Are You Normal?

Are You Normal?

Are you normal? You would probably answer yes to that question, but do you really know what normality is for a human being?

After all, a knowledge of normality is the only basis upon which we can diagnose accurately. That is why we have to understand very clearly how God created us: only then can we have an intelligent understanding of what has gone wrong, and its consequences, and what God has done to put things right.

In Psalm 8, David asks God, "What is man that You are mindful of him?" Then David acknowledges, "You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet" (Psalm 8:4-6). This was man in his innocence, man in normality, man as God created him in Adam: crowned with glory!

What was the glory with which God crowned man? God had said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness: ( Genesis 1:26). Man in the image of God was to be equipped by His divine indwelling, the Holy Spirit occupying the human spirit, so that man would manifest the very glory of God. It was a derived glory, exclusively dependent upon the presence of the Creator within the creature. Likewise the authority man was to exercise over the earth was the authority that derived exclusively from his submission to God's authority.

The Bible makes it abundantly clear that God Himself (the Creator within the creature) must be the origin of His own image. After God completed His work of creation by creating man, "God saw that everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). What did He see in that moment when He looked at man whom He created in His perfect image? He saw Himself! For "God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him" (Genesis 1:27).

God Himself, as our Creator, always intended that He should indwell us; His cherished ambition was to be seen and heard in those He created. That is normality for a human being, when God Himself is behaving in and through a man or woman. This is the purpose for which He created us, that we might be a physical, visible expression on this earth of the God who is otherwise invisible, as John tells us: "No one has seen God at any time" (John 1:18).

God created each human being with a physical, visible, and audible body to be inhabited by an invisible God, to make Himself visible through what that person does and says and is. God Himself must be the origin of this activity within us, which is called "righteousness. God is the author of all righteousness, and for you and me to produce it, He must be within us the origin of His own image, the source of His own activity, the dynamic of His own demands, and the cause of His own effect.

Therefore if any human being is truly normal in his or her behavior, there is only One Person to be congratulated, and that is God Himself. Normality for a human being is when God can be seen by anything and everything which that person does and says and is.

Our "natural" man, or who we are in our flesh, is void of righteousness and also of any true spirituality: "The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). The natural man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God because he is morally and intellectually incapacitated. The natural man is not normal; he is not what God created and intended man to be. In his fallen condition he is destitute, empty, and alienated from the person of his Creator. 

The moment you come to realize that only God can make a person righteous and godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know Him, and to let God be God in and through you, whatever that will mean. This will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing, for there is only one God, and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself.

"Be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and .... put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:23-24).

1. How normal are you? What is true normality for a human being?

2. What does it mean "to let God be God in and through you?

~W. Ian Thomas~