Are there ways in which God is like us?
Yes. God loves, hates, plans, creates, thinks, builds, achieves, expresses Himself, takes pleasure in beauty and diversity, is disgusted by cruelty and evil.
God communicates.
God enters into relationships. (Source: Pastor Steve’s Beliefs)

In a sense, the author is correct. God, according to the Bible, is and does all of those things. But I think the author is a bit sloppy: He has the direction backwards.

No, God is not like us. We are like God. Not in the New Age sense of being gods or even “god-like”, but instead being made in God’s image so we reflect a portion (albeit sometimes a tiny portion) of His glory. If we were to say that God is like us, we would be anthropomorphizing God, making Him like us. We should try to think in the right direction (top-down rather than bottom-up) regarding God.

For example, when we refer to God as “Father” we have a tenancy to apply our conceptions of our own father to God … which of course is quite backwards. To use Platonic terms (hopefully correctly) God is the Form, and our fathers are the forms. Or to put it another way, God is the mold, and our own fathers (as wonderful or as miserable as they may be) are the clay, which imperfectly represent facets of the original.

Of course, such similarities of God are marred (but not erased) by sin, which causes us to feel separated but not entirely estranged from our heavenly Father.

Related: How does sin estrange us from God? And what is God’s answer to the problem?

Finally completed my update of my essay/eBook The Historical Reliability of the New Testament! My original essay was rather short (due to the prescribed limits of the seminary class assignment for which it was written) however I have greatly expanded the essay (from approximately 3,000 words to over 8,000 words) and included many more details, observations, and citation of important thinkers on many subjects. Therefore, I now feel it’s more legitimate to consider it an eBook on its own, although if I ever finish my more comprehensive eBook, this will likely become a single chapter within that larger work. The only entirely new section in this update is “The Copycat Argument”, which refutes theories that the New Testament is merely the product of copying other religious myths. (Though I lent out my copy of Strobel’s newest, The Case for the Real Jesus, so I may add some material from that book once I get it back.)

If you’ve read it before, check out the new version! If not, no better time than the present to read it now! (It’s got a swanky new cover and everything! :))

You can also use this shorter URL to link to the eBook: http://www.whyfaith.com/nt/

After posting my essay, I realized that there were some areas that should be expanded. There was a word limit on the paper when I originally wrote it so I had to shorten some sections and leave other things out entirely. I’m working on a rewrite to expand its scope and add more detail. When it’s done, it’ll be released as a PDF instead of HTML, since it’s way too time consuming to convert it. (Saving in a PDF: instant. HTML: an hour or more) Also it’ll be under a Creative Commons license so hopefully it’ll get copied & passed around.

So look for that hopefully soon! I’ll probably wait until I receive the copy of Mark D. Roberts‘ new book Can We Trust the Gospels? I ordered so I can review it before I post the new version of my article. (It’s on its way right now from Amazon! :))

I spent several hours tonight converting one of the essays I wrote for my Master’s degree at Tyndale Seminary into HTML format. I still somewhat consider the essay a work-in-progress and will continue to add to it as I see fit, but I did take the liberty of adding some extra links to the end of most of the sections to further information on the web.

Read the article here:
The Historical Reliability of the New Testament
(Approx 4,000 words)

Whew. That took a loooooooong time. And now, I’m going to bed!