Our Purpose

It is a question as old as humanity: Why are we on earth and what are we supposed to do while we are here? 

Working the Land

Even the ancients spent time on this.  The Bible tells us from the very beginning in Genesis about many who searched for and discovered their purposes: Jabal discovered how to raise livestock, Jubal developed different types of music, Tubal-Cain mastered metalworking. 
These ancients figured out what to do while here on earth, but what about us?  What is our role?  Many answers can be found by gazing into the moment we were created. 

Out of the Dirt

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…”
We have a dual role, we humans.  A dual purpose, given to us by God Himself.  Let us make.  We are created, a part of God’s creation.  In our image.  We are God’s unique counterpart, His representatives here on earth.
Being made in God’s image brings with it certain responsibilities.  The second part of Genesis 1.26 says that God decided we were to rule, to have dominion over, all living creatures.

Dominion

David echoes this in Psalm 8 when he says that God crowned us with honor and made us rulers of all that God created.
This has, unfortunately, been used too often as an excuse to plunder the earth and destroy it.  Instead, “as God’s image bearers…we are to be wise stewards of the earth, caring for it and protecting it in a way that reflects and embodies God’s rule over his creation.”  ~ Resounding Truth by Jeremy Begbie
As God’s representatives, His image bearers, we also are to spread the knowledge of God and His love to the rest of the world.  We are to work to speed up God’s future goal for creation, to bring healing, restoration, hope and peace to the world around us.
Israel was supposed to be a picture of this.  Israel was called to be God’s people, accomplishing God’s purposes for humanity in and for the world.  They had experienced God’s rescuing power and love and were intended to be His way of giving that love to the rest of the world.
Does that sound familiar, as though it were, perhaps, something we are supposed to do?  I wonder what would have happened if Israel had obeyed.  What would our world look like if they had acted as God’s representatives?  This is a painful question because Israel’s purposes were but a shadow of our own.
What would our world look like if we were truly acting as God’s representative?  What would our neighborhood, our community look like if we were caring for and protecting our world, if we were sharing God’s rescuing love with the people around us?  Different? 

Neighborhoods

Things have gone wrong and many live in alienation from one another and in purposeless and destructive living.  We should want to be different.  We should be reflecting the image of God to the piece of creation in which He has placed us.
Our second role from that moment of creation is our very creatureliness.  “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness…” 

Created

We are created by God.  Along with the trees, mountains, birds and sun, we ARE God’s creation.  We humans, however, have a unique role that was given to us on behalf of all of creation.  A role that only we can fulfill.
We are (as far as we know!) the only creatures who can love God in return.  We are the only part of creation who can give voice to the wordless praise of all creation. 

The Trees Shout

In the human being, creation finds a conscious answering voice, a mortal from the dust of the earth who can know and respond to God’s love as a creature, love God in return, and as a part of this response, voice creation’s praise. ~ Resounding Truth by Jeremy Begbie
This is a beautiful picture and a beautiful role.  What grace that God entrusted this to us!  And yet what tragedy that our role as worshiper in creation has twisted into worshiper of creation.  Including worshiper of self.  Just as we have twisted our role as God’s representative, we have twisted our role of offering worship on behalf of all creation.

Worshipping

However.  (What a beautiful word is however!)  God gave us grace through Christ.
Jesus.  Man.  God.  A man who gave complete and un-distracted praise to God.  A man who perfectly acted out God’s wise rule in the world.

Perfect Man

He is creation’s worship to God ~ perfect praise from us to God, creation’s perfect voice.  He is the image of God to us ~ perfect representation of God, being a wise steward of the earth He brought healing, restoration, hope and peace from God to earth.
Jesus helped and healed many people, like this. He made blind people see. He made deaf people hear. He made lame people walk. Jesus was making the sad things come untrue. He was mending God’s broken world.  ~ Jesus Storybook Bible
The most exciting part of this news about Jesus?  We are invited to join Him.  What joy and grace!  What a gift!  By reflecting God’s image to the world around us, to the tiny piece of creation (human and non-human) in which God has placed us, we are voicing the praise of creation back to God.
What a beautiful circle.  What beautiful purpose.

Art Credits: photo of bird in hand by SP Veres; Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer

reworked and much edited from the archives

it’s a little funny to me that this blog is old enough to have archives

Our Jealous God

The Bible is the Word of God.  It is God speaking to us, revealing Himself to us so that we can know Him, know how much He loves us and so that we can learn how to love Him in return.
Word of God
This Bible of ours is a beautiful book of love.  And there are parts of the Bible that are downright disturbing, parts that don’t adhere to our black and white notions of God.  We like to gloss over these, to skim over them so that we don’t have to think about them, but they just won’t go away.  There are parts of God’s Word that don’t fit the image we have of God.  They don’t fit the sort of God we want God to be.  Even God the Son does and says some absurd and strange things.  Like the cursing of the fig tree.  Who, for the love of God, would curse a tree because it is not bearing fruit in the winter?  How could that action possibly have been done for the love of God?
Another of these disturbing pieces is God as a jealous God.  We tend to think of jealousy as weak, as petty, as fear.  We think of it as wishing that we were and had what we are not and do not.  But God is in everything and by Him everything lives and moves and has its being.  How can both of these be true?
Unfocused
We don’t always get a resolution of the images of God that don’t fit, these pieces of God we can’t make sense of.  This one, though, has become clearer lately through reading Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris.  She speaks of the jealousy of God as mother love, as a lion or tiger protecting her young with passion and fierceness.  This jealousy of God is the kind of jealousy that protects her vulnerable children from all that would hurt them, from all that would steal their joy.
Ten Commandments
It makes sense, then, that one of the times this image of God is given to us is in the first of the Ten Commandments.  These commandments were meant to show us how much we need God, to teach us how life works and the way we will be most happy.  So if God is jealous to keep false gods away from us, it is the jealousy that wants to protect us from all that would harm our souls.
God’s jealousy allows us to trust Him.
Who, after all, would trust a God, a parent, spouse, or lover, who said to us, “I really love you, but I don’t care at all what you do or who you become.”?  ~  Kathleen Norris
It is resolutions like this, resolutions that show that what seems disturbing is all somehow out of love and holiness, resolutions that help us trust for the unknown, disquieting pieces.  They help us trust that God is holy and is love and is working to make all of us and all of this world into what it was created to be.
Perfect World
Resolutions like this help us trust that God is a jealous God, “who loves us enough to care when we stray.  And who has given us commandments to help us find the way home.”  ~ Kathleen Norris

