Falling Short

             for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:23-24)

 

            “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4)

 

            And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (II Corinthians 3:18)

 

            When I read the first half of this passage, I tend to think that because all have sinned, therefore, all fall short of the glory of God. And as far as it goes, that’s true. It was today’s verse of the day, and as I read it, my mind hit the brakes too late to avoid slamming into Genesis 3:4. Yes, because we have all sinned, we all fall short of the glory of God, but what tends to lead us to sin is our recognition that we don’t measure up to God. Even without sinning, we fall short of the glory of God. It can’t be otherwise.

            Think of it this way. First, God can't create something that is in every way His equal. The fact of creation means not eternal, but God is eternal. Without the experience and thoughts of an eternity past, we would fall short of the glory of God, who has all of that. There’s the same problem with all-powerfulness. It’s logically impossible for God to create something as powerful or more powerful than He is since He has all power. He would no longer be God if He didn’t have all power. And if we were just like God, we would be God – not ourselves.

            This means that the recognition of our failure to be like God, the desire to do so, and the actions taken to accomplish it resulted in the sin that makes us fall even shorter from the glory of God, but we started out falling short. Loop… see infinite loop. Infinite loop…see loop.

            The curious thing about this is that we don’t seek the ocean's or the sun's glory. We don’t tend to desire to be like those because – for all their might and glory – we understand that if we were the ocean or sun (or part of either), we would be ocean or sun and not persons and, more importantly, not ourselves. But we want to be like God.

            God also wants us to be like Him. He created us in His image. Those who follow Him are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory according to  II Corinthians 3:18. He desires that we love, have joy, be peaceful and have peace, show patience, be kind, be good, be faithful, be gentle, and show self-control. But that’s not what we tend to mean when we discuss being like God. And that is part of the reason we fall short of His glory.