TO BE LIKE GOD — REALLY

You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4 & 5, NIV)
Be like God. I emphasize those words as I ask myself, what did our conflated far ancestors conceive as ‘being like God’?
I can guess. Most of us still imagine ‘being like God’ as being able to order the world to revolve around us, am I right? To be all-powerful, self-sustaining and immortal to boot, am I right? And have we any reason to think our prehistoric and early-civilizational forebears imagined anything different? I think the answer to that is a rather resounding ‘NO’; don’t you think so?
But such clues as we have to the nature of God — and if we call ourselves Christians, we follow, some for real (and I’m not at all sure of most of us), the God made flesh in Christ Jesus. His life is supposed to show us what it really means to ‘be like God’. And those clues are at least 180 degrees away from what our human imaginations conjure up.
Jesus lived and died like ‘the least of us’ whom he called ‘his brethren’. And when his apostles were scared and disheartened, God raised him as He had promised to do. But the point here is, Jesus lived and taught (and, I believe, still lives and teaches) the way to be like God is to empty oneself as we live the lives of servants to one another and to Creation as a whole.
I think a whole lot of dough-colored faces started to redden to varying degrees as I wrote the above lines. These evil-minded, greedy, essentially cowardly dinkyjohnnies and the shrivelled walnuts…