Who Made Who?
In the 80’s, the rock band AC/DC had a song “Who Made Who?”, which was a theme song for the Stephen King movie “Maximum Overdrive.” The premise of the movie was the earth passed through the tail of a comet, and when it did, all the machines came to life, or started doing whatever they wanted to. As it was a Stephen King story, of course terrible and tragic things were happening: kids were being chased by ice cream trucks, an ATM insults the customer, cars and trucks are trying to run people down. Several people are trapped in a truck stop diner, with driverless trucks circling the truck stop trapping the customers inside. One of the people inside is a distraught waitress (who’s already been attacked by an electric knife), who goes outside and yells at the machines and the trucks, “We made you!” The point is, humans make machines to serve them, but the machines are doing things on their own. Or to put it another way, the machines were not made to do what they were doing. It’s as if the waitress is yelling to the machines “that’s not what you were made for!”
I wonder sometimes if God is in his heavenly abode yelling at humans “that’s not what you were made for!” Genesis 1 tells us we were made in God’s image. Part of what it means to bear God’s image is to participate in the community of divine love that God has, as the Father, Son, and Spirit. Peter alludes to this in 2 Peter 1:4 when he tells his readers that God has provided promises to us, and that through those promises we humans can partake in God’s divine nature. Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is and he responds that it is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Jesus adds the second greatest commandment is like it – to love your neighbor as yourself. We were made to love God and to love our fellow humans. Then there are all sorts of commandments and laws given to us. Those aren’t given to us to see if we’ll comply with God’s legal requirements (though in some part that may be why they are given). They are given to us to teach us how to love God and to love our neighbor. They are given to us to teach us how to live in that divine community.
So when we go through life, and break these commands, it’s not just that we’re breaking commands and rules and getting marks that count against us on our record. When we break these commands, we are actually not loving God and/or our neighbor. Just to pull some commands from the 10 Commandments – when we murder someone, that’s not loving them. That’s not participating in the community of love. When we steal, and take things that belong to our neighbor, that’s not loving our neighbor – that’s loving the things that they have. When we covet or desire or have jealousy towards our neighbor or what they have, that’s not loving them and valuing them. When we lie, we not only withhold truth from whoever we’re lying to, we’re providing something else, a substitute which is something less than what we should give them.
When a couple gets married, they pledge themselves to each other, and wholly devote their life and body to that other to the exclusion of all. (That relationship is one that I think most closely resembles the relationship that God experiences among the Father, Son, and Spirit.) To demean or diminish the value of that relationship by engaging in adultery with others, to demean the value of the relationship with their spouse - that is tantamount to abandoning the divine community of love to go participate in some other community. A community of something less than the divine love of God’s community. How many times did God refer to Israel as an adulterous people because of their chasing after other gods?
“That’s not what you were made for.”
When we look at the world around us and see the hate, the selfishness, the lack of concern for others, war, killing, destruction, and so much else that is wrong in the world today, we know this is not what we were made for. But try as we might, we just cannot seem to help ourselves. There is a way out though, a way to return to what it is we were made for. As far as we ever are from God and his intended purposes for us, we are never so far that his arm cannot reach us, or that his ear cannot hear us. Jesus tells a parable of a shepherd going to look for a lost sheep. God is always on the lookout for his lost sheep, and is never far away. When we hear “this is not what you were made for,” and agree with it, and return to God, he is ready to forgive and ready to return us to that which we were made for, and welcome us back into his community of love.
-Mike Hendricks