God In Our Image

One of the great root heresies is the temptation to try to make God in our own image. We are made in God’s image, but this doesn’t mean that we may project back into God whatever we find in ourselves.

It’s often frustrating or confusing to try to figure out how people who profess to know God can get to the point where they promote and bless abortion, sodomy, transgenderism, fornication, polyamory, no-fault divorce. How do you get there? Well, you get there by beginning to imagine God in our image.

Perhaps one of the more subtle and vicious ways this occurs is when we prioritize relationship over truth. Arguably, this slide has been fed for decades by the evangelical mantra of having a personal relationship with God. To be a Christian is to be in covenant with God, but God does not relate to us the way we relate to one another. He is not getting to know us as we get to know Him. He does not change in any way. This would be to make God one of us and therefore no God at all.

In God, truth and love really are the same. This is why love rejoices in the truth, and we are to speak the truth in love. But since we are finite creatures, and not God, we must necessarily order these priorities, and the order really must be truth as the foundation for relationship. This is because God has ordered creation this way. God’s word speaks and creates this world and then creates a man to relate to it, and from that first man’s rib a woman was created to relate specifically to that man. The truth about reality is the foundation for relationships, and not the other way around.

In our culture, we have been taught just the opposite: to prioritize relationship over truth, that unity and harmony will lead us to truth, but this is not a harmless mistake. This is ultimately to play God, to pretend that our love can somehow create truth. But we are not God and therefore His truth is the only foundation for true love. God is love, and His love is identical with His truth. But we are not God, and so we must not pretend that our love is identical with truth. But the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld His glory, full of grace and truth.