God in Our Image

The Bible says man was made in God’s image, however I think it is a big mistake to reverse that statement, you cannot have a God in man’s image. What I mean by this is that people assume God is like some sort of person. They’ll refer to him with some pronoun (like I just did) or give him some sort of human type attributes. They think that God thinks like a man, what a mistake!

Let me use an analogy to explain what I am thinking. Imagine our relationship to the world of ants. If the ants could have some sort of comprehension of a human, we would certainly appear as some sort of all powerful God.

Imagine the ants trying to put some sort of ant traits on human beings. They would assume humans are like ants only all powerful. Think about how ridiculous that would actually be. But how could the ants think anything else? Ants are all they know. They have absolutely no concept on what it is like to be a human, zero, nadda, zilch!!

Look at it from the other angle. As humans how can we communicate with ants? Maybe on some very rudimentary level, but really we have no idea if they actually got our message. Now try to imagine explaining to a group of ants the concept of political power or some other abstract idea. It’s clearly not going to happen. From the ants point of view they wouldn’t be able to understand our problem, after all in their minds we are all powerful ‘ants’, we can do anything, why can’t we talk to them?

The gulf between ants and man is virtually impassable and yet I believe the gulf between God and human kind is probably even greater. Perhaps we are wiser than ants and can learn something from this analogy. We can learn that we must change our way of thinking and perceiving of what we call God. We need to reach upwards to refine our awareness where it might have a higher possibility of understanding some small concept that might filter down from higher.

Its clearly foolishness to think that God is talking to someone and telling them to wage war. This is the act of impressing human traits on God. The model doesn’t work in that direction. God can impress his image on us, we should study that image and strive for higher, more refined perceptions to understand what the image of God is. God may be all powerful, just as we are all powerful in comparison to the ant, but until the ant can learn and understand human concepts we will never be able to communicate with them.