THE IMAGE OF GOD.
How do you see unbelievers?
Humans are judgmental. We often have a superiority complex, and it's evident in the way we explain away our part in conflicts, in our tendency to blame everyone else but ourselves, and in how strongly we feel about the things that concern us while vaguely understating the things that concern others.
We do it in church too. Subconsciously or consciously, we suddenly take "Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers" more seriously. We preach and emphasize condemnation so frequently that we begin to position ourselves as the elites of the human race, like the cool kids' table where everyone else is filthy and unworthy.
But what if we looked at everyone else as the image of God?
All mankind was made in the image and likeness of God. It's a given. You don't have to be in Christ to have been created in His image. Do you get? However, what distinguishes us as Christians is our relationship with Christ.
As Christians, we have been brought into Christ, in whom we live, move, and have our being. We are being transformed into His image, and our lives are now meant to reflect Him.
With that established, a non-Christian or unbeliever is simply the image of God locked up in sin.
Now, sin sounds like such an extreme description, and when you read that line, you probably thought, "Ahh, wenti reach locked up in sin, na so unbelievers bad?"
But really, sin isn't quite the word we sometimes make it out to be. In the Hebrew Scriptures, one of the words associated with sin, chata, carries the idea of missing the mark. Therefore, if Christ is the mark, our source and sustainer, the very essence of our existence, then anything that falls short of God's will misses that mark. Do you get?
And this is where I want us to pause.
The fact that someone is missing the mark doesn't mean they have lost the image of God in them. Their sin does not erase their humanity, neither does it make them undeserving of dignity, compassion, or love. They may be living outside the reality of Christ, but they are still people created by God.
Dearest reader, we're all images of God. Remember that the next time you think it's okay to look down on someone. Remember it when you walk past a smoker, a woman whose dressing you consider immoral, a gambler, a drunkard, or when you catch someone in the middle of a deceitful act.
Remember that, in all their imperfections, they, too, bear the image of God.
This isn't to say that we should excuse sin or abandon our convictions. Rather, we must learn to separate the sin from the person committing it. We can disagree with someone's choices without stripping them of their dignity. We can condemn sin without treating the sinner as though they are beneath us.
After all, the gospel we preach is not a story of how the good people became better than the bad people. It is the story of a God who loved us while we were yet sinners.
So, the next time you encounter someone who doesn't know Christ, perhaps the first question shouldn't be, "What's wrong with this person?" but rather, "How do I see this person?"
Because if they bear the image of the God we claim to love, how we treat them should matter to us.
And perhaps, in our eagerness to point out how far they've missed the mark, we should remember that we were never the mark in the first place. Christ is.
@favvy_Okwansđź–¤.
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