Is God Like Us, Or Are We Like God?

Micah 6:1-8
What sort of lives should we live as we seek to serve God in faithful obedience? That’s a very appropriate question to which the prophet Micah offers two possible answers. We might call the first a human response:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high? 

Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, 

with calves a year old? 

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, 

with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? 

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, 

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
 (Micah 6:6-7).

In other words, if we shower God with gifts won’t the divine favor be poured out upon us? Of course this option assumes that God is like us, susceptible to flattery and prone to self-interest, that God can be bought or influenced by gestures that ultimately cost us nothing. That’s the “God-like-us” option. But Micah offers another, more appropriate response to the question of how we are to live in faithful obedience to God:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; 

and what does the Lord require of you 

but to do justice, and to love kindness, 

and to walk humbly with your God?” (Vs. 6-8).

Call this the “us-like-God” option, the path on which we strive to meet others with the same grace that God has shown us. In the first case, treating God as though God is human, we may as well worship ourselves. But when we allow God to guide us, when we live by what God desires of us, we will find ourselves enriched by the effort and will see the truth of God’s wisdom made manifest. The choice may not always seem obvious, but in so many ways it is crucial that we bend our lives to God’s will and quit trying to make God act like one of us.

Prayer: God of justice, kindness, and holiness, may we live in accordance with your will all the days of our lives and when we fail you, Lord, may we find in your forgiveness the power to try again. In Jesus’ name. Amen.