The Dream of God

God's dream was to create a people that would love him as their Creator. The dream was that man would choose to love him, to be in communion with God. The choice of man is the central theme, the fulcrum point of the success or failure of the God's dream in the world.

God created each of us in his image which is to say that he gave us freedom to choose whether or not to remain in relationship with him or not. Unfortunately, because we have this power of freedom, men all through the ages have decided that we would rather become gods to ourselves and forget God and his plan to relate to us individually and as a people.

God would not be thwarted, though, and the dream has continued in spite of men's efforts to leave him behind. God still wanted to live in relationship with men, wanted men to love him as their creator, so he chose a people, Israel, to be his Beloved. This relationship with the chosen people was not only to be their God, but also to show the rest of the world a new possibility for life, a new way to live, a way foreign to the ways of the fallen world. Being men, though, Israel would not stay true to God and still wanted their own rulers...their own kings...to be their own gods.

So God comes to his people to relate to them in a way we can understand - through the person of Jesus. The dream continues as he points the way to reach God, through himself. He shows (and tells) the world the way that we should live. He gives them, again, the new possibility for life. It is actually the same way of living that God has asked for since the beginning, to have his people freely decide to love him. It is this same offer and persistence of the dream that we realize even today.

My place in God's dream, then, is simply to answer positively to his call for me to love him. Just like Adam and many of the people of Israel, I have also exercised my freedom to outright reject God. But it is the new possibility for my life that I should turn from that rejection and repent into a place of love for God and men around me.

This is not necessarily an easy task, though. Like the Israelites, we today have people all around us who utilize their freedom to reject God. It is, in fact, deemed to be correct to be independent - free from the "rules" of morality that many believe to be the very essence of God. The messages of these people, the media, our educational systems all say that we can become like God, to know the difference between good and evil, to decide for ourselves what is to be the path for our lives.

While this is the mantra of the vast majority, it is a lonely road because it means that we would go down this path without God, without his guidance and comfort. Instead, this path leads us to become an island to ourselves - self-seeking and in competition with all others - not to mention being in competition with God himself - who have decided to take this path to be their own god.

So the dream of God is good news. We are no longer in competition with God, separated from him, but within the dream we are in union with him. Unfortunately, the idea of this being God's dream - and thus not necessarily the day-to-day reality - is all too accurate. Because of our freedoms and the possibilities they provide, it is not easy to be the created ones and we are tempted to become like the majority and be our own gods.

And the dream is not without accountability on our part. I've never found that love - which is what this dream is made of - could exist without responsibility. Responsibility to foster the relationship, responsibility to promote the relationship and its viability to others, to the exclusion of other associations that would be contrary to the goals of this relationship. Dozier goes to great pains to denounce the difference between the clergy and the laity and instead pronounces, in essence, that we are all priests of God, each with our own responsibilities to maintain and promote our own relationships with God for the good of ourselves and our communities.

Ultimately, I do believe in the dream, but I struggle to find my place in it. I struggle to be the creation and I look to glorify myself. As I walk down life's road, I choose many wrong paths, or errant exits, along the way. Over and over, though, God gently nudges me back into relationship with him and I am able to see glimpses of the dream - the vision for my life as the creation in relationship with its creator - that he lays out before me.