Love one another
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Hi, humans. I’m God. I’ve been through some changes and I want you to know about them.
There are many ways to tell my story. Just as there are infinite ways for you to tell yours – all based on the same data. So this is one version. Maybe you’ll find it helpful.
I started out as the creator of the universe: a guy beyond the sky who breathed the cosmos into existence. I was a human-like entity with unlimited supernatural powers. I created the universe because I was lonely. I needed a companion. So I formed the world and put a human on it – someone I could talk to. Someone who would worship me. But right away I could see there was a problem. It is hard to be friends with someone who is not your equal. But if I created him as my equal, he would be God, too. This was a problem that I couldn’t seem to supernaturally work my way out of. I wanted companionship, but not competition. Adam wanted companionship with someone at his level. He wasn’t happy – I could tell. So I put him to sleep, pulled a rib out of him, and turned it into a woman.
That worked for a while, but it didn’t take long before the two of them got ambitious. Taking walks with them in the Garden of Eden was nice for all three of us, but they wanted more. They wanted my superpowers. So they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and that’s when the trouble really got started. I didn’t like how uppity they were getting, so I kicked them out of the garden and made them work for a living, thinking that would wear them out so much that they wouldn’t be so ambitious.
But they got good at agriculture and started amassing surpluses of food, and their offspring created cities and civilizations. They got good at building things – like the amazing Tower of Babel. I was impressed, but also threatened, again, by how close they were getting to my heavenly realm. So I had to bring them back to earth by confusing them with different languages, so it would be harder for them to cooperate and do god-like things.
It was a nice try, but it didn’t do the job. People created more and more elaborate civilizations and were so focused on the pleasures they had created for themselves that they were beginning to forget about me altogether. I got really angry about it and decided to wipe the earth clean and start over again. I picked out one family to build a big boat and put pairs of animals on it, and then flooded the whole earth. After the flood, Noah re-populated the earth and things were better for a while. I got more respect and people seemed humbled.
But of course they just went back to their old ways again after a while. This time I tried to take a more subtle approach. I invaded the minds of certain people called prophets, who spoke on my behalf to correct the proud and evil ways of humanity. Occasionally this tactic worked, but mostly the people ignored or persecuted the prophets while they were alive, and only showed them respect after they were dead and gone. I was losing interest in human beings, just as they were losing interest in me. I felt lonely and frustrated.
But there was one human who gave me joy: Job. He followed my commandments and worshipped me with all his heart. With Job, I felt like there was hope that I could have a meaningful relationship with humanity.
Satan served as my special investigator in my heavenly court of angels and archangels. He saw that I was happy with Job, but he knew I’d been burned by people time and again. Satan told me that we ought to test Job to make sure his faithfulness and goodness was real. I reluctantly agreed.
The miseries that Job endured in this time of testing were many. He lost his family, his wealth, and his health. It hurt my soul to hear him crying out to me for justice and mercy. He knew that my treatment of him was unjust, and he told me so. And he was right. I tried to shut him up with a long diatribe about my mightiness and gloriousness. But neither he nor I found any satisfaction in it. In the end, we restored to Job his family, wealth, and health. But the test left both of us traumatized.
For millennia I felt guilty about what I had allowed to happen to Job. It made me re-think this whole business of divinity. Being supernatural was over-rated. I created the universe in the first place because I wanted a loving relationship with somebody. Love requires vulnerability. Job was vulnerable. I was not. Being supernatural got in my way.
So I decided to become a human being – a mortal. In Jesus, I experienced everything that Job enjoyed and suffered. It was wonderful and it was awful. After the torture on the cross, after the tomb, there was no going back. I gave up omnipotence and omniscience, and settled for omnipresence. Three days later, I emerged from the tomb… reduced to nothing more – and nothing less – than pure unconditional love.
Love is all that is left of me. I can’t fix things. I can’t force things. I can’t control things. All I can do is invite, attract, and welcome. All I can do is exude kindness and compassion, and hope that all beings will be drawn to me. And as they take me into their hearts and treat each other with love, humbly releasing puffed-up pride, I experience overwhelming joy in our companionship. My cosmic loneliness is gone.
Just as people must do, I had to give myself up to find the love I was so desperate to have. For eons I suffered loneliness and frustration, and in turn caused humans to suffer from unrealistic expectations of what I could do for them. I really wasn’t very good at being a supernatural divinity because I was so preoccupied with my own jealous rage. I’m sincerely sorry about all that, dear humans. Getting down to your level gives me infinite empathy for all you go through. I don’t want religion to make life any harder for you than it already is. So from now on, know me as love - so that I can know you, and you can know me, fully.