02 July 2023
We were created in the image of God.
There's lots of speculation on what that means. I'll cut to the chase: It is not a matter of attributes, but of authority conferred. Creation is fundamentally feudal. There is One sovereign authority over all things, the Creator Himself. He delegates authority at His whim to vassals. The whole point of the Creation narrative is that the one thing binding us to God is His purpose in us.
Among all the other creatures we can perceive in the natural world, none of them have that distinction. God made us the agents of His will over all the natural world. We bear His authority -- His image -- in order to conform the natural world to His wishes. Our attributes are simply the tools for exercising His dominion.
A human fetus is in the image of God not because of its potential, but because of its purpose in God's eyes. It has value to God, and He alone can authorize what happens to it. We are His agents in dealing with each other, too. We each are tasked with some very heavy burdens of decision in how to carry out His will. Our success or lack thereof does not change our purpose, only the level of peace we have with Him.
Eden was quite different from the rest of the natural world. God planted it Himself as His private garden. Our original mission was to maintain what God had made for Himself, His home on earth, and to make the rest of the world more like it. To the ancient Hebrew mind, that's what it meant to "subdue and fill the earth". We had the authority to do that, until we got ourselves ejected from Eden.
We were sent out minus that authority. It's possible to recover some portion of it as mortals, but that requires rejecting everything we hoped to gain from our choice in the Fall. We must reject the materialism (Lust of the Flesh), the excessive human curiosity to know and control (Lust of the Eyes), and we must let God rule over things He says are His to rule (Boastful Pride of Life).
The big task for us is no longer subduing the earth, but subduing our fleshly natures. Until we are on that path, we cannot experience divine sovereignty as His agents. The big business of the Covenant as our guide in this life is learning where the boundaries are. We gain actual divine authority when we no longer chase our own will.
In the ancient Hebrew mind, the only way God could eliminate evil and suffering would be to eliminate Creation. More to the point, He would have to eliminate us. The apparently logical conflict between predestination and free will is a western artifact. All of the assumptions are wrong, and that's how we get to that question.
Referring to Romans 9, if Pharaoh had accepted God's will for him, including the destruction of his economic situation, Pharaoh could have had peace with Him. It would not have stopped God from ravaging his empire, but he would have had peace about it and could have recovered somewhat. The problem was that Pharoah did not accept God's dominion over the situation.
How many times does the Old Testament refer to a scenario in which God commands someone to go and fight, without promising they would win? How many times do we learn that this is rightly a separate question? It's one thing to obey; it's another thing to expect a particular outcome. The whole point is to get you moving. The issue is exploring and occupying the intervening terrain, never mind the destination.
On the other hand, sometimes the destination does matter. The word "predestined" comes from the idea of a destination, not the path you traveled to get there. There are a lot of outcomes that are not predestined, because they aren't seminal to God's plans. He allows all kinds of things to take their course because they aren't destinations that He has decreed. You won't know until you get there.
God's foreknowledge is not predestination, it is not predictive in terms of iron-clad outcomes, but portrays what will happen if you stay on the same path you are on now. There are traps we need to avoid. What we need to understand about it is that God knows all the outcomes and will typically reveal to us enough to make decisions that please Him. You just need to work on trying to discern His wishes.
Foreknowledge and predestination are functionally two different things. It's not a question of defining the terms, but of gaining a perception of how God acts. It's not abstract, but personal. That's the Hebrew way of looking at it.
Thus, some of the biggest problems we have in serving Him arise from false assumptions about whether certain things are decreed. Not everything that happens to you was decreed. Some sorrows are simply part of the fallen situation. Yet, a great deal of our discomfort in life comes from making bad choices. Not because the choice itself was bad, but because we didn't properly submit to God in the first place. Rather, we decided on our own, as if we were gods judging what was good or evil.
The existence of evil is not God's failure, but everyone else's failures. God plans out certain destinations for this time-space bubble of existence. For reasons only He can understand, He chose to let us participate. The only way we can do so meaningfully is to stay in submission to Him. When and how your life here ends is not likely to be decreed, but the sum total of a lot of things you chose and experienced on the way were.
Granted, there are a few people whose time is limited, just as there are some whose space is limited. However, it's clear from Scripture that most are not so. There are plenty of soft limits, as well. It's all more complex than we can imagine. What matters is our submission, our resolve to please Him regardless of things we can and cannot control.
Most people get upset with God because they have embraced the lie that we have some right to choose certain things and ignore God's decrees. Without a proper Hebrew feudal submission, nothing will ever make sense.
I'm not the only one saying this. You can get a much more detailed treatment on the Hebrew outlook from this book by Dr. Michael S. Heiser. It's not a question of agreeing with all of his specific answers, but of how he approaches it.
Comments
DarkMirror
I put Heiser's books, and some other ones he's written, into my "to read" list.
Do you think the "made in His image" attribute has something to do with the third commandment, about not taking His name in vain? What I mean is that we have the authority to act on His behalf, but making poor moral decisions is executing on that authority ("His name") in a way He didn't intend?
Catacomb Resident
That is, indeed, the original meaning of "taking His name in vain". It included, but was not limited to, cussing or even just falsely declaring a curse that God did not back. We are obliged to use His authority on His behalf, so that things turn out for His glory.
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