God is Seeking Partners, not Panhandlers
There was a time in my life when I thought of God as a distant figure — Almighty God who sits in a far-away heaven. He watches over me like a big brother, keeps a record of everything I do. He blesses me for my good deeds and punishes me for my bad deeds. After I die, if I had been a good boy, this Father God allows me into heaven, which is a place above the clouds with a pearly gate and glitzy mansions. And if I had been a bad boy, He sends me to hell, a place under the earth with fire and flames and snakes and worms crawling all over you.
I have evolved enough to discard those childish stories and have come to realize that we are not mere creatures, at the mercy of a distant deity.When we see ourselves as mere creatures, we feel so helpless and powerless. We feel like victims at the hands of a capricious God or robots of a fixed fate.
God does not want us to be mere creatures or helpless victims.
In his book, Original Blessing, theologian Matthew Fox argues that “we are co-creators with God.” He describes serious faith as via creativa, a faith that invites us “to trust our vocation as artists, managers and new birthers and participants with God in a process of ongoing creation.”
According to Fox, “The primary human vocation is to create the world with God as an active and ever-present partner.”
There is a big difference between being a creature and being a co-creator.
If you read the Bible carefully and look at the creation story, you will find that we are created to be co-creators with God, a lesson rarely heard from pulpits.
When it comes to creating humans, God said: “Let us make man in our image and likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock and all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Gen 1: 27)
Someone who rules over all the creatures, doesn’t look like another creature to me.
Look at the next verse: “God blessed them and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.”
Again, somebody who is given the job of ruling over the earth and subduing it cannot be a mere creature. Due to our ignorance, ruling over has been misunderstood, and humans are ruining the Earth through their capricious consumption and callous attitude towards the environment.
Ruling over actually means being caretakers and custodians of Earth in partnership with the Creator thus becoming co-creators of a sustainable planet and heaven on Earth.
So, our relationship to God is not a master-servant model, but a partnership model. If we don’t partner with God in creating heaven on Earth, it is not going to happen. The flip side of this partnership is that we can create hell on Earth too. If we don’t like what we have created, we can change it. If we have made a mess of creation, we can clean it up. It is where the earthly lesson, you reap what you sow, comes into play.
Think about how new humans arrive on Earth. God doesn’t say, “Let there be more Americans, or let there be more Europeans,” and suddenly thousands of Americans and Europeans show up on the face of the Earth.
We know how the creation of new humans happen these days. Unless a man and a woman come together and do what they must do, no new life is going to be created. I am not being arrogantly agnostic about the divine input and involvement in the creation of a new human being. All I am saying is that we are not helpless victims or mere by-standers but active participants in the creative process.
God usually doesn’t do for us what God cannot do through us. God wants us to be co-creators with God, not mere onlookers.
God is seeking partners, not panhandlers!
