It and Thou - Part 1

The first great distortion Satan introduced into the mind of the human race is that the most important human quest is to know something as opposed to knowing Someone.

God placed the first couple in His paradise, giving them all they needed and inviting them to know Him as their loving, caring Creator God. Everything went well until Satan, the deceiver, turned up. It appears that God habitually turned up at the Garden to have fellowship with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:8). But Satan came in the in-between hours to tempt them.

Satan began by creating doubt about what God had told Adam and Eve. Once he saw the unsteady human heart faltering and embracing doubt, he pushed for outright disobedience by introducing the great distortion – that the meaning of life was to know something. He told Eve that if she ate the forbidden fruit, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” and assured her that she would come to “know good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).

This was a dangerous distortion. Satan turned the human quest from knowing Someone (God) to knowing something (the knowledge of good and evil). Since that moment, we have been living in that appalling lie. Instead of seeking God, we have been seeking to be almighty like Him, and in our pride we have sought to take His place through the self-centred schemes so common in the human DNA.

To know God is to come to the core of who we are as human beings. Our well-being is rooted in the relationship that God wants to have with us. Instead, our lives are wrongly focused on lesser forms of knowledge that cannot ultimately make us human.

The Lord Jesus warned His listeners of the peril of living in the great distortion that has infected the human soul. The Pharisees thoroughly knew all the details of the Law (though Jesus told them their knowledge was seriously flawed) but they did not seek to know the Lawmaker personally. Their focus was on the ‘somethings’ of life rather than the Someone who is at the heart of all reality.

It is possible that even in religious piety we can be thrown offguard and offline. The parable of the prodigal son illustrates the risk of staking our life on the pursuit of something rather than Someone. Both the sons were infected by the great distortion of Satan.

The way the elder son addressed his father disrespectfully (“Look”, Luke 15:29) and refused to enter his father’s house demonstrated that he did not really care for his father (or his brother). He was dutiful only for reasons of self-interest and self-protection.

The younger son was keen to spend his father’s inheritance on the sort of lifestyle he wanted. Only after he had lost everything and was hungry did he think of going home. His father received him and forgave him. Perhaps then the son looked at his father’s tearful, joyful face for the first time, and saw a person who truly loved him. Until then, his father was an ‘It’ in his self-centred universe. But it took serious adversity, humiliation, and the desperate need for forgiveness and reconciliation to help him see his father as a ‘Thou’.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote his book I-Thou in 1923. Buber divided human reality into two sets of perspectives: ‘I-It’ and ‘I-Thou’.

In the ‘I-It’ perspective we consider others (both living and nonliving) as objects. A table is an ‘it’ and we use it as an object. But it is possible to have similar perspectives with regard to other persons. We can reduce them to objects, in which case our primary approach is to use them rather than to love them. Similarly, we can reduce God to an ‘It’ that can be manipulated for our own well-being and agenda.

Discussion Questions:

Recall instances in the past when you were treated by others as an ‘It’. How did you feel in these situations? What factors in modern life make people tend to treat one another as ‘Its’? How is contemporary life organised around the goal of knowing

‘Something’ rather than knowing ‘Someone’?