“…Sometimes I doubt that man was created in GOD’s Image…”
After I cast my vote, I picked a matatu to the CBD and another back home – as instructed. I am one of those people whose polling station is somewhere deep in the informals… I will not say where. It was a former hood of mine and I was excited when I realized I had a genuine reason to go back there. Among the things I had missed were those chapos from the vibandas, chipo mwitu, and hot tea that came in enamel coated metallic cups. Being an important day, most of these vibandas were closed. I did not have the pleasure to have them. I decided to just go home and relax. The rebellious me detoured and I found myself hanging out by myself on a bench outside a certain mall in one of those places where the trees are really green and leafy… I don’t even think leaves fall on this side of the country. I had no hurry to go home since, there was nothing to do there. Follow the updates on TV? Ha! My phone has been and still is my best friend. So I took my earphones, nice music to back me up and I started going through social media. The timelines were full of fingers and nails and all that other scary stuff that people were posting to show that they have voted. ( I had a scary picture for this post but I felt it would scare people away)
Yes, scary… It was a finger and nail frenzy out there. Then a conversation started on one of the platforms about the legitimacy of the creation story… Well, at first this came out as a joke and I let it slide. Moving on swiftly, I followed conversations silently, sharing what I considered funny, posting my own thoughts here and there… However, this story wouldn’t just go away. Now people doubted if they were really created in the image of God. Is it even possible that someone would doubt this? At some point, I was in the same spot myself. But that was when I was younger. But mimi ni nani! At that age, I also had theories of my own and the one that was of significance related to the omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience nature of God. I mean if God is everywhere, he can be switching bodies faster than the speed of light to be like Kim and instantly to be like – (to look like) Kev. Since He has all the power, He could do anything He wanted, say anything He wanted and convince me anything He wanted. (I was a child – All-Powerful God says, “I created you in my image Chris,” & I am like “Yes Sir! You Did!”) – There, I believed it. Aaaand because He is the one who knows everything, what I do not know is just me and my small child and human nature level of understanding things – I wouldn’t understand. God knows everything including why I don’t know why He says He created me in His image (He – His), but looking at Njeri, She doesn’t look like me and I don’t understand how She can be looking like God as well – huh? I just decided to settle on everyone having a piece of God that looked like them. This cultured love among friends because now, we could not beat each other, insult each other, or do other bad stuff to each other because we were doing it to God. Scary…
Then I grew up. Trying to refine this theory by myself… This is using the world knowledge that I have been fed to that point. Then this changed and I was no longer that naïve Sunday school child who had an idea of who God really looked like, or even what or how many faces and bodies He had. However, in my journey with God, I get to know Him and understand Him more. It’s more of experiencing who God is. This can only happen when you are in a relationship with Him. “A relationship with Him…” meaning He is someone you can relate with. You know, I could not understand who God is or what He looks like if I don’t know what I am myself. His revelation brought me back to the “grassroots”. On me. So who am I? I mean like Chris. It’s easier to know who God is if I come from me upwards. I mean – while still on that naïve level. Therefore, Chris is made up of Body, Mind & Spirit. Body = Fleshy – fleshy things… and the intangible things. Things that you feel but cannot touch. I don’t even know how to define spirit. And please don’t tell me to do Google, it has a good definition yes, but you feel there is something remaining in the description. Okay, fine – the spirit is defined as “the non-physical part of the person that acts as the carrier of emotions, character, and the soul.”… “Will or sense of self” “The life force of a person” – This I can relate to. So I will say, the body houses the spirit, and the spirit houses the soul. That is in the context of the definition given online. However, another school of thought will say these are independent entities. The body houses both the spirit and the soul. What is the soul then? The soul is “Person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity” & another says the soul is the “complex of human attributes that manifests as consciousness, thought, feeling, and will, regarded as distinct from the physical body.” Now you can place them in their respective contexts.
One day while teaching Sunday school kids, I cannot remember the exact sermon but I remember, I brought a matchbox with me to class. I think it was about life, death, and the whole mixture of soul, body, and spirit. I lit the match and held up the fire for them to see. (Now I have a problem explaining this because it is out of context) I told them that is how the spirit is. It is like that fire. You can see it, you can feel its heat, you can see its effects (it can burn something) but you cannot hold it in your arm and put it in your pocket, your heart, or your stomach. (So we cannot touch the chest area and say my spirit is here…) or the armpits – as some kids were telling me. The spirit is just like that all over the place, in around being blow blown by the wind etc etc… Which brings us to the spirit man. When I understood who the spirit man was, and who my spirit man was, that was the point I started understanding the “Image of God”. The spirit man is the definition of who I am in relation to my spirit.
