Hopewit

One of Us? With whom, then, will you compare God? To what image will you liken him? (Isaiah 40:18, NIV) “ If God had a name, what would it be? And would you call it to His face? If you were faced with Him in all His glory What would you ask if you had just one question?” It’s been 24 years since Joan Osborne recorded Ed Bazilian’s song, One of Us. I’ve got it on a CD and played it in the car as we drove through northern New Brunswick. The haunting chorus (“What if God was one of us / Just a slob like one of us / Just a stranger on the bus tryin’ to make his way home”) stays with you; a fantastic backup band helps with that. Isaiah goes on to answer his own question beginning with what God is not: not a man-made replica of an imagined god by a craftsman in gold or wood. What God is, though, is a creative force in the sky, so far above that the people of the earth appear to him as grasshoppers. Not a “person” who walks to and fro upon the earth either . From his l...

There's got to be a story here. “ Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” (Genesis 1:26, NIV) This is part II of “mankind in the image of God.” Earlier, I pondered the imagery in terms of the physical—the human body, cuerpo humano . Today, I’d like to consider the implications personality-wise. Is the writer saying that God’s personality and our personalities are alike? Is a similar range of emotion and thought present in God as in us? Genesis 1:26 contains a “so that,” a reason for the creator to have made us this way; how else would we have the ability, skill and intelligence to accept sovereignty over the earth? Most of us, most of the time would likely question God’s judgment in thinking that we are up to the job, but such a conclusion can only be reached, I thi...