Goals

Aspire to Divinity Patterned After and Dependent on God

What is your goal in life? People have many goals, some personal, others social, familial, vocational, or financial. The goal of the less fortunate is to stay out of jail, avoid bankruptcy, continue to be able to feed oneself, and maybe, on an especially good day, hope the same for one’s children. More of us aspire to a good marriage, healthy children, and perhaps one or more merry grandchildren. The more visionary or fortunate have a so-called bucket list, implying that the goal is to complete the list or as many of the items on it as possible. Those things might be to skydive, travel around the world, or meet the president or the pope. Billionaires may add reaching outer space, flying to Mars, or becoming the first trillionaire to their bucket lists. Odd goals, to be sure, but goals nonetheless.

Christians, though, place their priority on a spiritual goal. Christians hope and yearn to be more like Christ. Theologians, especially Catholic and Orthodox but others, too, naturally have a fancy word for it. Theosis, they say, is the process of becoming like God. No one attains that goal. Christ was God. He didn’t become God. But we approximate that goal of becoming like God as, in Peter’s words, we partake of God’s divine nature. Christ is in us. We receive his Spirit. The Spirit transforms our mind. God made us in his image, and so we seek to fulfill the image of God. Christ urged in his Sermon on the Mount that we be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. All these verses and constructs tell us that we are right to aspire to a sort of divinity, patterned after God. And when we succeed, we take our place in God’s presence, a little higher than the angels.