Some thoughts on the nature of God

What does it mean to say that we are made in God’s image?

The Bible is very specific about this. It is said twice in Genesis 1: 26-27. It is also repeated in Genesis 5: 1-2.

We are all, women and men, made in God’s image.

It does not mean that we are Gods. It also does not mean that we are exactly like God.

To me it is a clue to God’s nature and a very important signpost to what we are and what we can be.

It is as significant a clue as the revelation that God is three in one, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Trinity reveals three aspects of a God that is beyond out abilities to comprehend. Despite our limits, God has decided to engage directly with us, God understands our limits and provides us with the appropriate means with which to engage with God. God becomes accessible to us through this and despite the mind-blowingly complex idea of the Trinity we can encounter and engage with God in these three aspects of God’s nature more easily than we would if we tried to understand God as a completely abstract or overwhelmingly incomprehensibly powerful and all encompassing being.

It was Christ that brought us to this revelation of the Trinity and He also used one aspect of this Trinity to point us towards the nature of God in ourselves.

By specifically teaching us that we should pray intimately to God, and by illustrating this through His prayer to His Father, and by constantly referring to God in this way, Jesus was adding a new insight into this idea that we are all made in God’s image.

Jesus humanises God in a very particular way – as a loving parent – and points towards this as a way of helping us build a more intimate and effective relationship with God. But He is also telling us to look towards ourselves so that we can discover more about both our own nature and that of God’s.

If we are all made in God’s image and Jesus is revealing to us a new understanding of the Old Testament (both of which are true) then Christ’s teaching of the Trinity tells us that it is helpful to understand our God in this way. And if two of the three aspects of God He reveals to us contain human references there must be aspects of the nature of being both a parent and a child in the image of God that is contained within us.

So, we are pointed towards looking at aspects of ourselves as a way of helping us look more closely at the nature of God.

What is it that is valuable, important, good, nourishing and so on about parenthood and being a child?

I have been pondering on this so much! There are so many aspects of ourselves as human beings that are highlighted when we become parents and there are equally valuable aspects of our human nature that are revealed when we see ourselves as children.

I will not list them all here, but they include elements such as unconditional love, a readiness to forgive and to forgive again, trusting in others, the ability to see the best in others, a deep desire to help others become independent and happy and so on.

Consider this; God is so incomprehensibly awesome and powerful that we can never get to grips with what God is. However, every human being that has ever been and will ever be born holds a tiny fragment - a small but completely true aspect of what God is within them. Even when every human being has lived and the new Kingdom comes, the sum of all our parts will not equal the whole, which is God.

But if we live our lives looking for that aspect of God in everyone we meet, how will that change and transform not only our lives but the lives of everyone we meet?
Through revealing this to us and through the rest of His teachings, Christ points us to something wholly new and enriching. Some people say we should look for Christ in everyone we meet. Perhaps we might see a new aspect of the Trinity every time we make the effort to look.