Ultimate Experience: The God Like Us and Unlike Us

 

The ads that blanket your world
beckon you to trivial things.
Here is the great, the awesome,
and the only worthy pursuit.

 

In my previous posts in this series, we saw that knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is good, perfect, personal, and superior. In this post we see that…

Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is both like and unlike us.

What attracts men to women and women to men?

Much of the spark of sexual attraction is the difference between the sexes, not only the difference between the male and female bodies, but also the difference in emotions and perspective. Men and women think differently.

But we are also the same. We share human nature. We are persons capable of conversation and creativity. We share in having mind, will, and emotions. We share in having dreams and hopes, loves and loathings.

You can love your dog, horse, or cat, but your relationship with humans has the potential to be far richer than what you can have with an animal (notice that I used the word potential).

We tend to make friends with people who have something strongly in common with us.

Like the electricity between men and women, knowing God is full of wonder because he is both like and unlike us.

Similar to God

God created us in his image, so we resemble him.

Like God, we are personal and relational. We are rational. We both have a will and make choices. We both are alive. We both are moral beings attuned to right and wrong.

Because God created us in his image, we by nature can understand many things about him intuitively as we think about him, and as we read about him in Scripture and ponder his creation.

Because we have much in common with God, we can have a deeply satisfying relationship with him. This relationship has the potential to be far deeper than we can have with any human, animal, or lifeless thing.

Different than God

But God is also very different from us.

He is divine, we are human. He is eternal and uncreated. We are short-lived and created. He created us; we did not create him.

So we are two infinitely different orders of being.

God has no limits. We are limited in every way.

God exists on his own, perfectly independent, with no need for anyone or anything but himself. We are completely dependent on him for everything, every heartbeat, every breath, for existence itself.

God is holy. He is other. He is unique.

And this makes him intriguing. This makes us curious.

Boom

Put these similarities and differences together and you have more than a spark, more than electricity—you have lightning and thunder.

You have the most exciting, interesting, and mysterious experience available.

Therefore, knowing God is the ultimate obsession.

 

We will look next Monday at more reasons why knowing God is the ultimate experience.

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