On yesterday’s episode of #OffTheHighway, Dr. Randy Woodley shared a couple of thoughts on why, perhaps, many of us do not tangibly experience God.  It is a thought-provoking 3 minutes that you can check out here.

Dr. Woodley states that we have made the Creation to be unnatural and the unnatural (human-manufactured) world to be natural.  So how could we hope to engage the Natural God.

A strong statement to say the least.

On the Bible’s first page it is very popular to go and ascertain clues to our human identity.  Verse 26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in Our Image'” and then in verse 27, “God created humanity in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female.”

It is a great passage.  It speaks to our irrevocable connection to God.  It speaks to God’s communal (trinitarian) nature and how that communality has been transferred onto us.  It also speaks to the equality and egalitarianness of all humanity.

I have read this passage many, many times.  I have taught it many times.  And, yet it is shocking how short-sighted I am.

This essential identity passage (one paragraph, one thought) goes on.  Our identity does not stop at our integration with God and our solidarity with all people… it goes further.

Let’s keep reading:

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and care for it: the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and every living thing that moves on the earth.”  Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seek; it shall be for you, and to every beast of the earth ad to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.

Why aren’t these verses also included in our identity statements.  And if these words are also essential to our created reality, to use Randy’s word, to our “natural” state, then maybe they imply a necessary requirement to our spiritual wholeness as well.

And maybe God can be found there.

The last words of our Genesis 1 identity paragraph is simply this:

God saw all that God had made, and behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:31