One of the most quoted Bible verses of all time is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Yet its interpretation is often shaped more by the lens of our own lives than by its theological context. When read according to modern proclivities, it can lead the hearer to believe that God’s primary motive in creating the world and sending Jesus was out of his love for humanity—and, by extension, that God’s story is ultimately about us and our salvation.
This subtly casts us as the central subjects in the story of redemption, making us the authors and arbiters of meaning and relegating God to a character in our stories—a figure we can define to fit our narratives and employ for our own ends.
In the church, this can look like consumer-oriented services, self-centered worship songs, numbers-driven missions, a transactional view of salvation, and an overemphasis on individual spiritual growth.
But the gospel is not primarily about our redemption. It’s not centered on us and what we can gain from God, but it’s ultimately on God in Jesus Christ. By shifting the focus away from ourselves, we discover a far greater story—one where God’s love, glory, and eternal purposes take center stage, inviting us to find our true meaning and joy in Christ.
Every created thing exists because of God, through God, and for God (Rom. 11:36). The New Testament makes these points specific to Christ. All creation exists in, through, and for Christ (Col. 1:16), “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Rev. 22:13). In the end, Christ will reign over the entirety of creation “so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:25–28). In the words of theologian David Fergusson, “The world was made so that Christ might be born.”
So while it may feel central to our stories, any personal experience of salvation is merely an appendix to the central plot.
God’s all-encompassing purposes of reconciliation go well beyond individual salvation to the restoration of creation under Christ’s lordship. Far from diluting the gospel’s imperatives or sidelining its call to repentance and discipleship, this reading of God’s cosmic story deepens our understanding of our place in God’s creation. It invites us to live out our faith in light of the reality that there is nothing truer, nothing greater, than following Christ.
To show what a difference this makes, we’ll consider two ways of telling the gospel story: one centered on us and one centered on God. As we’ll see, the meaning of Easter shifts profoundly depending on which story we adopt.
When centered on us, the story begins with viewing creation primarily as a home for humanity. In the beginning, all creation was declared by God to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31). We might call this God’s “Plan A.” In this view, the Garden of Eden represents a paradisal environment in which we are designed to live in harmony with God, provided we make the right choices. However, we chose disobedience, disrupting this harmony and forcing God to change plans.
When centered on God, the story begins with God’s decision to bring the world into existence—not as an end in itself, but to find its end in God. Creation is not primarily about us but about the reflection (or imaging) of God’s glory, goodness, and overflowing love.
Humanity is then created in God’s image—not to find inherent value and dignity but to reflect God in the world. This calling anticipates the coming of the Son, “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15). In this way, God blesses humanity and declares it good.
Yet God also warns that if humans seek to become like God on their own terms, by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they will be separated from God and their lives marred by death. When Adam and Eve disobey, this is what takes place.
So begins the reconciliation story—in which God awakens his creatures from their deluded fictions to restore their harmony with God’s story.
When centered on us, Israel’s history is about God making a deal with a particular people—one that hinges on their participation and response. My grandfather, the theologian James Torrance, called this kind of conditional response a “contract” rather than a true “covenant.”
In this view, we read the text as though there is a contractual agreement between God and Abraham: “If you will be my people, then I will be your God”; “If you keep the law, then I will be faithful to you.” This frames God’s relationship with Israel as legally and morally conditioned on the people’s faithfulness. And when Israel fails to uphold its side of the bargain, the relationship deteriorates, resulting in exile and separation from God.
When centered on God, God’s relationship with Israel through Abraham (Gen. 17:7) is a divine covenant because it is rooted in God’s unconditional promise: “I will be your God, and you will be my people” (Lev. 26:12, NLT). Then, 430 years later (Gal. 3:17), God clarifies the expectations of this chosen people—in sum, “I am the Lord your God,” therefore “keep my commands” (Ex. 20:2–17; Lev. 22:31). Israel’s religious identity is not self-chosen but given to them as characters in God’s narrative.
Even in times of defiance, Israel’s identity remains intact. Their rebellion can only ever reflect a resistance to their true nature, a pretense of being other than who they truly are.
This is because, as biblical scholar Jon Levenson writes, while “Israel’s capacity to sin may have proved more powerful than their love for God . . . God’s love for them proves more powerful than sin.” The apostle Paul explains to the Roman church that “as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:28–29).
Yet Israel’s defiance reflects a broader human tendency: the impulse to “play God” by defining ourselves according to our own fictions, set in opposition to God’s story of creation.
When centered on us, Jesus is viewed as “Plan B,” a response to humanity’s failure to uphold its side of the relationship with God. In this framework, God the Father makes an agreement with the Son to fulfill the law on behalf of sinful humanity. By becoming incarnate, suffering, and dying on the cross, the Son takes on our punishment, satisfying God’s justice and enabling forgiveness. This act bridges the separation caused by sin, opening the way for a renewed relationship between God and humanity.
