Have you ever been driving, looking at the car in front of you, and suddenly the tail lights, license plate and bumper look like eyes, a nose and a mouth? I'll bet you have. Or have you sat in a chair doing nothing, looking at the wallpaper or the ceiling, and suddenly you can make out a face in the pattern? You've probably seen pictures of rocks in the desert that are famous for looking like a human profile when viewed from just the right place or when the light hits it just right. There's the famous Face on Mars, the sticky bun that looked like Mother Theresa, and the Faces of Jesus and Mary have been seen in everything from clouds, to frost-covered windows, to slices of toast, to candy bars.

We humans seem to be hard-wired to see human characteristics in just about anything. More than anything else, we can see a human face just about anywhere we look. Is it any wonder that ancient peoples found gods everywhere in nature? Stare at a lake or a rock or a tree long enough, and you are bound to see a face in it. It's not a human, so it must be the face of the lake itself or the face of the god that dwells therein. Over time, stories develop about this god. He or she is given a name, an origin, a personality. The god becomes more real to the humans by becoming more human itself. No religion I'm aware of ever developed around worship of an object or a mindless force. The god always had to be built up into a human-like creature before it became worthy of worship. Man created gods in his image.

Perhaps this talent to find persons wherever we look was planted in us by our Creator. We have a personal God who wants us to look for Him, so he planted in us an innate desire to seek out a person when we look around. But God knows that this instinct alone isn't enough. Left to ourselves, we can work out the existence of some sort of god, but we can only cast him into a mold of our making, ultimately ending up with a God that is only a pale reflection of ourselves.

Fortunately, God has not left us alone in our search. In His revelations to Abraham, Moses and so on, God took on a human characteristic such as a voice so that He could tell and show us more than we would figure out on our own. In Jesus Christ, God the Son went beyond assuming a human characteristic or two by becoming fully human Himself. He could teach us, show us, and lead us directly. He gave us a face that satisfies our innate longing to find a person wherever we look in the universe. And He helps us to go beyond our homemade gods and see the glorious truth that, rather than God being a person we've made in our image, we were made in His.