  On the morning of His resurrection, the Father’s firstborn son, Jesus Christ, declared to Mary Magdalene, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father” (John 20:17).  The Son was speaking literally not figuratively. 

Our Heavenly Father is more interested in our growth and progress than even the most loving earthly parents are in the growth and progress of their children.  His happiness is connected with our happiness and progress, His “job satisfaction” derived from our moral improvement.  That improvement, in turn, comes from the righteous exercise of our freedom to choose and do good. 

The exercise of our choice is all that we can give to God that He does not have, and He will not deprive us of that power of choice.  He will not take it, because by doing so our “choice” becomes worthless to Him.  It is the fullest and therefore richest exercise of that freedom that He seeks and applies His own effort to empower and encourage and protect.  To diminish our freedom is to diminish its worth to Him.  Compelled virtue is no virtue at all and has no value to the Father or to His children.  By choosing good in an environment where we may select evil we become good; by living virtuously among full opportunities to embrace vice we become virtuous.  Through that process—with the free gift of the Savior to retrieve us, upon conditions of repentance, from evil choices—we expand our freedom, rejecting all that would enslave us.  In so doing we qualify for God’s ultimate gift, eternal life.     

That is the process and what life is all about.  God devotes His attention to creating the necessary environment and conditions for our eternal progression.  Then He stays involved to help each of us as much as we will allow.  His love for us extended to the sacrificial offering of His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, who used His own free will to rescue us out of the depths of evil if we would apply what choice we may have left to turn with all our hearts away from darkness toward light.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  (John 3:16)

This being God’s work and His glory, He cares very much about what we do that affects that work and glory.  That is also to say that nothing else we do matters to Him.  It is only in the context of His work for our immortality and eternal life that anything we do really matters.  God is probably not very interested in whether we buy the blue car or the white car, per se, as it has little bearing on immortality and eternal life.  God could be interested, however, if we choose to buy the blue car after agreeing beforehand with our spouse to buy the white one, as unity in marriage matters a great deal to our eternal progress, as does keeping promises.

All of this begs the question, if something does not matter to God, should it matter much to us?  In fact, paying excessive attention to the minutiae and distractions of life can become a big deal, if doing so draws our time and effort away from what truly drives virtue.

Customs and traditions can do this very thing.  Consider the recent Christmas season.  Were there little things, maybe many little things, that competed for your focus on Christ and the commemoration of His mission, and the many good works that the Christmas season offered?  Customs and traditions can do that if we are not careful. 

The Savior, during his mortal ministry in Galilee and Judea, frequently pointed the people to their traditions that interfered with what He called the “weightier matters”, such as “judgment, mercy, and faith”.  He called that straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matthew 23:23, 24).  Do we not see a similar error in the political correctness of today that raises an uproar over a stray word—no matter how ugly—while embracing all varieties of immorality and family destruction? 

God’s work is all related to us, because we are related to Him.  Knowing God’s work, and making it our work, may be as important and valuable for us today as it was for Moses in his time.  I suspect so.