When we try to be like God

We see fingerprints of God’s glory displayed all throughout creation.

The remotest crevices of the seas resemble the undiscovered depths of His mystery.

The sweet scent of the honeysuckle reminisces His kindness.

The soft glide of a falling leaf from the mighty oak tree tells of His never-wavering love.

But the sun teaches us something about God and about us too. 

God’s likeness is that of the sun. It exposes the shadows of evil and overcomes it with its’ brilliancy. The beams create rainbows when looked at through a distance, yet our retinas burn if we gaze at it directly. When we aren’t reviling Him, we see Him as He intended: good and beautiful. 

God is not like us, His attributes are more divine and expansive for us to fully discover. We can spend eternity knowing Him but won’t find the end of His goodness. Forever in free-fall, we will never stop being dazzled by God. 

As Christians, we often hear the encouragement to “grow to be more like God.” But that can’t be true. For starters, we will never be an infinite being because we haven’t always existed like He has. God’s incommunicable attributes are ones only He can possess. Some of these include His sovereignty, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

Maybe some of us are thinking, “Okay, but I know I’m not sovereign or omniscient like God.” Yet, don’t we act like it sometimes? We try to be our own little gods. When we do this we’re rebelling against how we were created to be. Eve paved the way for us when she bit the apple on the forbidden tree in the garden. She resisted the calling God intended for her.

What happened? Her eyes were opened to the reality of the world but through the lens of her finite human form. Unable to access God’s communicable attributes, Eve along with the rest of humanity will never be able to make sense of the world and the evil inside it. No matter how hard we try, we can never be God. 

Jen Wilkin in a Following Faith podcast episode puts it like this, “Those who were created to reflect Him at the fall choose instead to revile Him.” We choose our own way when we deny God’s rightful place as our sovereign Ruler in our life. When He doesn’t do what we want Him to, it’s tempting to believe we know better than Him. God’s rules will seem obtuse and manipulative. The lie which Eve chose long ago springs up again as we believe we know better than God. 

Not only will we assume morality for our own life, but also we bring God’s character into question. “How can God be good if He allowed this thing to happen?” We see Him as scary or cruel, someone who stands in the way of our freedom. 

The more we resist how God created us, the more we will continue to determine life to be senseless or meaningless. We will be on an exhausting ride to find fulfillment and crushed when we fail to meet our own standards of morality. Of course, even if we pursue to be more like Jesus, we will still be operating in a life overrun with sin and evil.

Once sin entered the world, God knew we would wrestle with His character. Which is why He sent Jesus as not only our price for salvation but to show us how we ought to emulate Him. We can only be like God in the ways which Jesus showed us while on earth. He exemplifies how we can live out God’s incommunicable attributes that we were designed to embody.

While imperfect on earth but perfected through our final sanctification in Heaven, we can still misuse and abuse these attributes too. Thankfully, we have a patient Father who waits to be gracious to us when we do. 

“Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; how blessed are all those who long for Him.” (Isaiah 30:18 NASB1995)

Instead of resisting God, we are able to see just how beautiful He really is. Jesus showed us how to care for others while loving God more. He lived for God’s approval and not man’s. Demonstrating kindness and gentleness in a world of hatred and injustice, He taught us strength. 

When the sun rests, it doesn’t stop being the sun. Though darkness threatens to overshadow life’s joys, we can be sure that God’s character never changes. In His sovereignty, He will redeem what is broken and restore what is lost. The sun will rise again.