THE ULTIMATE QUESTION

What is the eternal reason for creation?  This is the ultimate question.

Creation embraces both the spiritual beings we know as angels from eternity past, and the physical creation of time and space, the physical sphere in which we have our part. 

What is the purpose of creation?

I would suggest it is to glorify God.  To 'Glorify' God is to magnify, to expound, to reveal the true nature of God.  To expand on a comment by one of my old teachers; glorification is 'revelation in the interest of absolute truth'.

But why would a God who has everything need to defend his person, why does he need to defend his truth?  Surely he is sufficient in himself?

Lewis Sperry Chafer wrote (somewhere in his Systematic Theology) a passage that went something like this:

'In eternity past before the creation of angels, evil existed only in the abstract, as an antithesis to God.  The creation of living volitional beings brought about the opportunity for evil to take concrete form and in the fullness of time to be destroyed, thereby leaving the goodness of God victorious and unchallenged.'

To establish the supremacy of good over evil necessitated a situation where  a lesser volitional creature  could bring about the reality of evil so that it became a fact not an antithesis.  To then defeat evil by means of justice and love would be clear indisputable revelation 'in the interest of absolute Truth'.

The angels were created and Lucifer, by his own volitional choice, chose to rebel against Truth and so brought evil into reality.

The rest is history AND eschatology.  See both the Old Testament and the New.