Exploring the Social Imagination

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

We exist, we imagine, because God imagines us

We move and live in Him...Acts 17. We exist because God wills us to be, we exist in His imagination. What about free will? Free will is freely given by God; because we are God's creation, we exist in His imagination. There is great joy to be loved freely, God wants us to love him of our free will, not by His will but by ours. He wants us to choose His will which is to choose life, choose light. If He just turned us on so to speak, what would our existence be but that of constant stream of matter without any emotion, without any reason for being. We would be like a simple flower blowing in the wind without consciousness, without thought of being anything.
God made each of us special and he loves us in our diversity/differences, not sameness. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth... he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. Do did this so that men would seek Him... Acts 17 24.
By God setting man in different places man had to adapt himself to and establish himself in the place God put him. We understand that God created men equal, from one he made all and that he created them to be different as he put them in different places. What we should realize is that race is socially created among men who recognize their diversity as they find themselves different by and through living in different places. We are socialized in a place (we get to know each other) and since not every place is the same place, not everyone is the same.  Why did God do this, so man would seek God first to understand his diversity, his place that God put him.
In today's social arena, the debates over race and equality are heated. We it appears we cannot accept our diversity, being different. We blame religion. Is it because we doubt God's imagination, to make us different by placing us in different places. In reaction to that, we want to imagine 'pretend' a life without God. We want to live outside of God's imagination. The idea is to transcend God's imagination, take His authority and override His authority, a notion that we can free ourselves from God and God's imagination, His diversity and His judgement. This is the problem. We think that if we create a sameness among men, we will still have diversity. Wrong. What we have done is usurped God's imagination.
God is all loving and all forgiving. When one has rebelled against that, one is living in darkness, and the light of hope becomes so bright it is almost impossible to bear, this is what judgment feels like; and yet if we ask God to forgive us and we forgive ourselves by embracing His love which is all His imagination and seek to live in that, then we become as bright as that light we once could not bear to look at.You see, diversity like His is the brightest light of all, in that we exist in all complexity we live and move in Him. Acts 17

1 comment :

  1. Jesus was trying to indicate that without God you simply do not exist. It's no that we should hate anyone, but if we don't love God and know His love for us before all else, especially ephemeral human beings, we are lost and have no life in us.

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