Because We Look Like God

Hello all y'alls!

I had a thought a while ago which I have never actually heard anyone else talk about, so I feel slightly hesitant to bring it up, except that I'm pretty sure I'm right, and if I am, this is a new perspective that I think is really valuable.

So firstly, one thing I have heard people talk about a LOT in the past couple of years, is identity. The gist of all the identity talks can, I think, be broken down into three categories.

1. Your Identity is Not What You Think It Is
2. Your Identity is Under Attack
3. Understanding Your Identity is SUPER Important

Let's talk about these.

1. Your Identity is Not What You Think It Is

I love to dance. I want dancing to be what I do with my life, no matter how hard it is. In fact, I love how hard it is. Discipline and the feeling of achievement is one of my favourite things about the art form, and for a really long time, I couldn't wait til I could take on the title, "Dancer."
"Ballerina," I felt was even further from my reach, and I refused to call myself either one of those titles for a long time because I felt that I needed to earn it first. I couldn't wait to earn it. I couldn't wait to be able to call myself "A dancer."

But I realized one day, through hearing another dancer's story, that I wanted to call myself something because until I had achieved something great, I didn't feel like I had any value to give. As soon as I had done it, then my existence would be worth it. Then I would have value. But God challenged me on that and called back to my attention the fact that He could totally take away my ability to dance, and what would I do then? My potential identity would be gone. How would I live without knowing that someday I would be valuable?

Saying it in such blatant words makes it obvious what the problem there was. Of course it didn't sound like that in my head. I had wrapped my identity up in what I was able to achieve, I had told myself that until I got there, just being a beloved child of God wasn't good enough.

The truth of the matter is that your identity is not found it what you do, how you think, what you believe, your identity is simply you. It's who God created you to be. It's the pure core of who you are that God made, loved, and died for. He thought you, without any other credentials, were worth dying for.

2. Your Identity is Under Attack

The kind of scenario I mentioned above is SUPER common. For some reason it's like most humans are not content with who they are, they have to find their identity in something other than God's love, whether that is their work, their family, their achievements, etc.
It's almost like someone is selling us that lie.
Speaking of lies, you know what else "someone" tries to sell us? That in order to fix ourselves, we should hurt ourselves.
A couple examples are, throughout history every time pagan worship has been allowed to progress, it always turns to some sort of self-harm. In idol worship people would often cut themselves as they tried to appease or appeal to whichever god, and even further, it would often lead to child sacrifice, so not only would they hurt themselves, but they would hurt their children.
Not only pagan worship, but things most of us North Americans in 2018 can relate to more, like cutting. Eating disorders. If I may make a parallel to going a step further, pagan worshippers sacrificed their children to the gods, we have abortions.
Why would demonic forces work so hard to make us find identity in wrong places and hurt ourselves? Because if we believe and rest in who we are in Christ, we don't need anything else to be satisfied. We don't need to play any of the devil's games, we're happy right where we are, completely protected by our Saviour, and that is the last place Satan wants us to be.

3. Understanding Your Identity is SUPER Important

I sort of touched in this already, but the reason it's so important to understand your true identity, is because the more you are under Christ's protection, the less you are in dangerous enemy territory.
If you are looking for identity in your job, this opens you up to potentially making an idol of your job, but it also shows that you think you need more than God.
If you completely understood how much God loves you and were perfectly at peace with that, what could convince you to hurt yourself? It would seem like utter foolishness to you.
If we as a nation understood people's identity as "Made in God's Image," would we kill our children?
There are just so many things that would be changed if we only knew who we were in Christ. We wouldn't hate ourselves, we wouldn't hurt ourselves, we wouldn't be always longing for something to make us valuable.

I know that was a long winded prologue, but if you hadn't thought through all of that before, it's better that you do before I say my new perspective on this.

The thought suddenly came to me one day. "Why does Satan have a bone to pick with us?"

Seriously. Think about it.

He was jealous of God, organized a rebellion, and got kicked out of heaven, before we were ever created. That had nothing to do with us.

He has supernatural power. Obviously not as great as God's, but if we didn't have God's protection, imagine a fight between me and the devil. It would be like:

Me: Take this! (Starts running forward with a sword and a battlecry)
Satan: Yeah, that's enough.
I'm dead. The end.

So seriously, why does he care about harassing us? We are no threat to him, we had nothing to do with his fallout with God, even if he did manage to win all of us to his side, he's not creating an army, we're just all going to hell, which, by the way, was God's invention, not his.

