The View from the West Mesa

Last night I was exploring the web and came across what appears to be the Christian version of The Onion. The website offers a Word of God for Today and yesterday’s was taken from Isaiah 1.15a: “No matter how much you pray, I won’t listen….” (CEV). So you get the idea of the website. When I mentioned this Word of God to a few friends, the immediate responses included appeals to God's eventual relenting, his compassion, and other soft and warm concepts about God and our relationship to him. This is common among Christians, emphasizing the goodness and graciousness of God rather than his wrath (with some notable exceptions in the popular media). God is good, and patient, and compassionate no doubt. However, the God in Isaiah is the same God in John. This seems like it may be a problem with us Christians from time to time. We get comfortable living our lives, secure in the idea that either God doesn’t notice or that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. We go to churc...

God loves you, he knows you are human, and he knows you are imperfect. He can live with that because he wants you to be transformed into his likeness. God knows that being transformed is a process that occurs over time. If God wants a people who live in his image; in the way they are made (and he does), then he is able in his patience to wait for you and to cover you with grace while you make mistakes. Scripture in fact tells us just that. God is patient not just with his people, but with the world. Just as God wants you to be transformed, he also wants all people to come to him. His patience and covering grace is part and parcel of the process he is willing to allow for you to grow more perfectly into his likeness. The implications of this are huge. Primarily this means that you aren’t damned just because you aren’t perfect. You aren’t automatically lost if you sin. Just the opposite in fact – your imperfection is the result of training and shaping. Your failure in any given...

So, who are you? Who does God think you are and who does he want you to be? In the last post I suggested that people are made in the image of God – that they are the image of God. Having been made in that image, we are not crafted in perfect likeness of God but with an imprint of his character. That imprint drives our desires and values if we live in it. God sees you as his creation, as his child. He loves you and wants you to grow in his image so that you can live a life most satisfying and sublime. We know he loves you because John tells us that the sending of Jesus was due to God’s love for you. Even while we were sinners, we are told, Christ died for us. In both the Old Testament and the New we are told that God’s intent is to gather all nations to himself. This statement tells us that God indeed loves the world and wants all people to live with him. God sees in you himself; his own image being perfected and shaped through your life on this planet. God is not in a hurry n...

God created Man to live on the Earth, in the image of God. Since we know God is spirit rather than physical, that image cannot be our form and it must be something else. Since Adam and Eve were barred from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, I suspect our intellect isn’t what constitutes that image.  I prefer the conclusion that the image in which we were and are made is the character of God. Man is made with his most innate desires and values matching those of God. Throughout Scripture we are called to become like Christ, we are pointed toward the fruit of the Spirit, we are told to imitate God. I believe we are urged in this direction not because it is so foreign to us, but because they actually describe how we are made to live. If we raise our children in our image or likeness, it isn’t that we have two feet or that we can work logic questions. Most importantly, raising our kids in our image has more to do with the way we see the world, other people, and life ...