You’re Only Human: Lament, Limits, and the Sin of Trying to Be God
There is an old temptation in the Bible, and it has never really changed. It has only changed its marketing.
Lucifer says in his heart, “I will ascend.”
The serpent whispers to Eve that she can be “like God.”
And modernity, with cleaner fonts and better branding, tells us to “be all that you can be,” to actualize the self, to transcend every limit, to treat dependence itself as a kind of failure.
In other words: the oldest sin is still for sale.
That is one of the deeper currents I heard running beneath my recent conversation with theologian Kelly Kapic on Created in the Image of God. Kelly’s language was gentler than mine might be, but his point was sharp: one of the great spiritual confusions of our age is that we no longer know how to be creatures. We are embarrassed by limits. We resent finitude. We want, if not outright divinity, then at least a convincing simulation of it—control, mastery, optimization, relevance, endless productivity, and some version of immunity from suffering.
But as Kelly put it near the end of our conversation, the goal of the Christian life is not to become superhuman.
It is to become fully human.
That sounds simple, until you realize how much of our religion, our ambition, and our anxiety is built on resisting exactly that.
Kelly came to this not merely as an academic, but as a husband and father whose family was broken open by suffering. After his wife was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties and later entered a long season of unrelenting chronic pain and fatigue, the theological questions stopped being abstract. They had to live somewhere. They had to breathe. They had to account not just for doctrines on paper, but for bodies that ache, days that drag, prayers that seem to go unanswered.
And one of the first things that kind of suffering exposes is how poorly many of us have been taught to lament.
Kapic noted that roughly 40% of the Psalms are lament. That fact alone should stop us. Ancient Israel’s songbook, the prayer book of Jesus Himself, makes enormous room for grief, protest, bewilderment, complaint, and ache. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not the language of unbelief. It is the language of covenant spoken under pressure.
And yet in much of modern Christianity, lament has become nearly unintelligible. We are eager for victory, for breakthrough, for strategy, for uplift. We are much less comfortable sitting with someone in pain without trying to explain God to them. We rush to resurrection and skip Good Friday. We offer formulas where presence is required.
Kapic said something in that connection that struck me deeply: when people say they are struggling to believe in God, they often are not really asking the philosophical question we think they are asking. The deeper fear, he suggested, is often something like this: What if this suffering reveals what God is really like?
That is a far more dangerous question.
Not “Does God exist?”
But “Is this the kind of God He is?”
That question is not answered, Kelly argued, by a tidy equation. Not by a philosophical proof. Not by one more glib sentence from someone who has not sat in the ash heap long enough to earn the right to speak.
It is answered, Kelly offers, by Christ.
By what kind of God enters suffering rather than explaining it away. By what kind of God bleeds. By what kind of God weeps. By what kind of God takes death into Himself and breaks it from the inside.
Kelly put it memorably: God cannot die. God cannot bleed. God cannot sleep. And yet in the incarnation, the Son becomes what He was not—fully human—without ceasing to be what He eternally is. So the God who cannot die becomes human so that, in Christ, He can enter death, not as spectator, but as participant.
That matters to me. It matters because too much religion tries to solve suffering without solidarity. It offers thought where what is needed is presence. It speaks above our pay grade. It pretends to know what God is doing in every specific wound.
But the Bible itself is less smug than that. It gives us Job. It gives us lament. It gives us a crucified Messiah.
And it gives us limits.
That is where the older temptation reenters the room.
One way to read the opening chapters of Genesis is that humanity’s trouble begins not simply with disobedience, but with a refusal to remain within creaturely bounds. The desire to “be like God” is not evil in every sense—after all, we are created in His image. We are called to maturity, discernment, holiness, even communion. But there is a difference between growth and grasping, between ripening and reaching too soon, between likeness by gift and likeness by theft.
The serpent’s suggestion is precocious. It bypasses process. It treats dependence as intolerable. It offers elevation without formation.
That is why I do not think this is merely an ancient problem. It is the modern problem. Our world catechizes us constantly into impatience with creatureliness. We are told that limits are oppressive, dependence is weakness, aging is failure, suffering is interruption, and the self must forever expand. Even our spirituality can become one more version of self-enhancement.
Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization. The military says, “Be all that you can be.” The wellness world says, “Become your highest self.” Tech culture says we can optimize everything. Careerism says meaning is achievement. Even some churches say God’s main interest is helping you unlock your best life.
Underneath all of it is the same hiss: ascend.
But to be human is not to ascend endlessly. It is to receive. To live within givenness. To know that I am not God, and that this is not an insult.
Kapic’s reframing of Jesus’ command, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” was helpful here. Biblically, he argued, perfection is better understood as fullness, completeness, maturity—not flawless superhumanism. Hebrews can even speak of Jesus being “made perfect,” not because He moved from sinfulness to sinlessness, but because He entered the full completeness of the human vocation, including suffering.
That, too, is a hard word for our age.
We do not want completeness if completeness includes pain. We want power without weakness. We want growth without grief. We want wisdom without loss. But in the Christian account, maturity is not achieved by escaping the human condition. It comes, mysteriously, by passing through it faithfully.
This is one reason my weekly visits to a nursing home with my wife have become so important to me. Had you told a younger version of me that some of the richest spiritual company I would one day keep would be among the elderly, the amputees, the fading, the grieving, the nearly gone, I would have been surprised. But there is a clarity there. A stripping away. Death is not theoretical in those rooms. Neither is dependence.
And strangely, neither is joy.
Not cheap joy. Not denial. Not motivational wallpaper. But something quieter and more durable. The kind that can coexist with pain because it no longer imagines pain disqualifies life from being meaningful.
That is closer to lament than to triumphalism. And closer, I think, to truth.
We are not helped by pretending to be more than human. We are helped by the messengers of God, the prophets, those mentioned in Hebrews 11 - the Faith chapter, who all showed us what true humanity looks like under the pressure of sorrow, fatigue, betrayal, and death. And of course by Jesus. Kelly points out that He does not become less human by suffering. Nor more divine by overpowering it theatrically. He becomes, in some profound sense, the revelation of what humanity was always meant to be: dependent, faithful, truthful, surrendered, and alive to the Father even in the dark.
So perhaps one of the greatest recoveries available to us now is not self-actualization, but creaturely honesty.
I am finite.
I am not in control.
I do not know everything.
I cannot save myself.
I cannot explain every wound.
I do, at times, need to cry out, “Where are You?”
And none of that disqualifies me from faith.
It may be the beginning of it.
Kelly Kapic reminded me that the Christian life is not a project of self-deification. It is not the elimination of dependence. It is not a ladder upward into sovereignty stolen from God.
It is communion.
Communion with God.
Communion with neighbor.
Communion with creation.
And the slow, painful, beautiful recovery of what it means to be human in the image of God.
You are only human.
And that is not your shame.
It is your calling.
You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.
— Wade
If this reflection resonated, subscribe, share, or pass it along to someone tired of pretending to be stronger, clearer, or less needy than they really are. Sometimes grace begins when we stop trying to be God.
Sneak Peek: Next on Created in the Image of God
This week, the conversation continues in two very different but deeply connected directions.
Sunday, June 21 at 7:00 AM US Central Time, I’ll be joined by Steve Chalke—Baptist minister, author, and founder of Oasis Charitable Trust. We’ll talk about faith in action, and why the gospel cannot remain an abstraction. If Christ is truly encountered in the real world, then justice, reconciliation, and community transformation are not side issues. They are part of the point.
Then on Tuesday, June 23 at 8:00 PM Central Time, I’ll sit down with Gary Rendsburg, scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history. We’ll explore the language, literary structure, and remarkable depth of scripture itself—from ancient Hebrew and the Dead Sea Scrolls to the carefully crafted world behind the biblical text.
So whether you’re drawn to the lived demands of faith or the ancient words that continue to shape it, I hope you’ll join us.
Until then, stay human—and stay hungry for truth.