The answer, I believe, is simple. We are just tools in his fight with God.

It's true, God kicked him out of heaven. God will always be stronger, and always win every fight they have, but Satan is a schemer. What better insult would there be than to hurt what God loves?

Imagine an analogy, let's say you have a nemesis, but you're basically Superman and can't be beaten. Your nemesis can't kill you, but he can kill your sister. Your spouse. Your child. You and I both know that would hurt as bad or worse as if he had just killed you.

So that's exactly what he does. He does everything he can to fracture the relationship between God and His church, everything he can to get the one God loves to turn away after other things, and everything he can to make those who bear the very image of God, mar it. Because if he can't hurt God, he can make us hurt that which most closely resembles Him. Another analogy: If someone burns a picture of someone else, you imagine they probably hate them.

One more thing! When God made Himself vulnerable and came to earth in the form of a man, Satan tempted Him in the wilderness by challenging WHO HE WAS. His identity. "If you really are the Son of God..."

In summary, Satan has a bone to pick with us only because God loves us, and because we look like God.

So friends, this inner struggle we have all the time as Christians, what the bible calls "the race," and "the good fight of faith," it's not just a battle we have to win for ourselves. It's a battle we have to win because Jesus gave us the power to do it, and if we don't, we aren't the ones who end up the most hurt, He is.

Flesh and Blood

“For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying: “I will declare Your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to You.” And again: “I will put My trust in Him.” And again: “Here am I and the children whom God has given Me.” Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” (Hebrews‬ ‭2:11-15)

Oftentimes my thoughts are very scattered, so please forgive me if I don't make sense. If nothing from this point on makes sense, at least you will have read some scripture, which is always worth something.

I read Hebrews 2 today, and thought of this.

God is ultimately in charge. If you want to think about it visually like a ladder, God is at the top. He created man, who is flesh and blood, so they are one step down. Because of God they have flesh and blood, just the simple fact that they have flesh and blood shows that they were created of God.

They have children, who are a step down on the ladder from them. The children also have flesh and blood because of their parents, the simple fact that they have flesh and blood shows that they were born of their parents.

For God to put on flesh and blood is an act of amazing humility in itself, because in doing so, He is putting himself on the ladder under His own creation.

Not only this, but think about death.

God is not afraid of death, and death cannot harm Him. There's literally nothing it can do to Him, He would never have a REASON to fear death.

But His children became slaves to the fear of it. His creation was terrified of it.

Not only did He humble himself to the level of a child of His creation, but He allowed Himself to be conquered by the thing that never would have touched Him because He is more powerful than it.

He allowed what His children feared so much to overpower Him, so that it would never have to overpower them.

Obviously, even as a child of flesh and blood, and a victim of death, He still claimed the victory, and still plundered the defeated enemy for his spoils.

Satan's spoils. God's captive children, which He raised up from the ashes of their destroyed kingdom and set on thrones as His heirs.

Percy Jackson (Warning: Spoilers)

I just finished reading Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan.

For anyone who does not know what this book is, it's the first in a series about modern Greek mythology, the main character being Percy, who is the son of Poseidon and a mortal woman.

I had mixed emotions about the book. It was intriguing, funny, mostly I would say a good book. On the other hand I couldn't get past a few things about the Greek mythology, because I am a Christian and it is contradictory to what I believe.

But laying that aside, I learned a few things from reading it.

First thing's first, I noticed a distorted version of the truth portrayed. Not just in this book, but in all Greek mythology, there tends to be a male god who has a child with a mortal woman, and the son is the hero of the story. Familiar? It sounds a whole lot like Jesus, being the Son of God and Mary, and being the "hero of the story." The difference is this, the children born of the gods of Greek mythology are half god and half man, and they are born because of immorality, most of the time.

Jesus was FULLY God, and FULLY man, and He was born of a righteous, perfect God, and a virgin.

The key points are left out, but other than that the story is basically the same. Interesting how Satan created a near replica of the truth for the Greeks to believe.

Another thing I noticed was this,

Percy goes to a camp called Camp Half-Blood, where they train all of the demi-gods. When he gets there he meets a lot of kids who are hurting, they feel depressed and sort of rejected, because their god-parent doesn't seem to care about them. Percy had the same sort of feeling, and it is totally reasonable, we naturally want to have a relationship with our parents. I think if we had a parent who was a god and they really didn't care if we lived or died or if they ever got to see us, we would feel rejected too.

