I want to talk about the image of God in this world. Scott who wrote Issues facing Christians today brought some powerful thing about the image of God. He wrote that the biblical revelation reminds us that human beings are not self-explanatory.

We derive the meaning from outside themselves, from God in whose image they are made

Now this is very significant essentially, that really just puts human beings into the right pedestal so that we don’t exalt ourselves as if we are god in this world living in self-denial that there’s a higher power we call the sacred power in this cosmos, caused by the enlightenment. During which Reiff and Freud and the Rousseau and all these folks abandoned the sacred order, and put ourselves in charge all the universe. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe). They have forgotten completely that we derive our meaning from outside ourselves, not from within ourselves. That’s when exactly the modern contemporary cultures teaching that we just need to be authentic to restore our dignity to find our dignity by looking inwards to find our authentic self. They forgot that we did not derive our image, our meaning of who we, from within but we got it from God in whose image we were made. Like Scott said we are not autonomous individuals, creating ourselves constantly by the decisions and choices we make.

No, we are images, we are reflections

Now we are mere images we are not the thing we are not god! Can you imagine we images trying to say to the creator God that “we find our authentic self within ourselves not in your image?” That is completely laughable, in fact it’s not even funny anymore, because this is precisely what the world is doing heading towards ,causing millions and millions of millennial generations totally alienated from the image of God. They can’t find themselves anymore.

The dignity of a human humanity is derivative

That’s the important word. We derive our dignity from our created God in whose image we were made in. In other words our dignity is derived from God. Our dignity did not come from our authentic self deep within, it comes from him whose image we bear. We are dependent beings.