WE ARE NOT GOD
Read Time: 3 min 20 sec
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I don’t always feel His presence. But God’s promises do not depend upon my feelings; they rest upon His integrity."
R.C. Sproul
THE GOOD STUFF
WE ARE NOT GOD
by Mike Crowther | Member at Redeemer
And the serpent said to the woman, “You surely shall not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” - Genesis 3:4-5
The story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent is certainly one of the best-known passages in the Bible, but I’m not sure that we pay sufficient attention to the core (no apple pun intended!) element of the human race’s fall from our initial state of communion with God and His creation: our willful and ongoing demands to be God’s equals.
How many of our endless catalogue of sins are built on the foundation of acting as if we are God? God made it plain in Genesis and thereafter that He wishes to live with us, and He instituted guidelines for us to do so in peace and joy. But noooooo, we have many far better ideas of what’s really right and wrong, and when others don’t follow the Gospel According to Us, then we are more than willing to step in for God and invoke His wrath by proxy!
Satan has worked wonders in the millennia since Adam and Eve by encouraging us to take the pure truths of God’s Word and twist them in ways that suit our own interests, essentially placing us as the interpreters of His will and usurping the Holy Spirit. That arrogant commandeering of God’s Word is at the center of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees, whose focus on manmade rules stood in the way of their practice of God’s essence: His love for His people.
One of the clearest examples of God’s sadness and dissatisfaction with our actions is in the story of the woman caught in adultery who was brought before Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees (John 8:1-11). The “human” way to deal with her sin was for us to embrace God’s role as judge. Jesus taught us, however, that being God is infinitely more than that, and that while we are on this Earth and merely “seeing through a glass darkly,” our best course is to love, forgive, and encourage righteousness while leaving the judgment to the only One who is truly “like God!”
To think about:
What are my primary values (personal, political, social, etc.)? Might any of them reflect pride and a futile desire to “be like God,” rather than reflecting a humble willingness to personally submit to the teachings of Jesus Christ?
Do I exhibit any behaviors that might originate from pride and a futile desire to “be like God,” rather than a humble willingness to personally submit to the example of Jesus’ life and death?
Philippians 2:6 tells us that Jesus, “who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped…” What are five attributes that Jesus demonstrated through His own life that we should also seek to model our own lives on?
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