Is It Reasonable that God Would Care About Us?

At http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2017/02/and-when-evil-is-greater-than-good-from.html I discussed why it is that God doesn’t eliminate evil that is just so great there seems to be no surpassing benefit from it. I tied this into the role of God’s love.

That might seem easier to swallow if it could be explained why God would even care about us in the first place.   Why should we mean any more to him than a bacteria does to us?

1.     The Bible often alludes to characteristics of God which seem to be quite human.  There is a reason for that, and that is that we are made is his image, after his likeness.  There are implications to that, aside from the important one that man can become God (in a sense) and God can become man.  It is doubtful that this is a reference to physical appearance since God is not physical, but to personal qualities.   There is that statement of Ecc. 7:29, “God made mankind upright”, which brings takes the focus of man’s likeness away from physical appearance.  There are things about man that appear designed to make him compatible with God.  It is quite deliberate.  Man was made that way by God.   We just happen upon bacteria; we don’t make them the way they are.

2.     We mustn’t confuse our powerlessness with meaninglessness.  An infant is small and powerless beside his parents, but does that diminish their affinity?         

3.     We mean something to him because he is Love. 

4.     God’s care for us is what we ought to suppose would result if he made us specifically to have certain characteristics that are so identifiable with his own.

5.     The proof that God personally cares about us is that he demonstrated this care by sending his son to die for us.

If we rely upon the Bible, we see that we are a very big part of his plan.  He has made a people for himself: “You are my people” he says in Isaiah 51:16.   Hebrews 2:10: “For it is fitting for Him, for who are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory…”  Just because we seem so insignificant against the backdrop of eternity and against the totality of the universe is no evidence that we actually are when we assume that it was all built for him to share with us.   We see that all things exist for Christ (Hb. 2:10) and that he will share it with us (Revelation 3:21).  He is “firstborn among many brethren” (Romans. 8:29).