Restoring Us To His Image, Part Two by Teresa Beem

In part one, we explored Christ's command to "be perfect" as God the Father is perfect and what that really means to us as Christians today. I suggested that one way we may better obey Christ and restore us to the image of God is through finding and living the joy of self-sacrifice. For the ultimate example of how to be perfect as God is perfect was seen in the joy of Christ's offering of Himself on the Cross. If we look to the Cross, then we see that perfection isn't about keeping laws perfectly or learning perfect truth or making perfect decisions and acting perfectly. As humans we will never be able to know all and so we will make mistakes. However, what we are able to do is love like the Father... love perfectly. 

It is found in suffering for the other. For suffering helps us to understand this eternal and highest thing we call love. In fact, suffering in an act of self-giving, best exemplifies love.

And this is hard for most people to understand. Before I was a Catholic, I would have simply stared at that concept without even the slightest notion of how to understand that, for I had been raised in a culture that says love is a feeling, a tender connection between two people. I did not see love as a gift of self-sacrifice based on one's will. I never realized that perfect love was not easy to give.

While we all enjoy things like gifts, time with each other, people listening to us, the greatest gift one can ever receive is when a beloved is in need and another person gives up what they need for the beloved.

I don't mean that real love is giving your ice cream to someone. I mean the really hard stuff.

Jesus told us that the greatest love is for a man to give his life for his friend. Sometimes that is not just taking a bullet for them. Sometimes it is not about an instant death to save another--as a soldier gives his life for his country on a battlefield. Sometimes giving one's life for another means giving up your dreams, your ambitions, your rights, your energy for them--day in and day out. Sometimes we are called to be living martyrs of love.

Think of the husband whose wife has had a stroke and his days are spent in total care,

brushing her teeth, dressing her, helping her to the bathroom not for a day, but until death do they part. This sacrifice, as painful as it is, through Christ's grace, we can learn to give with joy. And that will restore us to perfection.

Think of the spouse who has been unfaithful, or is an alcoholic, or is irresponsible. While love does not mean to sacrifice so that these people can remain in their sin. It does mean that we give up what we want, what is easiest for us, in order to authentically help that person be better. True love does not enable people to be weak and sinful. True love stands by, never abandoning them, as love helps them be strong overcomers of sin.

A side note: Please understand I am not saying this saves us. This is not about justification or earning salvation. This is about restoring us to perfection--sanctification. My audience is the Christian--the one already accepting the covenant relationship of God and themselves.

The Garden of Eden

I have been thinking about this quite a bit and here's some thoughts about how this idea of perfection can be traced all the way back to the Fall of Man in the garden.

After humankind sinned, we learned to take care of ourselves first; we began to look inward and no longer enjoyed sacrifice. God knew that we would have relearn what had been natural to us--the joy of sacrifice and self-giving. And the "punishments" of God in the garden of Eden were to help us regain this knowledge of the natural joy of self-giving.

God Disciplines Man

Let's look at the Genesis story after the fall:

To the woman he [the Lord] said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Genesis 3: 16-19

In these verses, God is using His gift of creation in order to restore us back into His image. These chastisements were not simply punishments to show us who was boss. No, these were specific penances/disciplines in order to restore us to His image.

Man's sin was that he did not truly love God, nor his wife. For Adam's love for his Creator was neither obedient to the command to take authority over the earthly kingdom nor did Adam love his wife perfectly. For Adam deferred to his wife. Because she was so beautiful a creature, since she had been the crowning creation, the man abandon his wife to deal with a deception without intervening as was his job as her husband. Keep in mind that Adam was not deceived. He was being irresponsible and disobedient. He fell to cowardice.

Therefore, God had to reverse these tendencies that would now follow man through the millennia. He had to give the man courage to take responsibility and act with self-sacrifice. Therefore, God told man that he must work hard tilling the ground. He must act in order to take responsibility for his wife and family.

