The Urge of Him Who Lives Forever & Ever.

"Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created."

What is the meaning of life? Why did God create the Universe? Who made God? What's it all about?

All these questions are shadows, haunted hollows.  It is these and more that the vision given to John on Patmos fills and answers with fire.

"You Created all things" 

This is Divine data, written on the fabric of the Universe like a watermark and received by  all, though suppressed by some.  This is the "what".

"...by your will they existed and were created."

What is deeper, further back, more fundamental than the will?  When we speak of causes, reasons, and the like ("I did this because I was low on sleep/had too much coffee/grew up in a broken home/didn't take my meds etc...), we aren't talking about the will.  

The will is uncaused, it doesn't exist as a cog in the mechanical cause & effect realm (though it dialogues with it).  The will perceives possibilities, and chooses.  God's will, the source of all created wills, is infinitely more so uncaused.  There is no sense in asking what caused God to will the universe, seen and unseen, into existence.   

This is not to say that God's decision to create was arbitrary or frivolous.  We call decisions without thought arbitrary, and decisions without serious purpose or value we call frivolous. But this cannot be applied to God, and may be misleading even when speaking of human wills.  God is personal, and is the ultimate ground and source of thought and purpose.  If such a being has a desire, it will not (by nature of its source) be thoughtless or purposeless in the sense connoted by "arbitrary/frivolous". 

The will (θέλημα, in Greek as used in the verse above), is synonymous with desire. And persons desire. Mechanical flowcharts (of the kind many neuroscientists and psychologists want to reduce us to) do not.  The will is a fundamental thing, which is a source of other things - it is not a product,of other things. Our wills are informed and presented with possibilities by the external created universe, but God, at the point of Creation, was limited by no such externals.  Only the council of the Father, Word, and Spirit.  The desire of God.  His Love - for what is Love but a fundamental preference, or desire?

As God showed Julian of Norwich:
"He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding, and thought: what may this be? And it was answered thus: "It is all that is made". I marveled how it might last, for I thought if might suddenly have fallen into nothing for its smallness. And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it."

Or as George MacDonald says it:
"We do not, I mean, to speak after the manner of men, come of God's intellect, but of His imagination. He did not make us with His hands, but loved us out of His heart."

And as such things loved into existence - or even, thank God, more than things: persons with wills in God's own image! - what can we do but say with those in the vision:

"Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power!"