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.

You Are a Spiritual Animal

Ecclesiastes 3:16-4:3

When our children were little one of their favorite video tapes was a Disney sing-along that included the song, “You Are A Human Animal.”

You are a human animal,

You are a very special breed,

For you are the only animal

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

There is an interesting parallelism to the song at work in our reading from Ecclesiastes today. “I said in my heart with regard to human beings,” we read, “that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:18-20). The writer of Ecclesiastes would likely concede that people can read and write and think, but would then point out that their end is the same as that of animals. “All is vanity."

John Macquarrie might disagree. In his essay, “Spirit and Spirituality,” Macquarrie makes the point that “’spirit’ names a kind of being that is somehow shared by [humanity] with the Spirit of God. Spirit is present in and constitutive of [humanity], as well as God…Thus [humanity], alone among all the beings on earth, was granted a share of spirit.” In his article, “Spirituality in the Recovery Process,” F. A. Prezioso makes virtually the same point. “Spirituality is a quality that belongs exclusively to the human animal,” he writes.

What then are we to say about these things? The writer of Ecclesiastes believed that humanity is but a facet of creation, a part of the bigger picture with a role to play in relation to God but with no real advantage within the realm of history. When we consider the presence of the spirit in human life, though, and the relationship between God and humanity in the creation narrative and elsewhere we find a much different image. We alone among all forms of life have a claim on God’s image and God’s presence for we alone have been filled with the divine breath which is our “inspiration.” We may be human animals, but there is much more to it than that.

Prayer: Lord, it is you who have breathed life into us. Help us to honor your presence in all that we do, for it is in Jesus’ name that we pray. Amen.