An invitation to creatureliness

This side of Genesis chapter 3 (where the Fall of humanity is detailed) I find that I am a creature of God by position and can choose to be His creature by practice. It is the "choice" and "practice" part that bears some meditation and exploration on my part.

Now I know that the only rational position for me to take as this creature of God that one of utter dependence upon Him as my Creator. Of course I know that I am dependent upon Him for my food, heartbeat, respiration, metabolism, and a host of other things that I cannot even come close to enumerating. That is the positional creatureliness that I find myself in. What I find in myself is this propensity to take this dependence, this positional creatureliness, and use it as a foundation to build something more than the creature that I am. In other words, I use the dependence that I have on Him (as a matter of fact) and use it to stress my independence from Him.

If this all sounds like a bunch of self-frustrating confusion it is because it is.

I am at my best when I am in imitation of Him through partaking of His communicable attributes like mercy, love, grace, faithfulness and both acknowledging and practicing my complete an utter dependence upon Him for my physical, spiritual, emotional, and social needs. This means that I will watch and pray as I wait for the second appearing of His Son, and read His Word fully applying it to every area of my life. It also means that I will eat and breathe in humble thanks for the food and air He has given to me, and thank Him for the ability to use both of them to praise Him and spread His renown here on earth.

I am at my worst when I reject this invitation to creatureliness that He extends to me and look elsewhere for the satisfaction of my needs and neglect the ingestion and application of His Word. I become something of a quasi-god trying to attain some sort of godhood but never really getting to it because of the boost I get from God Himself as He allows me to breathe, digest breakfast, and form man-like thoughts. Man-like, not mannish thoughts for mannish thoughts would necessitate the acceptance of this invitation to creatureliness.

But there is yet another wrinkle to all of this. There is another invitation that is issued to me that Francis Schaeffer calls glorified creatureliness. That is a topic for another post. Maybe even the next one.