He Made You to Carry What He Is

Stay with the strangeness of it. The beings in that council were magnificent — ancient, powerful, blazing with borrowed glory. And when God went looking for the ones who would finally do the council's work rightly, He passed them over and bent down in the mud.

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in Our image, after Our likeness...'" — Genesis 1:26 (NET)

In Our image. He never said that about the angels. He said it about the thing He was making out of clay.

People spend a great deal of time asking what the image is. Is it that we can reason? That we can build? That we can tell right from wrong? Those answers are not wrong, but they are too small, and I think you already know they are too small. Look at the One whose image you bear. At the very bottom of Him, underneath the power and the wisdom and the holiness, there is this: God is love. He is love the way the sun is fire — not a thing He does, a thing He is. And so the truest part of His likeness in you is not your cleverness and not your strength. It is your capacity to love. You were built, before anything else, to carry love — because the One you came from is love, and a likeness is meant to look like the One it came from.

Now I have to give you a word, and I am going to be careful with it, because it is the hinge of this whole book.

There are things about God that He cannot give away. He cannot make you able to hold the universe together. He cannot make you everywhere at once, or all-knowing, or the source of your own existence. Those belong to Him alone, and a made thing can never have them. The old teachers had a name for these: the things God cannot share.

But there are other things — and these are the heart of it. His goodness. His mercy. His wisdom. His patience. His kindness. His love. These He can pour into a made and mortal child, and that child can carry them, can grow full of them, can begin to glow with them the way iron glows when you leave it long enough in a forge. The iron does not become fire. It never stops being iron. But leave it in the forge and it will take the fire's heat and the fire's light into itself until you can barely tell, looking at it, where the iron ends and the fire begins.

That is what you are for. Not to become God — that was the serpent's lie in the garden, and it leads only to death. To become so full of the love of God that it pours through you into a world that is starving for it. The thrones in the council stand empty because the ones who sat there would not let the love of God pour through them. You were made — you were chosen — to be the kind of being who will.

This is the whole thing. Everything else is detail. God is love, and He made you to carry His love into His world, now and forever. Receive that before you read another page. Let it be the ground you stand on.

And now you can see what the school is for. The things God can share — His mercy, His patience, His kindness, His wisdom, His love — these are not gifts He drops into you finished, the way you would hand a child a coin. They are more like a language, or a craft, or a way of moving, that has to be learned — learned slowly, by living it, by failing at it and being corrected and trying again, the way you learn anything that goes deep. That learning is the school. The curriculum is the communicable life of God. And the strange and wonderful thing — the thing no school on earth can offer — is that the Teacher does not stand at the front of the room handing out lessons from a distance. He moves in. He pours the very thing being taught into the student, and teaches it from the inside.

We will come, before the end, to how that learning actually goes — how slow it is, how it cannot be rushed, how the costly parts are not the school failing but the school working. For now, only hold this: you have been enrolled, by grace, in the highest school there is, and the subject is the love that God is, and you are only at the beginning of it, and that is exactly where you are supposed to be.