I am Mankind. I literally represent the whole of Mankind.
Observation
I don’t know if you have ever noticed this in yourself, but personally, I am unable to follow every instruction perfectly. Somehow, for whatever reason, I always want to add my own particular spin to whatever the instruction happens to be, assuming I can persuade myself to do it in the first place.
But let’s go back a bit and start with the most inexperienced of humans: children. Getting a child to do anything can be frustrating. Teaching a school-going child to feed the dog every day is a daily undertaking. They appear unable to remember from one day to the next the simplest of instructions. Progress is slow. It takes many months and is often accompanied by moans and groans and possibly even the rolling of eyes.
It gets worse as the teen years kick in because now the will is starting to be exercised more obviously and every request is regarded as an interesting interlude in the daily walk to do only what I want to do.
When we transition into young adults, we hopefully start seeing the consequences of our obedience or disobedience and start making better decisions.
The point is that this will that we have to want to do stuff our way is hard to overcome.
I am Mankind
Genesis 1:27 (NIV)
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
‘Mankind’ represents the created mankind, either a male or a female person, created by our Heavenly God and made in His image.
Let’s call it MK.
“So what?” I would say.
It turns out that “So what?” is quite a big deal.
It’s a big deal because, as it also turns out, we have been built with what I believe is a fundamental flaw.
By God the builder Himself.
And because God built that flaw into MK, it must therefore not be a flaw, from His perspective anyway, but a feature built within the OS of the MK processor.
The first example of this feature happens in Genesis.
MK is told this:
Genesis 2:15–17 (NIV)
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
And the Lord God commanded the man,
“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
And then he does this:
Genesis 3:1–6 (NIV)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,
but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden,
and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.
“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye,
and also desirable for gaining wisdom,
she took some and ate it.
She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
God gives instruction A.
MK does B.
This very simple example then gets repeated for the rest of our natural lives, whether we are Christians or not. We do not do instructions well. Especially instructions that we don’t like.
Why is that?
Because we are not robots.
In my coding years, I expected the system to work according to my coding plan. When it didn’t, I suspected an error in my code or that the hardware was not up to the job in question.
In real life, it gets more complicated. As discussed in another Observation, the Bible gives great advice on how to speak to others.
Ephesians 4:29 (NIV)
Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths,
but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs,
that it may benefit those who listen.
It’s a simple statement, easy to understand, sounds like great advice, comes from the Bible and yet when I analyse any given day for 100% evidence of this in me, I find I fall short all the time.
What is the problem?
My first thought is that at least it proves I am not a robot. At least a robot would have completed all the given instructions perfectly. Isn’t that what God wants? Has He created Mankind to follow His ways perfectly?
And yet, that does not appear to be the case.
We are flawed and yet created by God.
What is going on here?
For some reason, we think we have options or other ways or even the audacity to think we don’t need to do it at all. Clearly, we need to understand our spiritual nature better and how that nature integrates with the God of the Universe.
In the next post, we’ll go back to asking ourselves why we do anything in the first place.
~~~ THE END of Part 1 ~~~