You Thought That I Was Altogether Like You

I've heard it said that we become like the God we serve, but I am not so sure that is the real gist of it. Perhaps rather than BECOMING like the God we serve, we make God into OUR OWN image. Sort of like the scripture that declares...to the pure you show yourself pure but to the froward...you show yourself froward. (or as the NLT words it in Psalm 18:26 ....To the pure you show yourself pure, but to the wicked you show yourself hostile) I've read Psalm 40 and Psalm 50 over a few times the past week or so. Not sure why I've been drawn to them. There is a verse in Psalm 50 that stuck out and has been going through my thoughts since then.

You thought that I was altogether like you.

Although we recite verses that express the sentiment that "his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not his our thoughts," I suppose we are still inclined to make him in our own image....at least subconsciously. Part of traditional fundamentalist teaching is that while we may recoil at things like eternal hell, the penal substitutionary view of the atonement, the OT atrocities and the animal sacrifice system...it is because his ways are higher than our ways and we cannot understand the depth of his justice and judgement. You know...as in..."yes God IS love but he is also JUST." They believe these things seem heinous to many of us because we are fallen human beings and might be inclined to err on the side of leniency. Since God is JUST, well....then he extracts the justice we would be too wussy to demand.

But that is not how I see it at all. I think the part of us that recoils at these things is his spirit within...not our carnal nature. We are all too happy to extract eye for an eye justice. Mercy is what we have the problem with. But if we listen to that voice within, and don't squelch it when something rises up in us that declares, "I'm not like that."...then perhaps we are seeing him as he is...which is anything but "altogether like us."

In his sermon entitled Light, George MacDonald says:

He cannot make the meanings change places. To say that what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to God, is blasphemy; to say light in God and light in man are of differing kinds, is to speak against the spirit of light. God is light far beyond what we can see, but what we mean by light, God means by light; and what is light to God is light to us, or would be light to us if we saw it, and will be light to us when we do see it. God means us to be jubilant in the fact that he is light--that he is what his children, made in his image, mean when they say light;

Living Light, thou wilt not have me believe anything dark of thee!

In proportion as we have the image of Christ mirrored in us, we shall know what is and is not light.