Then God said, “Let us make man in our image…” (Genesis 1:26) Unfortunately, many try to turn that scripture around. They think it reads, “Let us make God in our image.” In other words they have the misconception that God likes what they like, hates what they hate, and would react the way they would in any given situation. In their minds they actually create a being more like themselves. Which validates this old saying: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.” So popular is this quote that it’s accredited to everyone from Voltaire to Rousseau and even Mark Twain.
A. W. Tozer says: “Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.”
Unfortunately sometimes our view of God can reflect our own personality. Introverts might think God is distant and not all that interested in our day to day lives. Extroverts might think God is the life of the party so let’s live it up. Happy people might think God wants to give everyone a big hug. Angry people might think God wants to annihilate everyone. Activists might think God is interested in social change, so they join groups to affect this. Pacifists might think God will just let everything take its course, so it’s better to remain uninvolved.
Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird says a friend of hers puts it this way: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.” This makes the Christian life so much easier because the phrase “what would Jesus do” quickly morphs into “what would I do.”
Eventually we must all learn to accept that what we think is not as important as what God thinks, because our thoughts are not his thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8) After all, God is God! Since God has given us free will we can choose to believe him or not. We can even choose to make him over into our image, but our inventive mind manipulations will not change him into something else.
Christians spend far too much time trying to align God’s views with theirs instead of striving for the reverse – aligning their thinking with God’s. It’s a hard concept to grasp but God does not like what we like, just because we like it. God does not hate what we hate, just because we hate it. God does not react how we react, just so we can justify what we do. If he did, we would not need to seek the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5) and be transformed (Romans 12:2).
