What does God want?
This is a question that has caused consternation among the faithful for a very long time, even it seems among Jesus’s disciples. We have heard the story of the two disciples who wanted to be Number 2 and Number 3, next in line behind Jesus in the kingdom of God. Jesus on that occasion disabused them of their mistaken ideas about first, who gets to come first before the rest of the disciples and second, that the kingdom is somehow about power, position, and privilege.
No, we’ve read the divine comments about the first shall be last and the last first, about how in the group of disciples, the leaders won’t “lord it over” other disciples like the Gentile leaders do, and even that the Son of Man has come to serve, not be served. It takes a while it seems for us humans to get the idea that the kingdom of God isn’t about me.
We’ve changed the question a bit over time, or maybe added variations on the theme, “what is this all about?” Over the millennia disciples have believed and taught one another that the purpose of Man was to worship and enjoy God. This is fine as far as it goes – grateful praise and worship toward God is indeed good and proper, and no doubt disciples should enjoy being around God as well. This though also misses the mark and is too small of an idea for the creatures that God created.
Let’s take a little closer look at what the Bible actually says about the original purpose and state of mankind. We read two things primarily in the creation accounts. First, that we are the image of God – male and female. Added to this original idea, we find that the expectation of each person is that they become transformed into the likeness of Jesus – his character, his values, his drives. Image, likeness. Same idea. We can assume then that you and I were made to have the same character, values, and drives as God has. No wonder the fruit of the Spirit are what they are, that the qualifications for elders and deacons are what they are. They all point toward the character of God revealed in Jesus. That is what and who you and I were originally meant to be. That hasn’t changed.
Man’s job given to the first Adam was to husband the earth. To care for it, to manage it, to live among the flora and the fauna as God’s representative in the extended Garden – the earth. Adam names the animals not because it made for a nice story, but because that was his job – to know the animals and thereby being able to give them appropriate names and to husband them. Our divinely given job is to be God’s representatives on the earth, to manage the world we were given to live in, and to help make it flourish.
Our job then? To live as divine-level lovers, embodying the character, values, and drives of God as his representatives, his image, and to care for the entire earthly creation.
That is no small task and is considerably larger than jockeying for position or to simply worship and enjoy God. No, in a real way, by being his image we are to be the representative presence of God in the world.
You. How ‘bout that?
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