subject: Are We All Descendants Of God [print this page] According to the previous Worldwide Church of God founded by Herbert W. Armstrong, and even some of its fractured remnants to this day, the reason God created humankind was to reproduce Himself.
This surprising, thoroughly original proposal is one of many attractions of this church that once drew millions of supporters around the world. Among its many highly unusual views and sentiments, this is potentially the most unusual one of all, that the entire universe was created by God as an incubator of the human race, with the intention of reproducing Himself and populating it with his own descendants!
Why would God not just recreate Himself by fiat, same as He divided the heavens from the land and sea as recorded in the Book of Genesis? How could a God who made asexual reproduction in simple single-celled amoebae not be able to simply divide or clone Himself if reproduction was his aim? Why go thru all the hassle of 7 days of creation?
According to this church, it is perhaps because reproducing Himself means first and most important reproducing His own moral character. God gave mankind free moral agency as he Himself has free moral agency, and it's this free will that distinguishes God, and by extension though to a much smaller degree, man, from all of the creation, even angels, the servants of God.
The world is, basically, a kind of establishing grounds similar to an army boot camp where training and testing is conducted, only in this case of life the goal is to become God sort of, that means to be moral, fair and just like Him. This concept handily explains why such a good and all-powerful God could allow evil in the world, for evil is but a test to establish which souls are worthy of Godhood.