Art Credit: Moses Smashing the Tablet of the Law by Rembrandt

Is Grace Worth It?

I am always yearning for perfection.  I long for this battle to be done, for the result of a war won to become more evident.  I want my internal battle to be finished as well as the battle over this world of ours.  I get tired, you see, of fighting.  I want to love perfectly, to obey perfectly, to forgive perfectly.
Here I Fight
 I want our world to be able to quit fighting.
Fighting for Life
 I want all of us to love perfectly, to love in a way that results in bodies getting fed, animals feeling safe, hearts being healed, trees growing tall.
I’m ready for the lion and the lamb to lie down together.
Yet if I had been born into perfection, I would never have experienced the gift that is grace.  This grace-gift of being loved at my most unlovable, of being shaped into perfection at my most imperfect.  Is it worth it?  A hard question.
If I had been perfect from the start, I wouldn’t know battle and I wouldn’t know mercy.  I would, perhaps, trust more in myself than in the One who made me.  Are heights of joy made richer by the depths carved by sorrow?
Sorrow Carves Deep
Grace is having a commitment to – or at least an acceptance of – being ineffective and foolish.  ~ Anne Lamott
I don’t know why this is so.  I don’t know why we can only experience grace while being ineffective and foolish.  I don’t know why we must experience battle in order to grasp this gift full of beauty.  I wish it were not this way.
I do know that God does nothing by accident.  I do know that God created with a purpose of love and I do know that someday His will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.
God Fighting for Us
Is grace worth all of this?
There is much that I don’t know.  And there are a few things I do.

Art credit: Illustration from Luther Bible 1769

The Beauty of Gray

The older I get, the more gray shades I see in our world.  An expansion of colors, a deepening of my perceptions, these nuances that make my life richer are a bit astonishing.
It was much easier when the lenses I wear saw only black and white.
Lily Black and White     Analise Black and White     Cross Black and White
Life gets harder when you see things from other points of view.  Straight lines get hijacked and carry you off to the unknown.  Solid perspectives grow a little blurry and you begin to take a softer view of those you disagree with.
The more I meet people who were raised differently than I was raised and the more I read authors from other places and times and faith traditions, the more I begin to catch a glimpse of how much my view of God, of the Bible, of the world around me is colored by my own place and time and faith tradition.
Just as with every place and time and faith tradition, there is truth to be found and there is misunderstanding.  There are many issues of our faith that I have been rethinking and restudying lately, asking God once again to teach me His way.
Issues like the role of women in the church and in the family, homosexuality, how science and the Bible fit together, what the inerrancy of the Scriptures really means.  On some of these issues I am changing.  On others I remain.  Yet on all of these issues and more, as I read and study I realize something that is even more important than figuring out what is right and what is wrong.
No human here on earth is my enemy.  We who claim the name of Christ are all trying to love Jesus and obey God’s words.  Rather than those who disagree with me being the enemy, being the one who is deliberately misinterpreting God’s words, being the one who picks and chooses what they will believe, those who see things in a different light are just trying their best to follow Jesus.
Just like I am.
Perhaps they are interpreting Scripture incorrectly, but perhaps I am the one who is wrong.
Grace.  It is easy to receive and devilishly difficult to dole out freely.  I spend so much time wanting to get it right, sometimes from good motivation and sometimes from pride, that I quit looking at the person with whom I differ.  I see black and I see white, and the sharp edges of truth keep me from seeing the gray shades of Jesus in the face of the person before me.
Lily Four Shades     Analise Four Shades     Cross Four Shades
It is easier to look at the black and white of an issue, because to see the gray of a person is to see Jesus.  And seeing Jesus is always hard.  Looking at the face of Jesus has a way of changing you deep down where it hurts.
There is a reason why Jesus said that the most important thing is to love.  Loving God and loving people is more important than getting it all right.  He didn’t say it was the easiest thing.  Most things with Jesus aren’t.
Loving others has a way of hijacking the straight lines of your life and carrying you off to the unknown.  Loving Jesus has a way of blurring your sharp edges and softening the contours of your heart.
It is painful and it is frightening.
Lily All Shades    Analise All Shades    Cross All Shades
And those gray shades are beautiful beyond words.

 

Thanks to Kirk Sewell for turning the colors of my photographs into various shades of gray.  You can see more of his work at http://photographybysewell.webs.com