In this narrative, Jesus is not the ultimate purpose of creation but a means to humanity’s ultimate end: eternal life in a perfected state. Achieving this, however, requires we accept redemption through faith. Creation’s story, therefore, depends not solely on God’s actions but also on human choices. To attain everlasting life, God requires repentance and commitment to faith in Christ, placing the story’s culmination partly in human hands.
This perspective ultimately frames creation’s story as a divine negotiation with human autonomy. God creates a world with the capacity to find value in and of itself—independent of God’s purposes. God then sustains this world, guiding humanity in its search for purpose while carefully respecting our self-determination. Made in God’s image, all humans possess a capacity for judgment, creativity, and self-direction that allows us to pursue our own independent ends.
In this view, creation’s story remains unfinished until humanity embraces Christ through faith to achieve eternal life and ultimate fulfillment. Here, the central question of Easter becomes “How do we integrate Christ into our personal journey of salvation?”
When centered on God, creation is not an end in itself but a part of God’s eternal purpose, culminating in Jesus Christ. Christ is not a “Plan B” in response to humanity’s failure; rather, he reveals the true end of creation. In the Incarnation, God’s living Word enters creation’s story as a human who both reveals the truth of God’s story and is subjected to the false narratives that humanity constructs.
On one hand, God does not leave creation’s story in human hands but brings it to its intended conclusion through the incarnate Son. By the Holy Spirit, we are united to Christ, who embodies true humanity and defines our true roles, identity, and belonging in God’s story. Christ is not merely a path to wisdom, righteousness, and redemption—he personifies these qualities and invites us to walk as he walked (1 Cor. 1:30; 1 John 2:6).
On the other hand, Christ steps into humanity’s sinful stories of death and disorder. He fully embraces the human condition, taking upon its fatal consequences as “the Judge judged in our place,” to borrow Karl Barth’s phrase. Through the Resurrection, our false narratives are exposed as fiction and swept away by God’s redemptive power.
The story of Easter is thus not about balancing or neutralizing sin but about the collapse of sin’s false narrative under the weight of God’s grace and truth. In Christ, creation is brought to the eternal conclusion God had always ordained for it.
Now that we know Easter’s song isn’t ultimately about us, we’re left with important questions: Where do we fit in? How then is God for us? The answer lies in the profound yet puzzling truth that God is for us because God is for God. When viewed through a Trinitarian lens, this begins to make sense.
The reason for creation is rooted in the eternal love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. Creation naturally flows out of this love—beginning in the Father’s love for the Son and finding fulfillment in the Son’s reciprocal love for the Father, all through the Spirit. In this way, both the beginning and end of creation are rooted in the eternal life and love of the Trinity. This means, as Augustine observes, that while “every [human] is to be loved as a [human] for God’s sake,” “God is to be loved for His own sake.”
Creation only exists because God determined that God’s love should overflow into something new—something other than God. The world is not meant to merge back into God but to exist as a gift—which the Father gives to the Son and the Son returns to the Father, all in the Spirit.
This divine exchange revolves around the Incarnation. The Father sends the Son to identify with creation so that, in and through him, creation can return to the Father. In this way, God is for us in Christ by enabling us to be for God in Christ. According to Augustine, it is “by [Christ that humans] come, to [Christ] they come, in [Christ] they rest.”
This is how creation finds its perfection—by being drawn together in Christ into the triune exchange of life and love.
When we grasp this truth, we see that creation is part of something far greater than it could ever be in and of itself. We cannot, then, find perfection solely within our intrinsic nature. If we reduce God’s purposes in the gospel to our personal salvation or renewal, we miss the larger story. Our ultimate purpose is not found in ourselves but in God, as we are invited to share in the eternal giving and receiving of love that defines the triune God. Only by participating in this divine communion do we discover our true identity and the perfect purpose for which we were created.
What does this mean for how we understand reconciliation today? Too often, Christians reduce the gospel’s meaning to the way we secure a place in heaven after death. But this misses the heart of its message. The Christian life is not merely preparation for a distant hope; it is an invitation to participate in Christ’s kingdom here and now. Through the revelation of Jesus, we are called to embrace the beauty and goodness of God’s new creation in the present day.
Still, many of us resist this call. We may reluctantly serve God out of obligation, hoping to earn a future reward. Yet in our hearts, we do not relish how Jesus’ commands—such as charging us to care for the sick, the hungry, and the strangers among us (Matt. 25:35–36)—will upend our comfortable lives. But this mindset reveals a troubling question: If we have no desire to live in God’s kingdom today, what makes us think we would desire it tomorrow? Without realizing it, we can become impostors, professing faith but defying its transformative power.
So where is our hope? It does not lie in imperfect actions or half-hearted beliefs but rests entirely in God. The Resurrection is not just a historical event but also the source of all true and lasting hope. God’s power brings us new life, far beyond what we can achieve for ourselves.
The gospel of Jesus invites us to awaken from our finite tales into the reality of God’s story—to breathe in the resurrection life that has already begun and extends into eternity. It thus poses to us a question: Do we want to wake up?
Andrew Torrance is a professor of theology at the University of St Andrews. His latest books include Accountability to God and the coauthored Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth.
This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "The Crux of Creation".
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