The closer we return our attention to the beginning, the more wrapped in indistinct vapors of understanding of what God's intention is.
Our capacity to comprehend humanity's role in God's creation is distorted by the many personal concerns of mortal life.
Fashioning humanity is done over millennia involving stakeholders commanding a lion's share of human notice but contributing little compared to what is given by the multitude.
A record of the changes made to humanity's essence comes in many forms and in some cases favoring the memory of stakeholders and ignoring the multitude.
Stakeholders are mostly indistinguishable from the multitude during their lifetime despite evident efforts to favor themselves in the multitude's memory.
Textual records commonly enshrine stakeholders in metaphor as if the stakeholders were God's primary means in fashioning humanity.
The only thing that stakeholders fathom is copious memorials to themselves.
A multitude of human lives existed long before there were stakeholders.
Only oral stories reshaped into metaphor speak of the beginnings of humanity as well as lost relics recovered over a vast span of millennia.
To understand God's role in fashioning humanity, metaphor must return to its origin and the actual roles stakeholders had in the lives of the multitude.
Stakeholders refitted as just entitled individuals who are a tiny part of the multitude.
It is clear from cosmological observation that visible creation was shaped and reshaped long before there was the first human.
It is only hubris to conclude that humanity knew God at the first moment of its creation.
More likely that God has chosen to reveal himself in gradual stages of humanity's fashioning.
A beast in nature vulnerable to the whims of stronger, more powerful beasts awakens to a dim sentience and the realization of something greater than humanity and the desire to benefit from that something's presence.
The origin of pagan rituals meant to connect with that presence.
Stakeholders arose after the new sentience provided advantage first over stronger, more powerful beasts then the means to control human multitudes for a stakeholder's advantage.
Why would God favor a single stakeholder when there were human multitudes to converse with?
Such are the reasons for metaphor created by stakeholders to improve their advantage.
Erase the knowledge of human multitudes with God and focus the camera on themselves.
Creation, however, didn't start with Earth or even the galaxies near our solar system.
It is likely that the Biblical reference of the conflict between God's angels reflects a cosmological history which occurred long before our solar system existed as a cosmic cloud.
So, the enemy has always been a player across the Earth millennia span including the development of paganism by humanity.
Fashioning humanity includes the conflict between God and the enemy.
First, the weening of humanity from the clutches of paganism.
Second, the ability of humanity to understand and act according to God's will.
Third, developing consistent righteousness in order to be in direct contact with God.
How many more stages will there be in God's fashioning of humanity?
At the very least, oversight of God's angelic actions.
The current testament to God's will is incomplete and, in many ways, flawed.
Some scriptural metaphor was meant to serve stakeholders so is it appropriate in scripture?
Maybe, a fresh look at the record is timely.
