Study 16: All the earth shall be filled

Do we know what a human person really is? The common excuse, ‘I'm only human', is a put down. To be ‘only human' is a glorious thing—a creature of great dignity and nobility—we are made in the image of God! That means we are related to God—we take after Him. We are to be holy as God is holy. We are to rule like God rules.
Yet we ourselves are not God—though we have tried to act as if we were. Shakespeare's Hamlet extolled the human race: ‘What a piece of work is a man!' But he also had good reason to say: ‘And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.' We have exchanged God's glory for images of our own making, and then we have demeaned ourselves by becoming like them.
Where can we now find a human being who is true to the way we are meant to be? Those who knew Jesus said: At last—‘He is the image of the invisible God'! And they knew that from before the foundation of the world we were destined by God to be conformed to his image. Through faith in Jesus, crucified and risen, our old self is stripped off, and we have clothed ourselves with a new self that is being renewed day by day in the image of our Creator.