A Means to an End

“In Your presence is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11).

In the complexities and difficulties of life, it’s hard to keep in focus what our ultimate end is. The end, that is, according to God. For here, we constantly have all sorts of gaps between our present experience and our preferred state. So we pray, asking God to bring about what we want and desire. God being the means to our end.

For the unmarried, it may be a spouse. For the childless, a child. For the unemployed, employment. For the sick, health. For the hungry, food.

And the Bible encourages us to pray for these very things. Our merciful God is pleased when we do. And yet, in the end, are the answers the end? For us, yes. But for God? What is His end?

To answer, we need go no farther than the two commissions given by God to His people. The first to Israel, and the second to Christ’s disciples. One the shadow, and the other the reality. One Canaan, and the other the world.

And in both instances, what were God’s final words? In both, His final words were relational. “…for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9), and “…and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). We’ve been commissioned to go, and go we ought, and yet could the going merely be the means to an end? The end being…….Him.

Yes, from a human perspective, we see God as a means to our end. And in a very real way, He is. Only God can answer our prayers. And yet, might the greater reality be the opposite of our human logic? Might the true gap be intimacy with Christ?

This was Paul's conclusion as he sat in his gap, a Roman dungeon, and declared the startling endgame of his life. Not his release, but “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death” (Philippians 3:10).