A Reflection of Him

Created in God’s likeness, that is, as a mirror of Him God reflects His desires and His will in us. The Son came to reveal the Father and show what kind of person He is and what kind of person He wants to be in the son. Jesus clearly evidenced that God is a person who lays down His life for others, that He is a lover and a giver of gifts. These are the basics that make it possible for us to fully rely on ourselves.

God’s eyes are always searching men’s hearts to see if they have the faith to receive His gifts and if the desire He has impressed on them in accordance with his eternal wisdom is recognized and viable. Desire precedes faith so that wherever there is desire there is hope and where there is hope there is faith.

There are three verses (there are certainly more) that come to mind and which give evidence to this relation. In John 5:6 Jesus asks the man at the pool “Do you want to get well?” Jesus is mirroring Himself in this man who had been paralyzed for so long. That desire to get well which fuelled the man’s hope originated in God. Jesus was looking for an echo of that desire which was in harmony with God’s wisdom. Evidently, Jesus found it because the man was healed even though he never properly answered the question he was posed. Despite the agony of the man’s soul Jesus saw straight through it to his inner core where faith was stirring.

We find the second instance when Jesus is on his way out from Jericho. There He encounters two blind men and asks them: “What do you want me to do for you?” Again He is searching for the desire in these men that mirrors God’s wisdom. This time He found it undistorted since they boldly replied: “Lord, let our eyes be opened.” According to the measure of God’s faith you have received be it unto you!

The last instance goes like this; “And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.”” (Mark 10:51).

We are all these men in whom God searches after the echo of His wisdom in our heart’s desires. What do we answer Him? Do we dare to trust ourselves when His floodlight is upon us? His questions haven’t changed: “What do you want?” “What do you want me to do for you?” It is as God says: “I have imparted a desire in your soul. Has it produced the kind of faith that receives? Do I find myself mirrored undistorted in your soul?”

God’s pressing desire to bless prompts Him to pursue us with His love until we become true to ourselves through the pressures upon and the agonies of our souls. Unrelenting He chases after us until our desires are almost literally squeezed out of us and acknowledged in faith as His desires. We never come to this point without first experiencing a second death, because as long as we perceive our desires and will as apart from Him we inevitably will be unstable in all our ways (James 1).

All the promises come alive to the new self – the self that rises from the ashes of its recognized nothingness (the second “death”) as a united self – a taken over self which only can function in true freedom when it only see God in all it does or is. This is the self that trusts itself in all things. It can only come alive in the deep void where God is acknowledged as all in all, as the One who has found His abode in the purified vessel and who has saturated the temple with His being.

It is common that our desires and wants are covered with layers of unbelief, fear and false humility. It is God’s delight to peel off those fig leaves so that the core is exposed. We often fear our desires because they seem to be too good to be true, and we are afraid that if we bring them to the light they will be taken away from us and laid open as falsehoods. How often hasn’t terror seized us when we have been assaulted by thoughts that vehemently assert that our desires are just a product of our own imagination?

God has promised that His word will not return to Him void, empty, fruitless, or unfulfilled, but it shall accomplish that which pleases Him. That word is spoken into our spirit and manifests in our emotions, will and desires. Our Father eagerly nourishes it and with joyful expectation awaits its germination until it becomes our word.

“Faith is nothing else but the uniting of one’s will to God, and the receiving of God’s Word and power into the will, that so both these, viz. God’s will and man’s will, become both one substance and essence; that the human will be even God’s will. And even then Christ, in his suffering, death, and resurrection, is accounted unto his own humanity for righteousness; so that man becomes Christus [or the Anointed]: understand, according to the spiritual man. And thus we put on Christ in Abraham’s faith, and are twigs, shoots and branches in his vine, and the temple of  God” (Boehme).