Habakkuk 2:18 (ESV)

 “What profit is an idol
    when its maker has shaped it,
    a metal image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in his own creation
    when he makes speechless idols!”

One of the saddest things about idols is that people pay attention to a speechless teacher of lies, while a legitimate image of God (us) is right there handy.

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. — Acts 17:29 (ESV)

Unfortunately, sin makes us broken images of God. The same sin that causes us to make dumb idols makes it difficult to figure out which human traits are in God’s image and which ones aren’t.

One trait that’s clearly in His image is our creativity. We are like the creator in that we are creative. This is a huge difference between us and the animals. No animal is a tenth as creative as a small child. Kids with time on their hands are explosions of creativity. That’s why restaurants give crayons to children.

This leads somewhere. Because we’re creative, we pretend things. Part of that pretending is to write plays, novels, and other things that create little “universes.” The universes we create are nothing compared to God’s created universe, but we still get to see the relationship between creators and their creations.

From that, we can learn many wondrous things.

Let’s start with a simple example. I don’t write plays; I write computer programs. Imagine for a moment that my programs were somehow aware of their creator. What kind of questions might they ask about me?

Is he 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit?
(They might even wonder if I’m an unimaginably awesome 128-bit program.)
Does he have a graphical user interface?
Can he be ported between platforms?

Of course, these questions are misguided. Programs (even magical ones that can ask about their creator) only understand the concepts of their world. They have no concept of a human or the world I live in.

Our attempts to understand God are bound to be misguided too. We ask questions that make sense to us, but they aren’t the right questions. We wouldn’t understand the right questions anyway.

The takeaway here is just to get some sense of the enormity of the gulf between us and our creator. That can stretch our minds but doesn’t give us any details.

But there are some details—in God’s word. That’s next.

All the weekly study guides, which include all five devotionals plus related questions for discussion or meditation, are available for download here:

https://www.ailbe.org/resources/itemlist/category/91-deep-studies