Warning day2

 There is a God.

You are not Him.

You may be good, but you are not God.

The Bible is unique among religious literature in many ways. Most noticeably, from the very beginning, we are given a realistic assessment of human nature in its dignity, its dependence and its potential for total depravity. Only the Judeo-Christian Bible describes each facet adequately.

Here in the earliest portion of the Bible, we read that the Creator decided, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1.26). It is worth mentioning the plural pronoun in this verse. There’s a clue as to the nature and character of God, and I’ll certainly double-click on that later. For now, we should explore this idea of what it means to be made in the image of God.

An image is a reflection. In this case, it is a person or thing that closely resembles another. We talk about a son being the image of his father. In a similar way, humans have been made to demonstrate something of the character and nature of God. Other parts of creation were good, but nothing else was created in God’s very image. Humans are distinct in this. We’re not just highly developed animals. We’re not just a bundle of body parts and nerve endings. We’re not just overgrown germs. We’re created in the image of God, and this should bring us a profound sense of dignity.

And yet, it’s also very obvious from the first pages of the Bible that we are not God. Created in His image? Yes. But there is a sharp dividing line between the Creator and the creation.

God fashioned the first human “out of the dust of the ground” (Gen 2.7), and then He called that first human “Adam”, which sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word for “earth,” as in dirt. It’s almost as if God named the first man “Dusty” as a reminder of where the man came from.

Furthermore, that human did not come to life until God had “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2.7). In a sense, God continues to do this with each and every one of us, giving “all men life and breath and everything else” (Ac 17.25). If God should decide one day to extinguish the sun or to drain all the oxygen out of our atmosphere, we would be helpless to escape our impending doom. It is only because of the benevolent patience of God that we are able to continue living. Only God is self-sustaining.

We are made in His image, but we are completely dependent on Him.

When we cannot content ourselves with this status of being over something (creation) and under something else (God), we fall prey to all sorts of delusions, the most common of which is the notion that our Creator does not have our best interests at heart. It is this thought that may have led Eve astray, and it lies at the root of most of the sin in our lives.

Can you be content with God’s way of being God, or do you secretly think you could do better?

The biblical understanding of human beings provides us with the tension of immense dignity and utter dependence. Any other attempt to understand ourselves and our proper place in the universe will always lead to depravity and confusion. Sin corrupts everything it touches and, unchecked, leaves us in a state of total depravity. In other words, the Bible is very realistic about humans: We’re good, but we’re not absolutely good; we’re bad, but we’re not absolutely bad.

Dignity with dependence or total depravity — the choice is yours.

 

Prayer 

 

O God, You are Lord of heaven and earth, and all things come from You and through You and to You. When You spoke the cosmos into being, You remained the infinite and personal One who is forever distinct from Your created order. You alone are God, and we are Your people who have been granted the immense dignity of being created in Your glorious image. You have called me to be like You in my thinking, my choosing, and my desires and emotions. By Your grace I want to emulate Your character and nature so that I will draw nearer to You. I know that sin and rebellion against Your benevolence only lead to pain, alienation and estrangement in my relationship with You and with others. I want to be content with all You have called me to have and to be, knowing that Your pleasure is my highest good.

In Jesus’s name, Amen