Psalm 56:8 New Living Translation (NLT)
You keep track of all my sorrows.[a]
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.
God is the one who made you from His desire to love and show compassion. His image dwells in the mothers hand soothing the furor of a child’s feverish brow. God measures sorrow keeping tears as tribute to His love for you. Can you hear His humor in the toothless grin of a baby’s belly laugh? He knit your dna with tenderness . He saw your flaws, blurry eyesight, and the back of your head bald spot. He likes you. You were His first love. He will be your final hope. Nothing in space can separate you from His compassionate presence; not time, distance, not death. Nothing. You bear His image within you. He loves the image. You are not animal. Like a grandparent enthralled by the grandchild he will not let you go. Leaving you is impossible for God. Whether the soccer game or the stalag, He is aware and brings compassion to your pain. St. Augustine once said, “Love means, I want you to be.” This is the tenderness of God for you.
The image of God is the sense you experience with a yellow sunset behind orange clouds, the mesmerizing hypnosis of a warm crackling beach bonfire. All is well when connected to the image of God. The imago both spiritual and physical can be sensed in loving without condition, brokered peace between nations, and in the delightful faces of children and their image in our grandchildren.
The American biologist O.E. Wilson wrote of biophilia, love of the living world. He believed we are genetically connected to nature and require its connection for our health. God loves the Creation, Nature bears His loving image and “our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, and hope rises on its currents.” (Ling, p. 14)
Jonathon Edwards considered to be America’s theologian crafted a beautiful anthology of the 18th Century New England Great Awakening. He rode his horse in nature daily after studying for 13 hours connecting nature and theology. Edwards believed that the world was a theater mirroring back to God beauty and intimacy. The world is God’s Theater of His Glory. (Zakai, p. 18)
Nature is not God. Man is not God. Nature bears the image of God and can assist to connect us to His beauty and balance. Nature is not random, it is a complex of ecosystems of healthy inter dependency.
The image is balance. Nature is balance. The universe exists in balance. We must balance.
Our mission on this planet is to live in wholeness; showing compassion to whom and what God loves.
For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;
For the choir director; on the Gittith. A Psalm of David. O LORD, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth, Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
And the heavens declare His righteousness, For God Himself is judge. Selah.
The heavens will praise Your wonders, O LORD; Your faithfulness also in the assembly of the holy ones.
The heavens declare His righteousness, And all the peoples have seen His glory.
All Your works shall give thanks to You, O LORD, And Your godly ones shall bless You.
Genesis 1:26
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26-27
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Genesis 5:1-2
This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created.
For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man.
Genesis 9:6
“Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.
James 3:9
With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God;
Psalm 8:3-8
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained; What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty! read more.
Matthew 5:48
“Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Deuteronomy 10:17-19
“For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. “He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. “So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
Romans 3:23
…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
Genesis 3:17-19
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
Philippians 2:6
who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
Corinthians 4:4
in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
Hebrews 1:3
And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
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