Of the Divine Traits of Humans and the Fatherhood of God

The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the History of the Peloponnesian Wars are among the Greek classics that are part of the classics-based education that my son receives at his school, a school that embraces our rich western heritage.  You may suspect and correctly so that he does not attend a government school (though we still get to pay—in many ways—for the bad education that other children receive in the government schools).

It is worthy of note that a common theme in many ancient western texts as well as in most cultures around that world is the descent of some person or group of people directly from God.  Why is that theme found so commonly among the ancients all around the world, east, west, north, and south?  A reading of Homer, Thucydides, and many other writers of millennia ago does not permit the conclusion that the ancients were dumber or less enlightened than more modern writers who would scoff at the idea.  The ancients seemed to have had their share of the dull, the average, and the brilliant as can be found in all ages, ours too.

Could it be that there is something to it, that there is a relationship between God and man that is close enough to be properly called familial, even of Father to son and daughter?  Is this a theme of the ages that will not die because it is based on reality? 

As the Lord prepared Moses for his mission to redeem the House of Israel from bondage in Egypt and restore them to their land of promise, He gave to Moses a vision of His dealings with mankind from its earliest days.  In the vision Moses was shown a prophet named Enoch.  Enoch was also taught by the Lord by vision, a vision in which he saw the panorama of the world only as God Himself could reveal.  When the mighty God wept because of the evil so prevalent among so many, the prophet was astonished and asked how the God of creation could weep.  Part of the Lord’s answer to Enoch included these words:

And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood. . .  (Moses 7:33)

Notice the relationship of Father to children, which also meant that in a real and not figurative way Enoch and all of the race of humans were “brethren”.  It was as a father in a very real sense that God wept for the misdeeds of His children and their cruelty toward their brethren, His sons and daughters.  This is a warm and authentic relationship with deity that men and women throughout the ages have craved and have instinctively felt.  

This is not to deny that there is a lot of mythology intertwined with the truth of man’s divine parentage.  There are powerful truths at the core of all enduring myths, the story in the myth often highlighting or demonstrating some fundamental verity.  While the scriptures can present truths in clarity and purity, even the myths of men preserve and transmit fundamental realities of existence.

Thus, throughout the ages and into modern days themes of divine attributes of humanity persist, that raise man above the rest of creation.  Men make and use tools, increasingly complex tools.  In a parody of the words of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, I often say to my children,

In every job that must be done there is a tool.
You find that tool, and, snap, your job’s a game.
Without that tool your job’s a hassle.

So men have found since creation, and so tools have enhanced men’s ability to be creators, a divine trait of the great Creator.

Recently I noticed what to you may be a commonplace.  As far as I can tell, only humans have pets.  Other animals may develop symbiotic relationships with other creatures, but only humans seem to develop those special relationships with other species, a relationship founded upon love and affection, of master to pet.  I perceive divinity in it.  If you have ever had a beloved pet, you may sense what I mean.

Perhaps the case of man’s divinity, his innate heritage from God, his Father, can be opened and closed by this one evidence:  man’s ability to make music.  Yes, yes, yes, birds whistle and wolves howl, and so forth.  But they have been singing the same songs since the beginning.  Man’s ability to create music is apparently infinite in extent and variety, because it comes from the Infinite.  It is divine in origin and the clearest example to which I can point of man’s direct familial relationship to God.

The facile retort to this is that men are so evil, how can they be related to the divine?  I respond much as Fyodor Dostoevsky did to this old and thin objection:  the existence of evil does not deny the influence of God, but rather the good that thrives in spite of the evil is proof positive of the presence and influence of God.

My final point would be that none of this is new.  It is the oldest truth of all, understood by the first man and woman.  Paul taught it 2,000 years ago to some of the most sophisticated people of his day, the saints in Rome:

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:  And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.  For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.  (Romans 8:16-18)