You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own. – Leviticus 20:26

Today's Scripture Reading (November 17, 2021): Leviticus 20

I love origin stories. As a fan of Spiderman, I find something intriguing about a hero who begins the story as just an intelligent outcast but then is bitten by a spider and becomes powerful as well as brilliant. But that is just part of the story. Maybe the most critical part of the story is what happens after the brilliant Peter Parker becomes the powerful Spiderman. When Peter Parker becomes Spiderman, he also becomes incredibly selfish, using his newfound power only to advance his own desires. But all of that changes when Peter's selfishness leads to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben had reminded Peter that "with great power comes great responsibility," a principle that Peter had forgotten at a critical part of the story. As a result of that lack, Uncle Ben had died. For the rest of the myth, Spiderman wages a battle not just against the evil enemies he encounters but also with his own desires to use his power to get what he wants. Peter struggles to fulfill the proverb that he had learned from his uncle, using his great power to accomplish a great good. And it is in that struggle that the story of Spiderman connects to the place where we live.

The story of the Bible begins with the words "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). According to Judeo-Christian belief, this is our origin story. God creates everything that we know, and after everything else had been created, he made us.

Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So God created mankind in his own image,
            in the image of God he created them;
            male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

While we are related to the rest of creation, we are also different. Maybe it is the presence of a soul or some other part of our make-up, but there is something different about us, something that has been created in the image of God. Unlike the rest of creation with which  we share this world, we also have an intimate connection with the One who made us. And being created in the image of God meant that we possess great power and great responsibility.

But we failed at that responsibility; we used our power for something less than what God had desired. And so, God called Israel, and I believe, later on, the Christian Church, to be different, set apart from the rest of the nations. He called us to his purpose, saying that we must be holy because the One who created and called us is holy. We are made in the very image of a holy God. It was sin that tarnished that image, but God has restored us to the original holiness for which we were intended.  And in that, he has restored the original power we were given at creation and given back to us the responsibility that we possessed "in the beginning."

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Leviticus 21