Psalm 139
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
When I have an opportunity to share any of God’s truth, I always like to take people back to the Garden. Back to the place where God created us and revealed that we had been created in His image (“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” Genesis 1:26). We were not created as puppets or mindless robots but individuals with the ability to make decisions.
Created in the image of God does not only mean we may physically resemble Him but that we have His attributes. We were created holy with unselfish love for God and our neighbour. We were able to make the right and correct choices. At our creation, we began living in harmony with God, others, nature and even ourselves.
In the Garden, we did not question our appearance or character. However, when we listened to the serpent, we were tempted to believe there was more to us than God suggested. We then challenged God’s authority, and our image was corrupted, as was our relationship with the world. The first thing that occurred was Adam and Eve labelling each other – they defined themselves as NAKED and associated that with shame. Before eating the fruit, they had no issue with their appearance – they were in harmony with each other and did not judge appearance. They had no self-doubt about their appearances, but once they broke the image, they forgot who they were and started to see themselves as different from what God intended.
Labelling assigns terms to people that limit others from seeing them as God created them. When we attached a label to a culture or an individual, we miss out on knowing them. Satan is the master of labels, both those that others apply to us and those we give to ourselves. He’d love for us to only see each other as labels such as tall, short, chubby, bad drivers and so on. He revels in our superficial labels because it distracts us from who we are, images of our Father in heaven.
When we erred in the Garden, God did not clap His hands and wipe us off the face of the earth. He set in place His plan to reconcile us to Him and to fix that broken image. Jesus is that path to reconciliation in that we can go to Him, acknowledge our failures and sins, repent, and seek forgiveness and be on that path to eternity with Him again
Only accept the image God gave you – His image.