In order for he and his family to survive, man must act with courageous love. He could not stay within the protective confines of his mother and father, but God said men must leave his parents--go out--and make his own kingdom cleave to his one wife--take courageous, self-denying actions.

By this action of hard work and sacrificing his mind and body, by being faithful to his wife, he would be taking back the kingdom he had been given by God.

The attachment to the land, the working and striving with the soil was man's way back--his restoration--to perfection. Man's sanctification would come through responsibility for a family. (Again to re-emphasize--this isn't taking away from salvation history and redemption through the Cross, this post is describing a kind of earthy penance.)

God still uses this method for man's sanctification. And that is why Satan has attacked men in this area. Satan does not want man to take authority over his earthly kingdom. Satan wants man perpetually irresponsible and cowardly. Satan has made men weak and given them Peter Pan syndrome.

Satan has taken men from the soil and enslaved him to the little illusionary digits in his bank account. He has lost his freedom and independence and man is reduced to toiling day in and day out for another man's kingdom, thrilled to get a few dollars, rather than seeing the work of his own hands on his own land. Satan's system has long been to make men nothing more than robots, creating a system where men no longer have kingdoms. Instead of self-sacrificing courageously for his family, many men have given their souls over to strive for mammon. And that is if they are striving for anything anymore. Many men have been raised to simply see life as a place to seek entertainment and comfort--watching others work hard for heroic masculinity via sports, video games and movies rather than becoming a hero themselves. 

Men today are demeaned by the culture. They are shamed into believing they have toxic masculinity. They are told they must not take up for themselves, that they are stupid and unneeded, that their most basic instincts are unworthy and evil--even their instinct to pursue a wife and then care of her. They cannot be the hero they desire to be, for everything they need to redeem them into the men God intended them to be has been shamed and mocked and stolen from them. 

Satan wants our culture to prevent man from learning perfect love through the joy of self-sacrifice. So Satan has allowed them to give into the dark and deep abyss of their weaknesses and now western men are vain, gender ambiguous cowards who would rather be a hero in a video game gratifying their sexual needs with a cyber freak than a wife.

And this has been Satan plan all along. 

Men need to start taking back their kingdoms. Marry. Have kids. Work hard for them. Be responsible and courageous and don't allow your wife to be deceived. Be a good warrior for God by being obedient. Be a good husband by making her your queen. Be a good father by disciplining your children, teaching them courage and godliness through your example. Take authority with sacrificial love. And ask for the grace to do it with joy.

Be a king. 

That was what you were made to be. For you were created in the image of God. 

(In part three we will discuss how Satan has tried to rip away women's sanctification, the female way of attaining joy through self-sacrifice.) 

Restoring Us to His Image, Part One by Teresa Beem

Showing Us Authentic Love

Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. Matt. 5: 48

We are in the image of God. 

Ponder that for a moment: We are in the image of God. 

That is an unthinkable thought. Incomprehensible. So we let it pass by as if it were a chalkboard of numbers and symbols Einstein had written. We might assent to the geniusness of it, but we have no idea why or how. 

However, if we prayerfully consider that we are in the image of God often enough for it to sink down into our souls, we would start discovering many humbling realities.  For the more we think about how we are made in His Image, we do not become proud. When we pray for God to reveal what that means, we actually become humbled by the fact.

If we look around, no one seems to be acting like they are in the image of God. Life is busy and noisy and confusing and we have so much to get accomplished. People seem careless, selfish and vulgar, rude and unloving.

How do we get back to the Image of God? For we must. Jesus commanded us to. 

Be...ye...perfect.

And we cannot say to ourselves, well, He covers us in His perfection—so Jesus means we are just supposed to take on His Holy Righteousness and not worry about any real change in our behavior. Except that is not what Christ said to those who chose to follow Him. He said to His disciples:

Be ye perfect... even as your Father in Heaven is... perfect.