Back to the conversation on the platform, that was triggered by the conversationon being created in the image of God. Two inputs stood out. I want to put them out there, before, I put mine.
“Nice observation… I also sometimes think so… But whichever thing that makes us think we are not in the so God’s image, because of the nasty things human beings do… Well the same human beings sometimes do good things, and sometimes I think it saves us a lot of energy and I could say frustration by just believing that probably we are in God’s image…”
“I think it’s us human beings that made out God to be in our own image so that we could relate with him. Since he has always been there, I fail to see how a rabbit (if it has a notion of a higher being) thinks God to be human like, maybe it thinks of an omnipotent big Rabbit watching out for it n it’s kind… #thinkingoutloud”
Those two lit a fire inside me that had to burn out here. On my fingers. & Keyboard. By the way, some 10 years back, I would have seen those fingers myself and brushed the idea away. So now, I imagined how the Spirit of God given to billions of people might be like. Picture teatime at a public gathering. There are teacups or containers of all forms, shapes and sizes. They are just cups from wherever they are. Then enter tea. The tea that is poured from the kettle is the same tea that goes to all the cups. So the man holding the nice white enamel cup, the one who came with last week’s overused styrofoam cup, the paper cup holder, the one with a plastic cup, the one with a tumbler and the clown who I can’t tell where they got the calabash from… They all have the same tea. SAME! All these vessels are different, but the tea in them is the same tea as it came from the source! That is how I would tell my Sunday school kids. But because we are on another level… (Plus I had to mention ‘calabash’ on my blog)
However, the life I now live…
It is a FACT we are created in God’s image. Calabash, Kauro or Styrofoam. Gen 1 26 “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…’” Likeness is a representation of something in terms of how it accurately represents the actual thing. In this case how man was created to accurately represent the image of God. To support what likeness this was, let’s check out, Ecclesiastes 12:7 “…and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it…” This clearly explains that as much as God created the dust – and used it to make man, He was not made by dust Himself, so we could not probably have been made to the likeness of a* God made of dust! = Spirit – likeness! To solve my dilemma about who was really created in God’s image, the man or woman, Genesis 5 in verse 1 & 2 comes through for me… “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. Male and female He created them…” So if we are alike, it is not based on the physical make up… – Don’t even think of asking if God is a He or a She, or why we use ‘He’. Isaiah 42:5 says “…God, the Lord…” “…Who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it…” You can only give that which you have. After molding us with clay, He gave us His breath and His spirit. Likeness is also brought out clearly when the Word tells us that only the Spirit of God comprehends the thoughts of God. In the same way, only the spirit of the person can comprehend that person’s thoughts. This is where I would conveniently insert the soul man, and say this is the feeling, & thinking man and confuse all the above. Well, that is 1st Corinthians 2:11 “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” Tells you we are the same, In Spirit.
The other aspect of being created in the likeness of God is our ability to create. This is what has been most amazing since I grew up from thinking God has one million faces all over His body. The part that in the same way God spoke “Let there be …” in the same way, are we in a position to use WORDS! Just like our father in Heaven used WORDS to create! Since 2009 I have been trying to understand the “Law of Attraction” – The Secret. Trust me, it is not a secret to me anymore. It is right there in the bible! That is the topic of another day. If we are brothers and sisters of Jesus – it is that spirit that binds us together. Romans 8:15 “… but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…” Had this spirit been absent from our lives, we would not have a relationship with God – actually, we wouldn’t even be in existence. Remember when I stated earlier in the post of how God continues to reveal Himself to me the more I seek Him? It’s just like a normal relationship, only that God’s is above all. The more you relate with someone the more you, stay with them, the more you talk and listen to them, the more you know them. THE SPIRIT is the element in humanity that gives me the ability to have this intimate relationship with God – to connect with Him. I am part of Him and by extension; it’s just me being reliant on the ‘Mother ship’ for all my spiritual provision.
So yes, I am created in His Image. & I don’t have any doubt!