imago-dei(3/5)
Humanity is created in the image of god
💬 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." Humanity is created in God’s image.…
Every one of us is shadowed by a false self
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.
Humans are words meant to respond
[Humans] are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer to Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signify Him.
God makes the works of his wisdom more beautiful through contrast
if Adam had never fallen, the whole human race would have been a series of magnificently different and splendid images of God, each one of all the millions of men showing forth His glories and perfections in an astonishing new way, and each one shining with his own particular sanctity, a sanctity destined for him from all eternity as the most complete and unimaginable supernatural perfection of his human personality. If, since the fall, this plan will never be realized in millions of souls, and millions will frustrate that glorious destiny of theirs, and hide their personality in an eternal corruption of disfigurement, nevertheless, in re-forming His image in souls distorted and half destroyed by evil and disorder, God makes the works of His wisdom and love all the more strikingly beautiful by reason of the contrast with the surroundings in which He does not disdain to operate.…
If I am true to the thought of him I shall find him everywhere in myself
[If] I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of His actuality and find Him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself. I shall be ‘saved’.
Our vocation is not simply to be but to work together with God
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.
God promises humans deliver retribution
Israel’s destruction of the nations who inhabit Canaan matches the pattern of the flood narrative as a consequence for filling the land with violence, but I’ve wondered why, this time, it was Israel who delivered the consequence. I mean, Noah was a passive observer when God let creation collapse upon his generation. It didn’t bother me too much that the LORD uses people to deliver retribution since the LORD uses Babylon later to do the same thing to Israel, but recently I realized that’s what the LORD had promised to do.…
All biblical roles and gifts express imago dei
The three dominant roles in the Hebrew Bible, prophet, priest, and king, are fulfilled in Jesus. I had originally thought because the Hebrew Bible used these roles to point towards Him (which it does), but had not realized that these three roles are subsets of the original Image of God role from Genesis 1. That’s so helpful to realize that humans are created to reflect, not only simply one of these roles, but all three combined, and that each demonstrate, albeit incompletely, what we are as Icons of God.…