God wants us to have a close relationship with him and not a religion, because religion is man trying to reach God, a distant and distant God, while the relationship is about God reaching man, and God reaches us through of his son Jesus Christ.
God sent his Son Jesus Christ to redeem us from sin, (sin is the culprit of distorting our original design and the guilty of having broken our connection with God). Jesus Christ came then to return us to the original state we had, so that we could return to the purpose for which we were created, so that we would be light in the midst of the darkness of the world in which we live.