What’s It Like to Be God?

June 14

In my last writing, I described how God wanted to know by experience and relationship what it meant to be human, and therefore, we may ask the question, “Can humans know by experience and relationship what it means to be God. In 1John 3:2 we read, “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

God is God and always will be. Humans are human and will be forever, but in Jesus Christ we see the two as one- God living in the temple of sinless human flesh, and whatever Jesus is—we will be like that in some way. This, I believe, is what John tells us.

At creation we were made to be the image or reflection, of who God is (an ontological assertion). If we want to know what God is like and what it feels like to be God, we must look at ourselves. When we see ourselves as we truly are, we then possess the essential tools for understanding something of what it means to be God (an epistemological assertion) .

The problem is sin. Sin distorts our perception of who we are, and therefore we misread who and what God is, but “in Christ,” the framework for knowing ourselves can be put back in order. From this perspective our epistemology, that is, our way of knowing, is fundamentally reoriented towards relationship and experience and away from so-called mere objective facts about the universe that we can manipulate to our advantage. Objective facts are valuable for validating, correcting, and refining what experience teaches, but do not explain existence or experience. To imagine, as western science does, that one can start objectively with observed facts to explain all experience is to pursue a mirage.

We were made to govern the world God made. When humans dominate and subjugate each other they reveal God’s intention at creation for humans to govern, but distorted by sin, the impulse to order our worldly environment is bent to destruction. Only a right relationship with God can reorient our self understanding and our knowing so that we may create as God creates, bringing to life things that never were before, and that lead to more and more life rather than the inevitable running down of civilization we observe to be the end of all merely human experiments in civilization and government.

As we come to know God in Christ, we truly come to know ourselves as we are, and as we experience life in relationship with God, we may also know something of what God experiences in relationship, because we are the image, the true reflection of what God experiences as a loving Trinitarian God of relationship.  Love and relationship lie at the root and core of all existence, and we can know this by experience (epistemological and ontological).