A little light housekeeping before we begin: After speaking to my Beloved and a few people whose opinion and wisdom I thoroughly trust, I’ll be focusing fairly exclusively on the Genesis Diaries for an unknown chunk of time. It has become clear that one of the most important things I can do with my time and energy right now is delve deeply into the scriptures and invite others to come along. Narnia is forever in my heart and I will eventually continue to enjoy plumbing the substantial depths of C. S. Lewis’ spiritual imagination. The great benefit of focusing on Genesis Diaries is that I get to point to the real Aslan and, as the title at the top of my blog site suggests, chasing down Aslan in the real world is the absolute goal.
He exists. He is so much more amazing than you think He is, and if you just loosen your grip on the flannel graph board and come with me then you can see too.
And now, back to our show.
We are finally at the sixth day. We all know what that means, right? Mankind is created! Woo-hoo! It’s the big celebration that caps off all creation right before God takes a “Sunday nap” from all He has created.
Ah, but that isn’t all the occurred on the sixth day. There was one generalized set of animals that needed to be brought forth before Man. It wasn’t enough to have animals of the sea and sky. God created another category: “Living creatures according to their kinds” upon the Earth.
It is interesting here about how specific God is in this sections of His creation. On the fifth day He declared that it was “swarms of living creatures” and “birds”. Here He strangely gets granular saying, “livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth…”. I’m still not sure what to make of that level of specificity.
Again, He “makes” the beasts as He did with the sea creatures and birds. He “labored” or “wrought” them after He called them into existence. As before, they are only considered “good” when His hand had worked them. Before His touch they existed, but after His touch they were “good”.
But…there was still something missing.
There are a lot of people in our current society, and throughout history for that matter, who have believed that Man was quite likely the worst thing God created. Many suggest that the whole natural world would get along exceedingly well if Man wasn’t actually a part of it. Interestingly, God disagrees, but let’s get back into the narrative.
The natural world, but for Man, has been created and God does something here that AGAIN, He hasn’t really done before. He doesn’t launch immediately into creating. He deliberates with Himself. Instead of saying “Let the earth,” or “Let there be…” or “Let the waters…” what He says is a fascinating phrase.
“Let Us…”
There are a significant number of ways that Mankind is different from all of the previous creations of God, but this one marks Man out as different from the first. God details the manner of creation, “make (wrought with hands) Man in Our image, after Our likeness”, and His intent, “…let them have dominion…”.
Everything before wasn’t entirely hands off, but this “Man” is to be completely hand crafted, bespoke as it were, and to look like God. How strange.
Many people have laughed at the idea of deities of the past considering that each culture has made their god to look like them. Warrior cultures would have warrior gods. Agricultural cultures would often create gods of harvest, hunt, and hearth. They would look like the people they were deities of and act like them. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is quite the opposite.
He wasn’t made in our image. We were made in His.
Have you ever considered how much this echoes throughout the biblical story? So many times God implores His people, “Know Me. Be like Me. Ask Me for wisdom so you can think like Me.” I can’t think of a single god or spiritual entity in all of recorded history that has ever made that kind of claim.
Right now I’m reading the works of Euripides, an ancient Greek tragedian, and in one of his works a character is beloved of Artemis. Why? Because he is into what she is into. Hunting. It wasn’t in trying to please her that he took up hunting. He just happens to like it so she happens to like and favor him. The gods of Greece never say “Hey, be like me.” They favor those who already happen to be into what they are into.
The God of the Bible, by His very deliberation, made us to be like Him, calls us to be like Him, and longs for face to face union with us. He is such a God of relationship that He is conspiring to cause each of us to have the opportunity to encounter Him and have the choice to follow or not.
If He made us like Him, then why the call for us to be like Him?
Because we are not enough like Him to bring peace and healing (literal Shalom) to this world. Our ways are not His ways, as later scriptures say. God says to love your enemies. That is quite literally the last thing on the list we’d ever want to do to our enemies. God says to give your life for those who hate you. To say that we bristle against that notion is a grand understatement..
He can see the expanse of space and time, knowing all things, understanding all things to the deepest quantum level. He can cause miracles to happen that, by definition, defy nature. He can, and has as we’ve seen in these verses, make matter out of literal nothing. He is so foreign to us in that He was not born, was not made. He is eternal. Just trying to understand these last two facts is mind boggling. I’m pretty sure that if I sat down to spend a day meditating on just that, trying to wrap my mind around it, I might go mad.
He is not subject to the negative emotions that we are, not subject to performing great injustices as a consequence of the best of intentions, and not driven by terrible passions. He commands us to be like Him; to choose the far harder path of peace, love, kindness, long-suffering, gentleness, self-control, patience, faithfulness, and joy. Those fruits of the Spirit are how He functions. They are everything we want for ourselves, the way we so deeply desire to have done for us, but are colossally difficult to put into practice for others. I know my record has been mostly that it is practically an accident if I show those virtues to people outside my circle of preferred people.
Oh, no. We have not created a god like us. He created us to be like Him.
And so here we leave it for another week. When God says that what He has created is “good”, He is not looking at just at the creatures of the land. What He is calling good is the interconnectedness and life-enhancing, life-perpetuating, life-abounding quality of the latest creation as a cohesive part of everything that has come before. But, it could be even better.
In our next entry God takes it from “good” to “very good”.
Yes, the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Most High, Commander of the Heavenly host…turns it up to eleven.
Finding Narnia 
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