Day: June 24, 2012

I believe God, in Christ, wants to somehow share His very nature with us, to in some sense enable us to enter into the experience of His absolute blessedness to the extent we can as creatures. From what I think is a biblical perspective this is our Lord’s goal for us, beginning in this life and being brought to fullness in the next. He not only lovingly desires our presence with Him but, beyond that, God also longs for us actually to share in His eternal character.

I think sometimes we resist this because it seems overwhelming to imagine being so blessed of the Father as to actually partake in His very essence. The immensity of the divine is intimidating to sinners saved by grace, or at least it can be. Beyond that the very idea of being so honored as to be the recipient of such a gift as the nature of Christ certainly doesn’t square with who we feel ourselves to be at our worst moments. It also seems beyond our present faculties to imagine being so gifted and, to some degree, this is true. It takes a great deal of faith-informed intellect just to think about the implications of being transformed into the likeness of the Son of God, and thus the likeness of God Himself.

We might also have trouble with the idea that it is somehow presumptuous for us to desire such a thing. How can we presume to be in any way like God? Isn’t that the original satanic temptation, the one that ruined our race to begin with? It is certainly true that we are never to desire to “be God”. It is the greatest evil possible to want such a thing, but that is not what we are discussing. We are contemplating, instead, the idea of sharing in the glory of our Father according to His own loving will and only by the transformative power of His own hand.

If we can get past the immensity of the implication of knowing something of God’s nature as our own someday, as well as our fears about wanting it wrongly, we can enter into a wonderful sense of anticipation.

One of the cardinal attributes of God is His perfection. As beings made in His image we all, whether we know it consciously or not, want to be perfect ourselves. The fallen human answer to that inherent need is the cursed attempt to become perfect in our own strength that we call perfectionism. Perfectionism is the very oxymoronic definition of “works-righteousness” and all too many of us have harmed ourselves, and offended God, by practicing it. For those of us who desire to fully repent of perfectionism the idea of having God’s perfection given us through the unearned gift of grace available in Jesus Christ can be both a deeply comforting and deeply revitalizing thought. And if being made perfect in this way seems at all cold and uninviting remember that it is part of the divine perfection to be perfectly and eternally whole, with all the overflowing joy that implies. If we are made holy as He is holy we are embarking on an eternity of holy bliss for, as Psalm 16:11 tells us, “at His right hand are pleasures forevermore”.

So it is no sin to meditate on what God, in his infinite kindness, plans to be the final state of His adopted Children. It is, in fact, a part of “the blessed hope” we are all called to contemplate on a regular basis as we continue to walk out our pilgrimage through this temporary state of existence we call our present life. Thinking rightly about how our God intends to share His perfect blessedness with us someday, forevermore, cannot help but be a powerful encouragement as we wait for our final rescue from both our fallen world and our fallen selves.