Hello James, thanks for taking the time to respond.

You said:

“Kyle, I agree that God created His children in His image, but I come to a somewhat different conclusion. God is spirit (John 4:24) and love (1 John 4:8), so God’s children are also spirit and love. This is where the story ends for me.”

Certainly, God made us as spirits, and certainly we are to love.

Yet we are more than spirits. God made bodies to house our spirits in this life.

Further, being spirits requires that we have minds. If we were a nebulous spiritual essence, we wouldn’t be like God. God is Spirit, and in His Spirit, God exercises an incredible mind. God thinks, creates, reasons, chooses, speaks.

Because we are made in God’s image, we can do all these things that God can do. We wouldn’t be a spirit like Him if we couldn’t.

You said:

“How did we get a humanity that has physical form (when God has no form) and does terrible things (when God has no sin)? Could it be God did not make the universe?”

We have a physical form because Jesus has a physical form. We are spirits who reside in bodies, as Jesus did.

Note that Jesus did this long before He was born. Read Exodus 24:9-11. Jesus appears in His boy to the elders of Israel and eats and drinks with them.

As for why we can do terrible things, it’s because we’re made in God’s image, but aren’t God.

Because we are made in His image, we can think and choose.

But because we aren’t God, we aren’t perfect. We aren’t infinite.

We are limited. There’s a lot we don’t know. There’s a lot we know incorrectly.

Because of this, our choices are not always going to be right.

God always chooses rightly, because God knows all things. He always knows everything about every situation and is able to rightly choose the right path every time.

We can’t, because don’t have such knowledge.

But the more we choose, the more we learn, and the more right choices we can make. ‘

Hopefully.