The more aware we become (in creeping, minutely incremental ways) how God is incomprehensibly other than we are, the more at home we are and genuinely content in our finite human skin. There's something beyond humility (though it likely turns out to be quintessential humility) in uttering with a sigh of relief, "Thank God I'm not God!"
Part of the relief is, of course, that the existence and state of the whole created order doesn't depend on me! Another part of it is, I realize there's a particular thought-experiment I need never invest my energies in conducting because it's a sheer waste of time. It's the one that starts: "Imagine what it's like to be God...." (Ah yes... yes, let's just... imagine that, shall we? Hold on, hold on, I think I'm getting it now...!)
Yet I can imagine someone, once, seriously setting himself that task, actually believing he could comprehend the essence and totality of God's... what? God-ness. And, having conceived that challenge to his powers of conceptualization, he reached the conclusion that he'd done it, figured it out, broken it down to its constituent parts, mastered the conundrum and qualified himself to assume the role and execute the duties thereof. He was called Lucifer.
What is piercingly poignant, in comparison, is what Scripture tells us about the only human being ever competent, capable and, yes, essentially entitled to indulge in that very thought-experiment: "What's it like to be God?"--essentially entitled because He was (and is) God. He is the single, singular case, out of all humanity through all time, of one who would not have engaged in something on the order of Monty-Pythonesque absurdity in saying, "Now my mind will conceive--authentically and clearly--what it's 'like' to be God. And I will enter into that reality now."
The thing that is piercingly poignant is, Scripture tells us He never did that. He chose, willed, not to. He completely set aside even the thought, having committed wholly to live as Man in absolute obedience to the God Who is not Man.
It's in the light of these things that what Scripture goes on to say about Him (and us, too) is so stunning. It is precisely this Jesus, Who, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage," but, instead, lived out, to the final degree and last extent, "the nature of a servant", and "being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross!" It's because of that alone that "God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:6-11, NIV-UK).
In the (to us) gloriously paradoxical way of God's victories, it's the One who never conceived in his heart a creaturely lust for the Eternal Throne but expended Himself instead to the point of virtual annihilation, apparently reward-less and comfortless as Death closed in to swallow Him up, Who turns out to reign eternally with the Father in Heaven, "God from God, Light from Light," on the "throne of God and the Lamb."
"But wait, there's more," as the saying goes.
As for us, the Scriptures speak of the consummate realization of our redemption, which is a kind of glorification, in Christ--not to become the same as God or usurp His throne, as Lucifer conceived it in his heart to do, not to be identical in every possible way to Christ the Word Incarnate--only One will ever be the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the Alpha and Omega, the express image and effulgence of the Father's Being. And yet, the apostle John says that "we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is." The apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, speaks of the body that is "raised imperishable... raised in glory... raised in power... raised a spiritual body." In an echo and affirmation of John's assertion--which, considering how different we mistakenly tend to think of Paul and John being from each other, is really stunning--Paul too points to the moment when "we shall be like Him": "...as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. ...[W]e will all be changed.... For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality."
Our resurrected state--in body and spirit as entirely redeemed and everlastingly, divinely renewed souls--within the entirety of the New Creation of God, will be possessed of a nature, of a quality and capacities, of a fullness and integrity of life, drenched with the living love of God Himself, such that, were it possible for us to see these future selves of ours, now, strolling toward us, we'd very likely fall on our faces like dead men. We might well imagine it was Christ Himself, or at least an angel, coming toward us. The apostle John did a fair bit of falling on his face before the heavenly glory revealed in the Revelation, whether at the aspect of Christ Himself or just an angel of God.
The theologians, and, yes, the mystics, speak of a process, "divinization." This isn't man-becoming-God. Rather, it's this very process of growing into the likeness of Christ through what is, in the simplest of terms, the "entire takeover" of the human will by divine love. Paradoxically, our divinization is so radically not man-becoming-God that it is, to the contrary, entirely dependent on the immutable fact--an eternal "verdict"--that we are not God. In other words, the only reason we may go on forever and ever growing in similitude, manifesting ever more sublime reflection of God is, quite logically, that we are other than He is. Otherwise all talk of "becoming like" is pure nonsense. We cannot go on "becoming like" what, actually, we have at some point become. I cannot be "like" myself, because I am myself! I may, however, become "like" the God Who I am not.
Divinization, then, turns out to be an eternally, endlessly "realizing" reality, because there is no end to the Being of the One Living God Whose life and love we are to engage, adore and extol, in infinite ways as yet unimaginable, all the more, forever and ever. Because He is infinite, our divinization, as His forever-finite creatures, is necessarily infinite. Such a singular, incomparable appointment and glory in the order of God's creation would be an impossibility to us if we were not... FINITE. Only the finite may infinitely "become". Only the finite may confront an infinite world of unknown, unexplored possibilities. These possibilities well up and spring, first and last, from the very life and creative will of the Living God.
Such is the glory proper and unique to Man, that of our created-ness and God-likeness in the sphere of the ultimately unfathomable designs and counsels of the Living Infinity that is the One True God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I think it appropriate here to repeat what I said at the outset: the more aware we become (in creeping, minutely incremental ways) how God is incomprehensibly other than we are, the more at home we are and genuinely content in (and everlastingly thankful for) our finite human skin. There's something beyond humility (though it likely turns out to be quintessential humility) in uttering with a sigh of relief, "Thank God I'm not God!" It seems appropriate, too, to remark that the way of this divinization begins, for the Christian, not in the "by and by" but right here and now--pointedly, inescapably and uncomfortably by having "the same mindset as Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5), which brings no promise of earthly glory or splendor... quite the contrary....
Which is all the more reason for that "sigh of relief." Yes, relief... because the very sigh is the sound of faith that HE IS.
