4.2 The Nature of Humanity
Who are we? What are we like? Unlike our stories about God, our stories about ourselves have remained pretty much the same across the ages. We believe we are good, but most people, all those other people, they’re bad. While we’ve always believed we are good, we’ve also always had to deal with the fact that we make mistakes. We all know how much we mess up, and while we believe most of God’s anger is the result of the intentional evil that others do, we are also guilty of falling short and displeasing him. Because even we, as good as we are, have sinned against God, all the trouble of the world has come into being. (But it’s mostly those other people's fault!)
When Christ revealed God as our Father, we accepted it, but what we failed to realize is how this implicated God in all of our beliefs about ourselves. If God is not some distant being who lives in the clouds, but is in fact our Father, then what we say is true about us, affects him as well. God is not just our Father. The Son is our Brother, and through The Holy Spirit we are destined to be God’s spouse. So let’s run through a simple story of us as evil sinners, but which also highlights our place in God’s Family:
There was once a wealthy man who had many children. The oldest was brave and wise, but all the others were lazy and spoiled. All of these younger children were constantly causing problems in their father’s house, as well as in the town. The oldest son, despite being admired far and wide, decided to marry the local town's notorious prostitute and brought her into his father’s home. She immediately fit right in with all her husband’s brothers and sisters; joining them in taking advantage of their father’s great wealth and in causing havoc throughout the area.
If this was a real family, do we honestly think we would respect this father? Or would we ridicule him and bemoan the fact that such wealth had been given to someone unable to even manage his own household? Would we not mourn the fact that the oldest son was unable to live up to his full potential because he was constantly cleaning up after all the trouble his wife and siblings made?
If God is our Father, Brother and our Spouse, then we must see how he is not immune to our insistence on believing we are evil sinners. Without realizing it, our beliefs about ourselves have prevented us from discovering who God really is. This hasn’t meant we can’t learn more about him and be in relationship with him, but that is because of his great Love, not because we accurately understand his character. So how do we reimagine ourselves in light of Christ’s revelation to us that God is our Father, he is our Brother, and we are destined to marry into the Family of God?
The only way to do this is through a story: