R.C. Sproul

We may enjoy a certain likeness or similarity with our Maker.

But beyond that likeness and beyond that similarity is the enormous difference, the dissimilarity between who God is

and who we are.

Again, let me go back to that statement I read to you at the beginning from St.

Augustine.

He asked the question, what is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it?

I am both a shudder and a glow, a shudder that is afraid, trembling, insofar as I am unlike it,

a glow insofar as I am like it."

And so Augustine roots this ambivalence of which Rudolf Otto speaks in the fact that there is some sense in which we're like God.

We are made in His image.

And because we are made in His image and made for His glory and made originally to have fellowship with Him, Augustine, you recall, began his famous book on the Confessions with a prayer in which he says, O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.

E.T.,

wanted to go home, and we responded to that.

He wanted to go to His heavenly residence.

We can understand that because there's a sense in which we have built into our own nature as creatures made in the image of God an eternal longing for our residence in His presence.

It's as if there is some kind of empty void within us, a vacuum that haunts us in the depths of our soul until we can reach out and embrace in a harmonious relationship the God who made us.

And yet...

Because of our estrangement from God and because of the dissimilarity between who He is and who we are, we remain a shutter whenever He intrudes into our presence.

So that intrusion, those precious moments, those pregnant moments where we do sense the presence of God are filled with this ambivalent reaction of attraction and of fear.

Let me read briefly to you what Otto says in description of this awful mystery.