When We Try to Be God

Our mandate and our sin

One of the most important books I’ve read in the last 12 months, in terms of my personal formation, is The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa. I was put on the scent of this book by a couple of people, namely Bobby Jamieson in his book Everything Is Never Enough.

The Uncontrollability of the World is a sociological look into how we are constantly trying to grasp for more control despite the reality that life is best lived when the world is at least a bit unpredictable.

I have plenty I want to write about this book that I haven’t yet, and so you’ll see me referencing it a good bit throughout the rest of 2026.

Right at the outset of the book, Dr. Rosa gives us his hypothesis. He says this (bolding mine):

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifests themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.

Phew.

I think what Dr. Rosa has identified here, without putting it in such terms, is this:

We continue to believe the first lie: that we can be gods. And our pursuit of deity is making us miserable in all spheres of life, leading to desperate swipes for power, politically and otherwise.

Really what I think we see here is the crossing of the line from our creation mandate into our sinful pursuit of godhood.

Our God-Given Mandate to Steward Creation

God gives his image-bearers a mandate with regard to the rest of creation right out of the gate in Genesis, at the creation of all things. Genesis 1:26-28 says:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

On top of that, in Genesis 2:15, a similar—perhaps more intimate—instruction is given. It says:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

God gave his people, as a gift and a responsibility, a mandate to have dominion over and subdue the earth, tending and keeping it. God tasked we humans, we image-bearers—the crown jewel of creation—to oversee the rest of all he made. What an amazing gift and terrifying assignment! I’m not sure how we’re doing with all of that, but that’s not the point today.

There is, woven into our DNA, a desire for order and control. It is part of who we were created to be from the beginning—order makers, chaos containers, and careful tenders. So any desire we have to faithfully carry out this mandate, seeing ourselves as stewards under the ultimate cosmic lordship of Yahweh, is good and right!

Unfortunately, this God-given responsibility is easily twisted into self-serving sin.

Our Self-Serving Sin to Idolize the Self

The problem comes when our divinely-imprinted desire for goodness and justice and order are not held in open hands, full of faith, submitted to God. We run into issues when we take our mandate into our own hands, when we see ourselves as lords and not stewards. When we see ourselves as gods and not saints.

Part way through Eve’s conversation with the serpent in Genesis 3, we see the vicious, effective lie offered up by the evil one. In Genesis 3:5, the serpent says of the forbidden tree:

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

I don’t know why Adam and Eve found being like God to be so tempting, but I’ve been a sinner my whole life, so I have some ideas why the offer may have been appealing to our first parents.

Our self-serving sin is that we want to be gods ourselves. Part of the reason this temptation is appealing is because to be like God is to be like the only ultimately powerful one, and we trust no one but ourselves with ultimate power. We see injustices or other kinds of disorder and brokenness that we feel—though we would never say—God is taking too long to fix, so we take and eat the fruit over and over and over again.

But part of the reason this poisoned fruit is so appealing, at least for some, comes out of a deep desire to take our mandate to steward creation seriously. When we see the daunting task to tend to all God has created, it is easy to be so intimidated by the responsibility that we opt to seize power for ourselves instead of trusting God and his provision.¹

When we detach our dominion from its source, we don’t stop worshiping, we just misdirect our worship outward into creation or inward into ourselves. As Paul writes in Romans 1:21-25:

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

May God help us not be the kind of people who know him, but strip him of his rightful place as the one, true God and Lord of our lives and all of creation.

We Cannot Control It All—Praise God!

Hartmut Rosa is right: we try to make the world controllable at every level. We want to make the world more controllable because we think uncontrollability yields anxiety and controllability yields pleasure. Unfortunately for us, the inverse is true: the more we try to control life, the more anxious we become, and any measure of control we gain is not offset by the anxiety laden in our efforts!

This particular sickness is getting worse, not better, with time. The primary reason it’s getting worse is because technological advances—however good and healthy some of them may be!—make us increasingly feel like gods ourselves. The illusion of control grows more and more tantalizing over time. Our ability to be gods—bringing about justice and fulfillment and life in our own ways—is always just out of reach.

Satan wasn’t joking, or even lying, when he said the fruit would make us like God. We are like God! Devastatingly, though, the fruit also made it so that we are never like God enough.

Might we pray with David as he does in Psalm 131, yielding power and control to God, resting in his sovereignty:

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

1. See also: Babel in Gen 11:1-9