What Is Man?

Long ago, king David asked God, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?” (Ps 8:4). People have many things in common with animals. They breathe the same air: they eat similar food; they have many of the same needs. But people are different from animals.

We want to know why we are here; what is our purpose on this earth, since we know that we only live a few short years? “His (man’s) days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower of the field, the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (Ps 103:15).

How should we use our time? Should we live only to satisfy the needs of our bodies? The apostle Paul said to the Corinthians, “For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said, ‘I will live with them and walk among them and I will be their God.’ Should we spend our time looking for the pleasures of this world? Because we are different from animals, we want to know where we are going when we die. “By the sweat of your brow, you will eat food until you return to the ground from which you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19).

How can we find the answer to these questions? The only one who can give us the answer is God who created us.

What makes people different from animals? The apostle Paul answered this question when he wrote to the Christians in Thessalonica: “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.”

Animals have social and physical bodies but not the power of reasoning. “A man who has riches without understanding is like the beasts that perish” (Ps 49:12 and 20). “Who teaches more to us than the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?” (Job 35:11).

Life on earth is very short. Death will soon come to each one of us. Therefore, we are not wise if we live only to satisfy the needs of our bodies. We are also very foolish if we live only for the pleasure of this world. “Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15-17). “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” (Matt 16:26).

Our purpose on this earth is to bring glory to God by doing what He told us to do in the Bible. A wise man wrote: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecc 12:13).

Bro Fred Mumba (Mufulira, Zambia)