Imagery

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” ¹ and ever since we have been making God in our imagination. We expect God to match up to our expectations, to allow us to make Him the way we think He should be for our personal fulfillment, to meet our desires.

When the Apostle Paul made his declaration to the men of the Athenian council, he made two definitive statements about perception of God:

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. ²
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. ³

First, God does not need anything and second, He is not imagery formed by us. Paul was never subtle and pulled no punches is addressing the problem. The Greeks had created a pantheon of gods known as the Twelve Olympians but had another nine levels of lesser gods. ⁴ This is the mindset that Paul addresses.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ^{5, 6}

With the understanding that, ‘God who made the world and everything in it is Lord of both heaven and earth, that He gives mankind life, breath and everything we have, that He established time and limits for all that lives on earth and that all beings need Him, Paul then acknowledges that God has permitted mankind to ‘do their own thing’ (free will—the ability to choose) but that it is now time to reconsider our course.

The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” ⁷

‘The times of ignorance’ overlooked were not condoned but rather mankind was permitted to ‘go their own way’ but then with the Incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus living among us, there becomes a demarcation where imagination is no longer believable for we have seen or have the witness of those who have seen the living God. And we have the testimony of the LORD Himself that repentance is appropriate, that Jesus will judge the World righteously for He lived sinlessly and the LORD accepted His fulfillment by ‘raising Him from the dead’ in completion of the work of God on behalf of mankind for whoever would accept His substitutionary sacrifice on their behalf.

Yet, we are still driven by imagination, by creating our image of what God ought to be in our lives rather than what He reveals in the Word. We still create ‘unknown gods’ that we serve with our lives, trying to attain what we think is worthwhile instead of what God says He desires for us.

We are strange. Or more likely, estranged.