16.1 Being Like God

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image and after Our likeness…” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

What does it mean that you and I, personally, are “like” God?

What is typically called “human nature” can be reduced down to the first two actions of separation from God by Adam and Eve, that is, pretending first (fig leaves) and hiding second (tree trunks). All human perversity consists of a simultaneous pretending in the face of others and hiding from God. All of it is fake, useless, and, with the redemption of Jesus, utterly unnecessary.

The Vanishing of Hades. As I have learned and practiced “Father with me,” in honesty and truth, so the need to pretend and to hide has vanished. As pretending and hiding have slowly vanished from my life, so also hades has vanished. And the harmony between my human qualities and God’s divine qualities comes ever more clear.

In Symmorphy I: Purpose, Chapter 8 “Likeness,” we looked at how we are like God inwardly and outwardly. We positioned three types of compatibility with God, (1) just like Him, (2) His counterpoint, as in our weakness to His strength, and (3) forgiving one another where we seem to conflict. Then we saw that God likes us because each one of us is a different expression of His own personality and qualities. If I like to garden, for instance, it’s because God likes it first.

A Wrong Question. We used to agree with the devil, that we are definitely NOT like God now, but that we ought to be. But as the hades of lying and unbelief has vanished from our lives, so our knowledge of how in-tune with God we really are has grown, and, in fact, will never cease growing. Human perversity can be nothing other than taking God-like qualities and turning them into wrongful and destructive directions.

And so we no longer ask the question, “How am I like God,” with a mentality that separates the human from God. Rather, we simply assume that God has told us the truth and that there is nothing about our true humanity that is not like God.

Liking Being Like God. At the same time as Jesus redeems us in our own knowing, so He also redeems God to us. We used to accuse God of all sorts of devilish attributes. To do extremely wicked things in controlling others is called, “playing God.” Yea right. Playing Satan and calling it “God.” In equal measure, then, that Jesus has brought us out from pretending and hiding, so He has also removed from us the horrific lens of seeing and defining God by the devil.

And then we discover something wondrous about being the likeness of God. We discover that we like God; we like being like Him; we like it that our personality and expression is His. We even come to like the fact that God is always humbling Himself in His entrance into the lives of all others.

Language and Communication. Let’s start with one of the most extraordinary facts of human creation. As Noah Webster pointed out, in the moment of their creation, God gave to humans a fully developed language. Adam and Eve could hear God’s voice and could visit with Him in a language both they and God understood!

Thus the speaking of Jesus as the Voice of God, as every Word God speaks, is there from the beginning between God and man as their very language and communication together. Adam and Eve were made out from Christ Jesus, as John said, and as Hebrews says – Sustaining all by His power-filled words. When Paul said, “The Word is near you, even in your mouth,” he was placing the Lord Jesus as language, as our ever-communication with God and God with us.

Every Aspect of Our Lives. By the time any child is three, he or she has mastered the most difficult learning task of their lives, the basic words and grammar of their native language. In fact, the learning of language begins in the womb, as the child develops inside of hearing the voice of its mother, and even, at times, of its father.

As we exist out from the Lord Jesus Christ and as we are just like Him, so every aspect of our lives is the likeness and the visible expression of God our Father. And so, as we go through five categories of human expression, we are studying these in terms of four things, (1) communicating, (2) learning, (3) thinking, and (4) doing.

Communication. Communication means a bridge from one to another, typically by words spoken and heard, but also any other form of connection. Jesus IS and has ALWAYS BEEN that Communication, that Voice, that In-between, the Connection between all and all.

Then Jesus said, “Learn of Me,” and whole worlds of human development open up to us. Just as God gives Jesus to us in the form of language, that we might hear His voice and speak Christ in return, so God gives Jesus to us in our capacity to learn. Everything true we learn and have learned is Christ Jesus. Whatever class you were in, you were learning Christ.

Learning and Doing. It is said that mathematics is the language of science. When you learned math and science, history and geography, grammar and spelling, you were learning Christ, even though you did not know or acknowledge that reality. How could we speak Christ back to God if we could not read the Bible or did not know the meaning of our words?

Most people learn first and do second. I have always been the opposite. I get out and do, first, figuring it out for myself, then I sit down and learn what it was I did and how to do it better. I built houses before I learned about building houses; I taught school before I learned about teaching school. Then, as I sat in the classroom to learn, I already possessed what it meant in practice.

The Difference between God and Us. The point is the continual back and forth between learning and practice or learning and doing. This is how we are made; this is God’s design of us as humans.

Does God learn, then? No. God is all here now. How then does learning make us “like” God?

The best way to describe the difference between God and us is that God is big and we are little. We are the finite and limited expression inside of time and space, inside of heaven and earth, of an infinite and unlimited God. We cannot know God and how we are His likeness except step by step, word by word, doing by doing, one little bit at a time – FOREVER!

The Principle of Reciprocity. Jeremiah said that God is brand new every morning. In fact, if we were to find one quality to describe the essence of a true teacher, it would be faithfulness. – Great is Thy faithfulness. Every morning forever, we learn something new of God sharing our lives with us and how we are like Him.

This brings us, then, to the principle of reciprocity, for it is by reciprocity that we learn God and how we are like God. In fact, it is by reciprocity that we learn anything from anyone. John said, “We love God BECAUSE God first loves us.” God loves me. I take that love into my knowing and mix it up together with all that I am, my human personality and expression. Then I return that very same love to God, now containing in it all my personal humanity.

A Dynamic Likeness. Every single quality that is God towards us operates in the exact same way as Love, by reciprocity. God’s just innocence is towards me. I take it as my own and mix it all up in my thinking with my human attributes and qualities, that is, as Christ Jesus. Then I return that same just innocence back to God, finding Him right and true. Yet God receives that just innocence back from me with me all mixed up in it, and I become as Jesus inside His face and presence.

This is God; this is how He works; this is what He does. In other words, being like God is DYNAMIC, not static. It is constant communication, back and forth, and not something that exists separately from God.

The Image and Likeness of God. This is so very cool, because I did not have this clarity when I began this short lesson a few minutes ago. God is faithful in teaching us of Himself every moment.

Our ability to reciprocate, then, is the central quality of being like God, for by it we learn of Him and return back to Him what He is, but with ourselves now part of it. For this reason, we place to learn and to do as our approach to understanding human expression.

We are the image of God; we are His appearance in creation as our love for one another. We are the likeness of God, His song in creation, as we learn God brand new every moment and as we sing Christ back to God filled now with our human selves.