Tuesday 16 June 2015

Why God made us human

It seems common amongst Christians to dislike and distrust our earthly nature, to see every earthly desire and need as an expression of 'the fall' (which was the rebellion of humankind against God, as described in the Bible in Genesis 3), and to assume that our goal is to overcome our sinful humanity.

And yet ... God created us human!

God made us frail people, created out of dust, who get hungry and need food, get tired and need rest, get lonely and need relationships, and as human beings our knowledge and understanding is limited. And this was before the fall. God created us human, and said his creation was "very good".

So, what happened after the fall? Well, amongst other things, we misused our God-given good desires, and became gluttonous, lazy, misused sex outside of marriage, and we thought we knew better than God. And so we decided that we didn’t want to be human; we thought we should be more than mere humans, we should be gods ourselves!

Consequently, people spend a lot of time and effort trying to prove that they are not human, that they can live 24/7, that they can keep going with some kind of 'pick-me-up', that they can exceed their human boundaries, that they 'know it all' and can 'do it all' and be 'super-human'. And many Christians join in, working 'tirelessly' yet getting exhausted, rushing around being busy, thinking we understand it all, and trying to be 'super-Christians'! And in this way we all fall for the Enemy's lie that we are not mere humans, we are surely something more…

We confuse ‘pressing on toward the goal’ (Phil 3v14) with thinking we should ignore tiredness, ignore rest, ignore our limits, pretend our small understanding is great knowledge and wisdom … in fact, ignore that we are human.

No, God made us human, and that was "very good". But why? So that we may live content within the God-given limitations that he created within us. For being human is not a sin. It is how God intended us to be - his creatures living in relation with our creator and dependent upon him for his love and every provision.

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