God taking His own time

[Kendel]

Hey, @Bucky_Wood!
Interesting questions. And I think your use of the football field may be the best ever.

The Westminster Catechism’s first question helps give some perspective, although it doesn’t directly answer your questions.

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

We’re here go glorify God. Period. All that is, no matter how you want to define it or how far back (billions of years or eternity past), exists/has existed to do the same. The more the glory the better! Strangely, baked into that purpose, we puny humans are somehow given the capacity to actually enjoy God, and to continue to do that forever. There is nothing humanly logical about this. You can’t tease this one out that way.

This model of uninhibited glory and enjoyment absolutely resists utility as we understand it, because as you started to point out,

• our part in the existence of life on the Earth is miniscule compared to the existence of the Earth;
• the existence of Earth is miniscule compared to the existence of the Universe (well, depending on its starting point);
• and finally, the existence of the Universe is simply not to be understood in comparison to the eternality of God.

Like children, who are shocked to find out their parents had fulfilling and busy lives before the children, we are naïve in our tendency to conceive the life of God really took off, when we arrived on the scene. We don’t know what He was doing or why, and even with some hints about what comes after each of us is done repurposing the earthy resources we use in order to have existence, the future is a bit murky. Murky but promising, because of promises we have been given.
We can rage for more information, if we want, but that will also be of no purpose.

I’ll wrap up with this. I am not the first to think about God’s work in the human terms I wrote below. (I’m quoting myself from another thread, because I’m too lazy to retype the same thing.) But I think considering the things we do ourselves for the sheer enjoyment of the process, even if nothing practical or needed is the result, is a way to help us differently and more helpfully think about God’s purposes behind creating anything at all, much less us.

@Kendel

I make stuff. I can’t help it. I do it all the time.
Yesterday, I wound into balls some wool I had bought recently, because I liked the colors in it and the feel of it. The tiny slubs wound into the otherwise smoothly plied wool in radiant shades of my oak and maple and birch trees. What will it be? I really don’t know. Eventually, it will tell me. We will work back and forth, trying rows of stitches to see how the colors behave and what fabric it yields. What structures will work with this? How to show these colors so others see what I see, when it comes from the needles in my hands, so it expresses what I feel in my mind?
The process is joyful work. It will never be until I make it. The Stoff will just remain Stoff. The other yarn in the trunk that is still unformed is still just Stoff and will remain so, until we spend a lot more time together. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the yarns become something other than Stoff, but when they do, the process and product and giving are a joy.

I’d like to propose that there is a maker who makes what is for the pure joy of it and the delight of making something that will eventually lead to living things (as well as many, many other things) in which that maker can delight, and who can delight in the maker. I am proposing that what is is made as an expression of joy and love, as well as an object of joy and love, and capable of spreading that joy and love. The making wasn’t necessary or even useful. But yet…