May 4, 2015
The first Star Trek movie ever filmed was a sort of parable in which the good ship Enterprise and its good Captain Kirk and crew are sent on a mission to find out whether an alien spaceship that’s approaching earth is friendly or hostile, and to determine what to do about it. They discover that it’s a very powerful, sophisticated spaceship which was accidentally created by the Voyager 6 space probe sent out from earth to collect information. Then it became a sort of sentient being that was becoming curious as to why it had been created, what it was, and who created it, and it wanted to find its creator. So it was headed back to earth to find its creator.
The space probe created by NASA had gone out into space and learned so much that it was able to become this tremendous spaceship, which was now headed back to earth because it wanted to get acquainted with its creator. It wanted to find out why it had been created and get some answers. This is the general gist of the story.
The implied meaning to this movie is that man has been created, placed here on earth by his Creator. And he’s been formed with a natural inborn desire to find and know his Creator and to be joined to Him, which we know is God. And this is, of course, applicable to us; that’s why God made us. “He has also set eternity in the human heart.”1
The human body in a sense is like a machine, but we’re much more complicated than any machines. We are self-reproducing machines, and we not only have knowledge and logic and the ability to reason, but also emotions and feelings, the greatest of which is love, that lift us far above any machine, animal, or other created thing, although even animals can understand love. Science has found that even plants can understand love. It seems as if all living things are sensitive to love and human emotion. And of course God has put in man’s heart the eternal desire to find and know and love God, his Creator.
Man is always searching for God, and God is searching for man. But man has to find God through the ways God has provided or he’s not going to find Him. And the way that we find the Lord is through His Spirit, which is in a sense His communicator. God is available to man, and God wants man to find Him and know Him, but he has to be willing to turn on his receiver, and desire God and be hungry for God and be willing to listen to God’s communications; most of all, God’s Word. God’s primary way of communicating with man is through His Word. God’s principal means of communicating to man what He is like is Jesus.
God has made a way for man to know his Creator, and He has made that the only way—“the way, the truth, and the life”—and there’s no other mediator or communicator except the man Christ Jesus.2 God has ordained it that if you want to know God, you have to go through Jesus. You have to find Christ. His communication is Jesus, and you have to find God that way. There’s no other way to find God because there is no other God and no other representation or living Word of God except Jesus.
Anyone who truly wants to find the Lord will find Him; God has promised that. Jesus Himself said that He fills the hungry heart, and “If you seek Me, you’ll find Me.”3 If any person really seeks to find the Lord and communicate with Him, the Lord will see to it that he finds Him somehow. There are many salvation testimonies of people who were out trying to find God and trying to seek a reason for their existence, a meaning to their life. “What’s it all about? Who am I? What am I here for?” If they seek Him, they’ll find Him. “That they may know Me, whom to know is life eternal.”4
The Lord has told us to seek Him and we’ll find Him, because He wants to be found. He has sent His Word to communicate with us, Jesus, to reveal Himself to us in the form of His Son, to show us what He’s like.5 God is like Jesus, and the only way you can know what God is like and find Him is through Jesus. That’s His Word, His communication, His message, His answer. When people send out signals to try to find God, if they will listen, they’ll hear God’s answers. The Lord will speak to them. The Lord will lead them to somebody who knows Jesus and who can tell them about Him.
Mankind, the creation of God, is seeking his Creator. A lot of people don’t know it; they don’t realize it. They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. They don’t know who or what they’re seeking; they just want to know who they are, what they’re here for, what’s their meaning, what’s their purpose in life. “Why are we here? Why were we created? Who created us?” We know the answers, isn’t that wonderful? We have the answers to what mankind is looking for, the reason for our existence, the meaning to this life, why we’re here, why we were created.
The whole story is right in the Bible, how the world was created and for what and by whom and how we were put here, leading right up to the story of Jesus, how God’s Son finally came to reveal God to us to show us what God is like. So Jesus, therefore, is His Word, His communication, His message. Jesus is saying, “I am.”6 He’s the Great I Am. In other words, “I am God. I’m God’s Son. I’m His communication. I’m here to show you what God is like. I’m His message.” Jesus is God’s Word, God’s message.
We would have never known what God was like, but through God sending Jesus, He made a picture of Himself, in a sense, to show us what He’s like. He has given us that story and He’s given us that message to spread throughout the whole world and tell man who God is, what He is, what He’s like, and that He loves us, and that He does want to be joined to us and with us, and He wants us to join Him.
This movie is a rather remarkable message that parallels the idea of man’s hunger for God and his Creator. It’s an illustration of man’s heartcry for his Creator, how man hungers for his Creator, the one who made him, and to find out why he was made and what he’s here for, what’s the purpose in his life. Jesus can tell us all of that, and He tells us all of that right in the Bible. Even the Old Testament says, “This is the whole duty of man, to glorify God and keep His commandments.”7 In other words, to thank God for creating him and to obey God. And we know that His commandments can be summed up in two commandments—love God and love your neighbor as yourself.8
As Christians, we have the answers that man is looking for. We are messengers, like the Enterprise in this movie, to go out and find these creations that want to find their Creator, and to tell them who He is and how to know Him and love Him and be joined to Him, like a bride to her husband. Isn’t that the way He compares us? We are called to find the searching souls, to love them, to lead them to the Lord, so that they may become one with Jesus.
That’s our mission; that’s our enterprise, to lead His creations to their Creator that they might be joined with Him and know who He is, what He is, and His love. We’re preparing citizens for the kingdom of God, in order that we might join Him in His great enterprise of the future to restore the whole world and man and set things right, and to make a new world, a heavenly world, the way God intended for it to be.
We are on an enterprise, a mission to explore the world that we might lead people to the Lord and help make a whole new world for God of new people, new children of God, a “new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”9
Originally published April 1988. Adapted and republished May 2015.
Read by Simon Peterson.
1 Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV.
2 John 14:6; 1 Timothy 2:5.
3 Matthew 5:6, 7:7; Jeremiah 29:13.
4 John 17:3.
5 John 1:14.
6 John 8:58.
7 Ecclesiastes 12:13.
8 Matthew 22:37–40.
9 2 Peter 3:13.
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