Formed for FellowshipSample

Created to Become

I can put on a mask if I want to pretend to be a superhero but don’t ask me to fly through the air to rescue a falling child.

Even the most convincing costume won’t turn me into what I look like in the mirror. It takes more than a mask to become a superhero and it takes more than a mirror to know who we were created to become.

Bookstores, social media accounts, and podcasts are full of people with a vague sense that there must be some reason why they exist. Everyone seems to be looking for help or offering up some kind of solution to the universal urge to become. Our culture’s obsession with becoming knows no bounds: becoming healthy, becoming wealthy, becoming successful, becoming important, becoming productive, becoming valuable, becoming worthy, becoming loved. Everyone feels that they were made to be something more than what they are by nature. Why?

In the beginning, God gave humanity a purpose. He created Adam and Eve in His image, He blessed them, and He commissioned them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28 ESV). Consider for a moment that everything God commissions Adam and Eve (and with them all of humanity) to do is a reflection of what He has already done. God tells them to “be fruitful and multiply.” The Creator God tells them to become creators because He is the Creator. Their creation will be different from His. They will create from what God has already made; He created from nothing.

God tells them to “subdue and have dominion” over every living thing. The Lord God who rules over all things tells them to reign over His world. It’s not their possession, and they don’t own it, but He is entrusting it to their stewardship. He reigns over all things, so He gives them rule over some things.

If Adam and Eve wanted to become what God was asking of them, they need only look back to God to see a picture for what it should look like. If they just kept beholding God, they would become what God was inviting them to become. But they stopped beholding God in order to try and become God. Not like God. They tried to become God Himself.