IMAGE

Origin (184-253), early Christian scholar, interrupted the Socratic precept, ‘Know thyself,’ as meaning for the Christian in effect: ‘Know your own dignity and worth, know yourself created in God’s image. The object of His love; and only then go on to recognize how much that image is defaced in you and so co-operate with God in getting it restored.’ This is indeed our rational course. We must take all the facts about ourselves into account. We should especially remember that we lived in Adam in his potential perfection, before his fall involved us in his death.

To this day everything cries out for the ultimate reign of God, for the kingdom to come. What is of ultimate importance is that we know well the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who ‘bring’ the kingdom to us. If we know only ourselves and our sins and problems without even knowing, and in a greater way, the God of the Kingdom of God, we will know evil better than we know good. Little is said in scriptures about the origin of evil, it is just present, in animal form in the garden and was in existence before man and was present with man, before the ‘it’ got inside him. Even if the story is myth, it does not take away from the fact that since time has been known evil exists. If it started in the garden or did not, evil exists. God on the other hand is no more spontaneous to tell us of His origin but is obvious in display of His love and character to be opposite of evil. We can know the maximum of our potential is to ‘be in His image’ and the maximum of defect is to the degree we have image of evil.

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female…” Jesus