As the old saying goes, “You can learn a lot about a person . . .

As the old saying goes, “You can learn a lot about a person by the company he or she keeps.”  That being the case, there may be nothing more shocking about the Almighty than the odd assortment of characters that God chooses to call friends.  Consider for a moment that Abraham was a liar, Jacob was a cheat, Moses was a murderer, Rahab a prostitute, David an adulterer—yet all of these individuals wind up on God’s list of favorites.

If the Bible’s overwhelming lesson about God is that God is personal and intimate (especially as revealed in Jesus Christ), then perhaps its overwhelming lesson about us is that, despite our many flaws and frailties, we still matter to God.  Granted, we sometimes have trouble believing that.  We think to ourselves that the Creator of the entire universe, with its trillions upon trillions of stars and planets, must have more important things to worry about than us and our petty, little problems.  And maybe God does.  However, what concerns us matters to God precisely because we matter to God.

In the creation accounts of ancient Mesopotamia, human beings are portrayed as almost incidental to the world, inferior beings fashioned only to serve at the whims of the gods, in order to amuse them or serve their personal needs.  In contrast, the book of Genesis places man and woman at the pinnacle of creation and invests in them the free will and power to determine—or, if we so choose, to destroy—all the rest of it.  According to Cicero, “The gods attend to great matters and neglect small ones”—meaning that, since our lives are so small and trivial, the gods have little interest in us.  But the Scriptures respectfully disagree, witnessing instead to a God who has made human beings “a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor.”

Some have pointed out that this exalted view of humankind is the chief difference between understanding life as a matter of fate or as a matter of destiny.  In other words, the pagan religions tend to see what happens to us in terms of fate.  The gods get bored or mischievous, and so they hurl things in our direction to see how we will respond.  The Bible, however, doesn’t speak of life in terms of fate.  We are not merely slogging our way through a meaningless existence, nor are we reacting to some god’s random whims.  Quite the contrary; we are created with a destiny, because we are the ones through whom God is telling a story of eternal significance!

Think of it this way—if you visit a museum that contains artifacts from ancient Egypt or Syria, you can view any number of statues of the gods Osiris or Lil or Astarte.  However, you won’t find a single statue of God.  In the first place, graven images of the Almighty are expressly forbidden.  But even more importantly, what I think we are offering the world, instead of some inanimate statue, is a living, breathing story.  It’s a story that began with Adam and Eve, continued on with Abraham and Jacob and Moses, unfolded further with David and Jesus and the Apostle Paul.  And, dare I say it, God’s story is still being told—even through the likes of you and me!