Part 3
"God" Colored Goggles
We ended our last discussion with the idea of seeing people the way that God sees them. So what exactly does that mean, well lets go back to our goggle illustration. Just as allowing our lives to be shaped by external or internal expectations tints the rest of our world with those "expectation goggles", when we allow our lives to be shaped by the truth of God's perspective, this perspective begins to affect the way we view others. So in gaining a better understanding of what God sees when he looks at us, we begin to replace the "expectation" tinted lenses with a set of "God" tinted lenses.
So with this principle in mind, lets look at some verses that give us a glimpse of God's perspective.
In Genesis 1:27 we see that man was created to "in God's image". The idea here is a little more than just that of being similar to God in some aspect of our being. Man was created as a unique being, nothing like man had been seen in all creation to this point, and the specific God intended purpose of man's creation was to reveal some parts of His being that had not yet been revealed in all of the rest of the creation. In fact, while all the rest of creation was declared to be "good" by God, only after the creation of man did God look at all that was made and declare it to be "very good". So first of all, when God sees us, he sees His own unique creation and in that creation aspects of His being that are revealed nowhere else in the created universe.
Next, we see that God values us. In Mat 10:21, we hear directly from the mouth of Jesus that we are of more worth than other created beings. David echos this sentiment in Psalm 8, where he mixes the dominion of man over creation, with marvel for God even taking thought of man, and a foreshadowing of mankind ruling over all creation, including the angels, through the man Jesus Christ. God values man because he has a purpose and a plan for man that is singularly unique among all the created beings, even spiritual beings.
When God looks at us, He sees a broken relationship that He would do anything to restore. We see from the very beginning of revelation, in Gen 1:26 a quote from God. "Let US make man in OUR own image". We see a God who exists in eternal perfect relationship within the trinity. Additionally, we see that one of the aspects of God that man was created to reflect was relationship. This was most clearly revealed through the creation of man and woman (Gen 2:24). As a result of the fall, the relationship of man with God and the reflection of God's relational nature was damaged. After all of this, we see that God chose to sacrifice His own Son to save His enemies (Rom 5:10), and why, because His business is fixing that broken relationship (2 Cor 5:18-20).
Now, this is not an exhaustive list of what God sees when He looks at mankind. Nor does this list look at some aspects of what God sees that change when a person believes in Jesus Christ for their eternal destiny. But these are some very key things that we can see from the bible are true of all mankind. I would even argue that they are the very heart of God's being, His purpose for creating mankind, and His current mission of restoring a broken world.
In our next installment, we will explore how our example of living with "God goggles", Jesus Christ, interacted with people.
FedEx,
President,
Men of Praise Motorcycle Ministry
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