• Created to be Like God •

By Father Peter Bowes

When God said the word, “Let there be Light,” creation began, with all the endless variations of life, all the potentialities and possibilities which developed from God’s Mind. This is difficult for some people to accept, and many turn to evolution as a substitute for God’s creation. It’s true that living matter evolves, changing and mutating and undergoing improvements, but a difficult question still remains: Are we different from the rest of creation?

Admittedly, humans have fallen quite low in their history on earth—submitting to primal urges, bodily desires and instincts—making it difficult to distinguish between human beings and animals. But use your powers of observation and see for yourself. Your cat or dog cannot innovate or be creative. They are the same day in and day out because they are instinctual beings. They have emotions and can learn responses and tune into your energy, but they do not have free will, a conscience or the power of the human mind. Yes, it’s certainly difficult to accept that worms, cabbages and horses are not equal to human beings, a fact that might upset some of you who instill human characteristics into animals. But try to make a horse do what you tell her with words and you’ll be sadly disappointed.

We are different from animals. God made us perfect, breathing into us a soul that contains the intelligence and love of God. The first humans, who were just newly created good and perfect, did not err in the beginning. But because they were inexperienced, they very quickly chose to be jealous of God’s knowledge and wanted to steal it for themselves. The dark force instilled in our first parents the desire to obtain things that they were not ready for.

This was the corruption of pride and malice that entered the first human beings. All the suffering on the earth from that time forward has been because of that sin and pride, which everyone has to pay for as our inheritance in being human. You might think it unfair for many to have to pay for what the first parents did, but we have the very same tendencies of pride that they did. If you haven’t noticed, people are still acting out their negative patterns—reacting in anger, criticizing and judging others, stealing, waging wars, cheating on their spouses. In other words, we all haven’t turned into little angels yet.

But while we have inherited the capacity to sin, we have also inherited the potential for perfection that God gave to the first parents. We are made in the spiritual image and likeness of God. We can create like God, we can bring things into manifestation like God, and we can love like God. At the core of every human being is goodness. Jesus said to the disciples, “Know you not, that you are gods?” We are to grow into the full potential that God gave us, learning to create and love and be uncorrupted by the world.

Jesus taught with the full consciousness that we could become like him. This is, in fact, what happened. The Apostles and many disciples demonstrated gifts of healing and love, just like Jesus and Mother Mary. It is our heritage to be like God—not greater than God, but like Jesus and Mother Mary, able to be one with God.