As I Was Saying is a forum for a variety of perspectives to foster faith-related conversations among our readers with the goal of mutual learning, even in disagreement. Apart from articles written by editorial staff, these perspectives do not necessarily reflect the views of The Banner.
The first time I flew, I worried that plane to a safe landing. Not one passenger—not the lady in the seat next to me, not even the pilot—thanked me. I held on tight to that armrest and at any hint of turbulence I held on even tighter steadying the plane by sheer will—or so I must have thought. To state the obvious, my willpower did nothing to hold up that plane.
Apparently, I’m not God.
My behavior on that plane, though, indicates that at that moment I must have believed otherwise. The same goes for all of us at times. How else could we dare judge fellow sinners by our own yardstick? Why else would we get angry when reality doesn’t unfold as we expect? What else would give us the nerve to act as if we are at the center of our own universe? In order to dare behave in these ways, we must, on some level, assume that we are God.
The Bible says this is a problem for us. We can all behave like the prince of Tyre to whom the Lord said, “But you are a mere mortal and not a god, though you think you are as wise as a god” (Ez. 28:2). As a church we regularly confess, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” but we are not immune from acting as if we were the Almighty.
Fallen and Fractured
It is an understandable problem. We are, after all, made in God’s image. He created us to uniquely reflect him. It’s easy to see how a reflection could confuse itself with the original. Our first parents did so in the Garden of Eden. They came to assume that they, like God, had the right to determine what will be good and what will be evil. It’s understandable that image bearers would try to become the original, but it’s not right.
We now often act as a twisted likeness of God. Rather than knowing rightly, we suppress the truth (Rom. 1:18). Rather than being comfortable in the light of vulnerability, we find refuge in the darkness of self-deceit (John 3:19). Rather than always keeping our word like God, we excuse and delude ourselves and others (Num. 23:19).
Distorting God
We distort God’s image in two ways. First, we distort in the ways we ought to be like God but aren’t. His love is steadfast. Ours is fickle. He is startlingly patient. We are startlingly impatient. He is good. We justify ourselves and our sin because we aren’t good.
Sanctification is the process of becoming more like him. We “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:10). We happily celebrate and benefit from any steps taken toward godliness. As we become more like him, we become more ourselves—the way we were meant to be.
The second way we distort God’s image is more subtle. We try to become God himself and replace God and God’s work. A church leader might find himself needing to be the standard of righteousness. A wife works herself ragged to be the center of her husband’s life. A revolutionary strives to force the world (or his workplace) into what he thinks it must be. A child behaves as if she is entitled to whatever she asks. This is us pretending to be God.
This distortion has parallels with the demonic. Satan is associated with the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14 who says in his heart, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High,” to which the Lord replies, “But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit” (Is. 14:14-15). It is the devil, not the Holy Spirit, who calls us to take God’s place.
This temptation to fill God’s slot is often rewarded and, therefore, particularly dangerous. If someone promises to make life go right, we are often willing to hand them the keys to our kingdom. We promote people who seem to think, as Mac McAnally wrote in It’s My Job, “In my contract there’s a clause that says, ‘it’s my job to worry half to death,’ and that’s the thing people respect in me. It’s a job but without it I’d be less than what I expect from me.” We give glory to the bold souls who promise to save us from our fears. We have a sad tendency to reward those who are willing to play God and then punish them upon discovering that they are as finite and fallen as ourselves. That’s Psalm 146:3, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.” We ought not to put that sort of trust in ourselves either.
Help Wanted
We need help. God reveals himself to give us just such help. He tells us what he is like in Scripture so we will know that God, not we, fills the voids. We have a proper need for someone to always be right and do right, for someone to be worth believing in. We do real harm when we put that weight on others. We do real harm when we shoulder that burden ourselves. The Bible tells us that God fills God’s role so that we will stop trying to do so.
That’s what I was doing on that plane. I was trying to fill God’s role, but it’s God’s will, not mine, that keeps up any plane or determines any outcome.
The better we understand who we aren’t, the better we can accept who we are. John Calvin began his Institutes of the Christian Religion by connecting our understanding of God and of ourselves. “Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.” Misunderstanding God goes hand in hand with misunderstanding ourselves. Knowing God goes hand in hand with knowing ourselves. We see this in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Until then, God is working to restore us to God’s image so we can know him and ourselves forever.
So praise God that he’s God, and praise God that we aren’t.