Only Human, or Fully Human?

Look at someone and ask, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s the most human question there is — and most of us have been answering it wrong for years.

The apostle Paul names the dilemma without flinching: the good I want to do, I don’t do; the very thing I don’t want to do, I end up doing. You’ve lived this. Day one of the reading plan, you’re casting out demons. Day three, God knows your heart. The thing you swore you’d never do again is the exact thing you do.

And here is how we’ve learned to explain it. We say, “I’m only human.” Notice we only ever say that to excuse a deficiency. You never break an addiction or forgive someone who wronged you and shrug, “well — I’m only human.” We reserve the phrase for our failures. Which means, somewhere along the way, we decided that the thing wrong with us is our humanness itself.

We’ve created an identity out of our deficiency rather than our design.

But go back to the beginning. Genesis says God made human beings in His own image, looked at everything He had made, and called it very good. There was no deficiency in the original design. So if being human is God’s image and God’s “very good,” then being human cannot be the problem.

Watch what Paul does in Romans 7. When he blames his humanity, he immediately qualifies it: “So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.” He names the problem without building an identity out of it. The problem was never your humanity. The problem is what sin has done inside it.

Here’s the tell we all miss. We confess that Christ is fully human and fully divine. Fully human. We never say He was “only human.” Intuitively we know there is something about His humanity that differs from how we talk about our own. So what if the goal was never to be only human — but fully human?

You are not a problem to solve. You are a design to recover. And if you don’t understand the design, you will keep trying to fix yourself in ways that never actually heal you — discipline, willpower, hiding, praying harder. So maybe the first question was never “What’s wrong with me?” Maybe it’s a harder, better one: do I even understand what I am?

That is where this begins.

— Paul