This isn't a symbolic righteousness. That would mean the Father's righteousness is symbolic. No, Christ said that we are to be really, truly perfect just as the Father in Heaven is perfect. And Christ would not have commanded us to be something we cannot be... now--in this world. He would never have given us a task which we could not achieve with His Grace. 
There is a perfection.

Jesus didn't lie. 

What Is the Father's Perfection? 

Perfection does not come with simply keeping rules. Jesus told us that. And when you think about it---the Father's perfection cannot be about keeping rules. He's the one who makes the rules. He doesn't have to abide by them. So the essence of perfection is more than keeping laws. 

Unfolding through the ages, from Genesis to Revelation, we are given glimpses of the essence of the Father's perfection. But the very soul of His perfection was found in His Son. 

So we are to watch Jesus.

His Son was perfectly obedient through love. Through Christ we were able to see the Father's perfection.

Jesus life was total self-giving. He went about healing our sins and restoring us to health, both in our body, mind and spirit. 

And the greatest moment of Christ's perfect obedience and love was seen on the Cross.

That is a strange vision of perfect love—the persecution, suffering and death of a God/Man. This perfection is not pretty. It doesn't call us with beauty and inspiration. One wishes to look away from that perfect obedience and love. And yet, there it is always before the Christian quietly witnessing perfection.

How is this gruesome display showing us love?

Let us back up a bit to explain.

The Cross of Perfect Love

God, the Creator of time and space, the one who breathes and stars are formed, speaks and the oceans appear filled with teeming sea creatures, was under no obligation to anyone or anything when He predestined and willed the future of the cosmos. He could have chosen ten million ways of saving mankind.

He could have simply forgiven Adam and Eve when they sinned. He could have begun an evolutionary process in which those who would sin would be the weaker who would Darwinistically be eradicated by the stronger people who fought temptation--eventually bringing perfection. He could have killed Adam and Eve and started over. 

But He chose a perfect, the best way of redeeming man. For it was the way of the Alpha and Omega, He who knew the beginning and end; the one who is perfection chose from the foundation of creation to rid the world of sin by sending His Son to die for us.

But not exactly after Adam sinned. No. It took time for this mystery to unfold. It began with an animal sacrifice in the Garden of Eden. 

And it was strange to our eyes.

Why did God set up a system of bloody sacrifice and the death of innocent animals? Why need millennia of foreshadowings of such things throughout the history of man before the Jews and the time of fulfillment of the Old Covenant in the first century?

If a sacrifice of death was deemed by God as necessary to rebalance goodness, why didn't Jesus die of old age? Or perhaps of a heart attack? Why send Jesus to die on earth? Couldn't He have died in heaven surrounded by billions of angels who loved Him? Why so cruel a death on earth in front of just a handful of people? Why? It is strange…. mysterious… and worthy of our contemplation.

For aeons of eternity, as our wisdom grows, we will be rediscovering the luminous mysteries of the Cross. For there is no way to explain it fully now. And what I am about to write, in no way contradicts any orthodox understanding the Church has had through the centuries. No, it is a small little light in the firmament that adds to what is already known.

The Cross is a View of the Father's Perfection

The Cross was our glimpse into the ultimate display of love. This was not just a man showing perfect obedience to His Father through dying, this was God showing perfect obedience to God. This was the unfathomable showing us the unfathomable and through His Holy Spirit and our faith, we will be drawn to this miracle.

This is love: Jesus with His arms outstretched encompassing and destroying all our sins in His battle with life and death.

This is Perfect Love which is Perfection:

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all....Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin. Hebrews 53: 3-10 

Perfect Love: Cross of Persecution, Torture and Death

How can this be? How can Jesus being scourged by the Romans soldiers and spat upon, mocked and crucified show us love? Our culture would be revolted by this humiliation and persecution and self-giving. Many would reject this love according to our opinions and views.

The perfect love of the Father that Christ reflected at the Cross was the joy of self-sacrifice.

Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12: 1, 2

To be perfect, we must find joy in self-sacrifice in obedience to God and serving others.

(Please read part two.)