Well of course I’m not! But do I sometimes act like I am? When things don’t go my way, when my loved ones hurt… why do I get frustrated, and sometimes even angry? Because I‘m faced with the reality that I’m not God! I’m not fully in control as I thought I was… or as I would like to be. And I face the very same ugly pride monster that brought about the fall of Satan himself! The very same ugly pride monster than Satan then used with Adam and Eve… “you will be like God!”
We have trouble accepting the fact that we are dependent creatures. We are not the Creator. And we have accepted the lie that this is very negative. We make God out to be some narcissistic figure who created humans to enslave them and so we are always seeking ways to do away with “the chains” as Rousseau would say.
What if God is completely different than this picture? What if God has been in relationship for eternity and had no need to create humans but did so out of an overflow of love? What if Christianity can be described as Dr. Maher Samuel succinctly described it, “an invitation to partake in the circle of everlasting fellowship?”
Can we still retain our distorted image of a narcissistic God who creates to subjugate and torment puny little humans?
In his brilliant The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis contrasts God’s vision of humans to that of Satan’s. He writes that Satan’s goal is the absorption of people’s will and an increase of Satan’s selfhood at their expense. God, in contrast, wants people whose lives “will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their will freely conform to His… united to Him but distinct.”
So yes, I am a dependent creature but I’m dependent on a loving Creator whom I can fully trust, who is fully sovereign, and through whom I can be fully me!