I don't remember if Percy says it, or how the message gets across, but there is an attitude of, "It's not unreasonable for our parents to not care about us, they are gods. They have more important things I worry about."

Percy spends a loooong time journeying before he gets to meet his father, but when he does he only gets to see him for about two minutes and then he has to leave. He leaves knowing that may be his last time ever seeing him.

I have grown up hearing Pastors say that God is a personal God. I know that. It does mean a lot to me, but I can't really grasp the full meaning because I have grown up having the emphasis on how personal He is, and not how sovereign He is.

But I realized as I read the book that God is every bit as God as these gods are, and waaaaay more. Yet He doesn't ignore His children. He wants us, He wants a relationship with us.

And the other thing is that we don't have to make a long perilous journey to talk to Him for two minutes! (and be afraid of whether He will punish us for wasting His time) We get to be with Him 24/7!

Our God is so much better than the Greek gods.

Reading Genesis Again

Hello! I'm back! I'm super super excited!! You'll never guess why. (No, this post has nothing to do with Valentines Day ;) ) I don't want to wait for an answer so I will just tell you, I am reading Genesis again!! :D

Usually I am not so excited to read Genesis, or at least the first few chapters, because since I have gone to Sunday School for many years and have always been in a Christian environment, I know the story. I know what happens, it doesn't seem that exciting to read it.
So usually when I read it I try to imagine all of the intricacy of the things being created in the first chapter, and how vast the universe is, and how God just came up with it all off the top of His head and spoke it into existence, but for some reason, even when I do this, it has little meaning to me.

The reason I started to read it again was because of two things, both of which were said in the same night. One evening my sister mentioned that in the bible there are lots of comparisons with us and God and plants. ("I am the vine and you are the branches," "He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water.." etc.) And in the same night a friend of ours said something along the lines of, "The old testament is full of prophecies and stories about Jesus."

Those two things just clicked for me and I decided to start over at the beginning and search for God's character and His story in the stories in the old testament.

Even looking at Genesis 1 in this new light was AMAZING. What used to be a simple chapter full of things I already know, was now an amazing...I don't know what to call it. It's like God wrote His story into all of the things He made, but you can't see it unless you look.


Since I am so excited about it, I will write about a few of the things I found in Genesis 1 and 3, and the rest you will have to find for yourself. :)

Okay, so the first thing I will write about, since I already mentioned plants, is plants. In verses 11-12 it says, Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
 
This is the coolest thing. Picture that the fruit tree represents God. The fruit tree (God) yields fruit, (us) according to its kind. (Made in His image) Whose seed is in itself, (you can look at this more than one way, physically, God made us to reproduce, and spiritually, when you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you, and He is the one who can bear fruit (John 15:5) through us) and lastly, On the earth. (That one is pretty easy to figure out)

Okay, and then another really cool one I found was in verses 16-18, Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

In this part I saw the two great lights as God and Satan. The greater light (sun) is God, and the lesser light (moon) is Satan. They are both greater in power than us, hence why they are the two 'great lights,' but God is by far greater than Satan. Then, they are the rulers of the day and of the night. Day is light, and the greater light rules the day, Night is dark, and the lesser light rules the night.

I thought that was really cool, but then it got even cooler when I told my dad about it and he simply said, "You know what is even cooler? Think about what the nature of the moon is. It has no light of its own, it can only reflect the sun's light." Think on that.

And I was going to stop there...so you can stop there if you are bored and don't want to read any more, but I have one more cool thing to say, this occurred to me in Chapter 3.

In verse 16 it says, To the woman he said: "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

I have never ever seen this analogy, or one close to it, so it was amazing that I saw this, but here it is. Because of sin, women have to go through pain for their children to be born. Because of sin, Jesus had to go through pain for us to be born again.

Isn't that awesome?! :)

Sorry this post was really long, but I hope you all liked it as much as I did. :)

And if you have never seen the creation story in this light before, I strongly recommend you go and read through it! There is so much more that I said nothing about.

I just think it is so cool how when you look at the creation story like this, it is so evident that God knew exactly what He was doing the whole time. He knew His whole plan right from the start, and showed it even from the start!

NOTE: If you liked this post, please click here to read a short expansion on the Sun and Moon parallel.