Between
NOW
&
Eternity

What is Man?

What is mankind, and why are we so important? Who are we trying to impress? Who cares anyway? Yet, regardless of whether these questions can be answered or not, most of us wake up each morning with hope in our hearts determined not to be overcome by circumstances but to overcome and to ultimately win the self determined prize no matter how great or small it may be.

When considering the wonder of what ‘man’ was created to be, and the potential of what we are and have achieved, the sense of awe is tempered by a great sadness at the fact that so much of that potential is being deliberately lost through our self-centred approach to life.

Is Man ‘a savage’ seeking nobility, or a fallen king destined to be restored?

Mankind has sought through many struggling ages to become the king of the universe and master of his destiny. Now that modern Man has convincingly declared that he has 'arrived' as the enlightened self appointed ruler, what actually have we come to? We are evidently “king of the castle” and the more we are able to measure, define and bring under our supposed control, expansively microscopic and macroscopic, the more we substantiate our claim to be “kings of the universe”. We stand at the pinnacle of human achievement and pride, but what exactly are we standing on? Is it a glorious testimony to our achievements, a white-washed dung heap, or an unstable combination of the two?

Our technological advances, especially in the last two centuries, could deceive us into believing that we are more advanced, better, set apart from previous generations. But is this a sustainable perspective? The technological achievements are awesome, but can we be proud of what we have done with them? The technology at our disposal may be more impressive but it is what is in the heart of the individuals that use it that determines the real benefits and fruits of the labour – short and long term. Is there more to Man than meets the eye!

“When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained; what is man, that you are mindful of him? And the son of man, that you visit him? For you have made him but a little lower than God, and crowned him with glory and honour. You make him to have dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet:” [ Psalm 8:3-6 and Heb 2 ] The ‘You’ is the Creator, and the collective noun ‘man’, is us, mankind, homo-sapiens, human beings – men and women - His creation – male and female.

Deep within there is an awareness that we have come from the earth – ‘dust to dust and ashes to ashes’ – but exactly how have we arrived at where we are? Across the cultures of the world, past and present, there are different testimonies to an understanding of a relationship between the earth and mankind. Myth, science, or cultural belief – they all seek to come to terms with awareness that we have a relationship with and a responsibility for the condition of our environment. In the past - worshipping gods of the earth that control our survival, in the present - worshipping gods of economy that control our survival; in the past - considering the earth as a living ‘Gaius’ being, in the present - chastened by ecological factors that testify to our use and abuse of the earth that threatens to fight back; in the past - worshipping ‘mother earth’ and the ‘Green Man’, in the present - worshipping ‘mother earth’ and the ‘Green Man’. Wait a minute - I thought we had advanced beyond myth and superstition?

But these things are re-emerging in our society as we return to occult practices to control our destiny. If we have advanced so much through science and technology then why are we returning to this ‘early ignorance’? Or have we realised that we have left behind wisdom and understanding of our universe that brought a greater awareness and harmony with our environment than we now have. We have become very clever through our technological advances but through the process have we become alienated from the environment that we are dependent upon? As Joni Mitchell sings – “Something is gained and lost in living every day…” – but what are we prepared to trade for survival and success?

If we consider our place in the universe from an evolutionary perspective then we are the result of random processes, struggling through the ‘survival of the fittest’ to improve on our situation having escaped from the ‘dust’ of the earth – from the ‘methane mud bath’. We are the king of the pack but still haunted by our similarity to monkeys – searching for reasons to prove we are more than ‘just animals’ and yet at times scaring ourselves by behaving ‘just like animals’. Nothing more than a savage seeking nobility – struggling to be king in a random and meaningless universe dependent upon our personally constructed purpose and imposed understandings to make any sense of it all.

Or, has each one of us already been given a place of significance in the Creator’s creation rather than being left to try to create a purpose for ourselves? If we abandon what has been specifically designed for us, and given to us to live out, then anything that we construct for ourselves outside of that will be a pale imitation of what we were created for. It will cast an uncomfortably incomplete shadow across our soul, regardless of how impressive it is or how much it expresses a desire to fulfil the deep desires within us that are echoes of our awareness of who we really are.

We have been created to be kings, to rule and have dominion on the earth. Isn’t that what mankind has always been striving for – to be ‘Masters of the Universe’? But the question is – who do we represent – ourselves or the Creator that made all things? We can only really fulfil our commission engaged in a creative relationship with the Creator on a journey of discovery – to be His representatives on the earth.

Our opportunity is to rediscover, re-engage and walk in a relationship with the Creator that will inspire and enable us to fully become who we were created to be – becoming effective and fulfilled in His purposes for our lives.

The tragedy is that despite the fact that so much of what we do is consciously or unconsciously trying to fulfil aspects of the great commission that the Creator gave Mankind when we were created, much of it ‘will end in tears’ because of our approach and attitude to doing it. The awesomeness of this process, is that it happens whether we acknowledge, deny, or couldn’t care the less, about God or our ‘gods’. The question is not “What do I think about God?”, but “What does God think about me?” Deep within our beings is ‘knowledge of God’ and what He is looking for, whether we like it or not. Most of us manage to bury it completely, we hope, but it reveals itself in fascinating ways through what we say and do.

There is a way to rediscover the full potential of what we have been created to be, but so often it becomes cluttered with religious indulgences, corruption of the truth, and irrelevancies, that thoroughly confuses and wearies the casual and sincere pilgrim, causing them to be diverted away from the narrow path into the dense undergrowth of ritual and fear.

This is not helped by the fact that so much of our accumulated knowledge has been fragmented into a multitude of specialised subject areas, (for practical reasons due to sheer volume), but which have become polarized in our thinking, rather than complementary. The net result is that the more we know about the details of things and how they work, the less we really understand about how it all fits together, and where we, as individuals, fit into it all. For most of us who just want to get on with our lives, it presents a bedazzling carousel of information, which is both impressive and confusing, and for the most part irrelevant to living, apart from providing an academic distraction from the mundane. That is unless you are one of the ‘specialists’, or are dependent upon information from a specialized area for the purposes of ‘earning a living’.

If we fully realised who we are and what we were created to be, we would live differently, treating ourselves, each other, and the world around us with greater respect and care. Unfortunately, we are going to a lot of effort to reduce Mankind to the lowest common denominator, while accumulating a lot of knowledge to prove that we are less than what we are; although the text books would claim otherwise.

There is no correct way of looking at life, the universe and ‘everything’, just different perspectives. It is physically impossible to know everything about everything, or even to know everything about a single event. For the purposes of maintaining sanity, we work with what we know, and draw actionable conclusions from them, and get on with life, no matter how imperfectly...... unless you are one of the perfect ones?