Disrupting My Childhood Thinking: God in the Image of Man?

Your PURPOSE explains what you are doing with your life. Your VISION explains how you are living your purpose.  Your GOALS enables you to realize your vision. 
~Bob Proctor

Orlando A. Battista a writer once said: "an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it". It was during my early years in life that I learned something through my so-called Christian upbringing when my grandmother used to tell me stories (from the scripture from her perspective) on how God will come finally to destroy this wonderful world deemed wicked with Fire. The idea of a blazing fire running unimpeded scorching every creature in its path really horrified me.  I found myself in the middle of a perceived war of two forces. In my thinking, there was on one side a God probably sitting in a server room monitoring every wrong move and ready to met out punishment and ensuring I was on the right spiritual track and on the other hand a devil with horns who was ready to take me with him to hell. Nowhere to run!

Looking around me today, I see a lot of people who go to church just to escape hell and hope probably to qualify to go to heaven a land of milk and honey but with one catch, you have to die first to get there. However, to pass the exam to enter Heaven seems so far fetched as a man seems to have the default settings to break God's righteous commands every six seconds. They lie for the so-called right reasons (so-called white lie) and they claim forgiveness thereafter as Jesus is believed to have taken away the sin of man.  In my curiosity, I have often wondered why a God who is so obsessed with perfection would put the extreme ability in man to break the same law they are supposed to keep knowing full well they won't keep it! As though God's commands are not enough, religious denominations have come up with further rules or we can kindly call them terms of reference for every believer to follow failure to which they attract punishment in the name of God. These sub laws also differ from one denomination to another such as don't wear this fashion or that etc (kind of spiritual fashion police for lack of a better word). Take a look at this YouTube documentary on the tribes of the Amazon who do not wear clothes (The Tribes of the Amazon forest) Even when these tribes are given clothing, they wear them inside their huts but walk naked outside the huts. Does the lifestyle of the tribes of the Amazon forest challenge our definition of decency or the question of right or wrong to be relative? Forgive me if I have missed something about religious affairs. The New Testament records a story of a lady who was caught in the very act of sexual immorality (probably considered level one sins or spiritual felony) and she was brought to Jesus so that he can pronounce the ultimate judgment according to the written law for this serious spiritual sin. Well to cut that story short, Jesus neither condemned nor judged the woman but encouraged her to make the right choices and do good (paraphrased) John 8:3-9. 

Fast forward to today, if that lady caught in adultery was in today's church, the supreme religious law would be meted to the letter and she would be used as an example, in the worst-case scenario be excommunicated from the church, Meaning she is too unholy to keep around the clean ones. It seems in today's religious perspective if you are not caught in the act, you are not guilty of any spiritual crimes. I am sure our minds are our best judges of what we do when no one is looking and we are all alone. I see female preachers in the western world preaching wearing pair of trousers with no objection but it seems to be a spiritual crime in some parts of Africa for a female preacher to be clad in trousers ministering the gospel. I don't know the devil they see in the trousers. Does this mean the spirit in the west accepts women in trousers and the spirit in Africa takes exception to women in trousers on the pulpit? What is right and wrong seems to be relative to where one is, it seems. How can the Biblical truth be relative? But all this is done in the name of God (subjugating the female class in the name of God!). While Christians describe God as love, they still add conditions to that Godly love. It's Like they are saying well! God loves you but! One thing I do know is that the only ones who still put conditions to their love are human beings and not God. We have been trying to define God in our human image. We add this earthly father figure to the image of God ready to correct a child without sparing the rod. We all know that in life anything you do has consequences. You want love, give love, you want money, give money. Whatever you are missing in life is what you are not giving away simple. Like the Bible says you reap what you sow. You don't even need the devil to help you with that. In today's theology, Not even the grace of God is free, they always find something somewhere to add to ensure it convinces someone the grace is not totally free. Why? I think its a quest to make sure the gospel fits our traditions so that it is acceptable. Politically correct if you like!

What happened to the "blessed are the fearless, for they shall know God". We are so obsessed with spreading a fear-based gospel that we even re-enact the Old Testament rituals to make the fear appear so real to all followers so as to keep them in check. Its as though God ceases to be God until people worship Him. The Christian Bible describes God as Love. But What is Love? Because fear has been so magnified in the teaching of the gospel disguised as attaining righteousness, most believers spend most of their lives trying to perfect their act to meet the perceived God standard in their lives and in the process forgetting that they have a life on earth to live for which the same God wants them to discover themselves, show forth His glory and account for their talents and potential.  

Genesis 1: 26 records and I quote "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 

Gen 1:27  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 

Therefore, why are we trying to define God in our own image? And not letting God be God. We are putting God in a box defined by our own tradition. Where is the God we are looking for? in outer space or up where? You and are I are divinity in disguise, we hold the form in which life is striving to fashion itself. When the seed of God was planted in man, it was ready to germinate and take its form effortlessly. Yet we have come to believe the seed of God is not yet in us and hence, we spend the rest of our lives looking for God and His miracles. We look everywhere for God except inside ourselves because it does not fit our religious construct. We walk as victims of circumstance waiting for a miracle to happen which doesn't happen. Whilst we have been waiting for God, God has also been waiting for us since we are the ones with the mandate to operate in the physical realm. Don't waste your energy trying to judge others by their color, race, tribe, language or by what they wear or look like, nothing you can conceive in your mind is the correct version of the presence of God. God will work in His own ways. In order to fill in the gap, we have resorted to our own Egos for identity which requires a title and manipulation of others in order to sustain control over others. We mistakenly call our ego as the true presence of God's power when it is our own deficiency we are trying to hide. The true power lies in our authentic self inside each one of us and it does not need the mind to comprehend or make sense of it.

For once try to go within, in meditation to find what you have been looking for from without. Some wisdom I have learned in life is that Two Things Define You: 1- Your Patience when you have nothing and 2 - Your attitude when you have everything. When you find what you are looking for, keep this in mind lest what is supposed to be your salvation ends up destroying you

I am out