TO BE LIKE GOD--REALLY

 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4 & 5, NIV)
Be like God. I emphasize those words as I ask myself, what did our conflated far ancestors conceive as 'being like God'?
I can guess. Most of us still imagine 'being like God' as being able to order the world to revolve around us, am I right? To be all-powerful, self-sustaining and immortal to boot, am I right? And have we any reason to think our prehistoric and early-civilizational forebears imagined anything different? I think the answer to that is a rather resounding 'NO'; don't you think so?
But such clues as we have to the nature of God--and if we call ourselves Christians, we follow, some for real (and I'm not at all sure of most of us), the God made flesh in Christ Jesus. His life is supposed to show us what it really means to 'be like God'. And those clues are at least 180 degrees away from what our human imaginations conjure up.
Jesus lived and died like 'the least of us' whom he called 'his brethren'. And when his apostles were scared and disheartened, God raised him as He had promised to do. But the point here is, Jesus lived and taught (and, I believe, still lives and teaches) the way to be like God is to empty oneself as we live the lives of servants to one another and to Creation as a whole.
I think a whole lot of dough-colored faces started to redden to varying degrees as I wrote the above lines. These evil-minded, greedy, essentially cowardly dinkyjohnnies and the shrivelled walnuts who are their consorts want to rebuild a caste system in our country with themselves as the actual owners of everything--and, yes, of everyone else as well. And they routinely violate both the Third and Ninth Commandments in their misuse of the name of Jesus in their attempt to reduce the rest of us to actual and perhaps again to legally defined slavery as well!
And now they'll whine they seek to 'serve' the rest of us by compelling us to live like them. Rather like Granny Clampett brandishing a rifle and declaiming, 'Th' code of th' hills holds ever'where!'
No, 'ladies' and 'gentlemen', that is not 'service'! That is imperialism of the worst kind!!
One salient trait of real service is, it listens seriously to those it seeks to serve. You seek to do no such thing! You seek to be served by the rest of us!
And what fuels you is rage. Rage at having not been listened to for decades! But you have very much the wrong targets for that rage! You have brethren who have also gone unheard, not for decades but for centuries--and who now welcome you to the Club of the Unheard! And we all have the same enemies: cunning dinkyjohnnies who have stolen from all of us for at least decades (and in some cases for centuries) and who have bullied those with darker skins even while they humbug a majority of us into the lie that, because our skins, hair and eyes are paler, we are intrinsically superior to the rest of humankind! Join those of us who are wise to their vicious game NOW!
Unless you wish to be content with stomping those who your puppet-handlers have taught you to hate--and this means, few if any tangible benefits for you--in order to have the nice things that most of us want and don't have, you'll need to make common cause with those of African, Native, Hispanic and Asiatic heritage who now share with you the trait of being willfully unheard! As Franklin said when he signed the Declaration, "We must now all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately."
So it is now with all of us. If you really wish to 'be like God', you must choose the way Jesus lived and showed and instructed us to follow. You need to let go of wanting absolute earthly power and be ready to share it, and earthly wealth, instead. If you don't, the rest of us--and the world at large--will know that you are not, and were never, real Christians at all but only greedy savages trying to misuse God's Name! And I hope you remember that God Himself will not hold you guiltless for that--and neither will I, for one!