Article February 10, 1997 Issue

Seeing others as God's child

Elaine Kay Lang

Have you ever found yourself misrepresented by association with a stereotype based on gender, marital status, age, race, physique, handicap, income level, parentage, or religion? Most of us have been categorized as part of one group or another, only to find all sorts of assumptions being made about how that group, or "they," think, act, or feel. Yet the individual you truly are is infinitely better and more valuable than any stereotype could ever represent.

There is a scientifically Christian basis for removing stereotyped impressions from our thinking. It rests on the understanding that God's man, His spiritual likeness, deserves to be seen and known for the spiritual qualities he embodies. We can choose, as Christ Jesus did, to replace the limited, physical, flawed, sick, and sinful picture of any individual or group with the spiritual facts of God's idea, man. What's more, this recognition of each individual's true, spiritual nature heals.

This higher, accurate view of man acknowledges the way God created him—spiritual, whole, intelligent, responsive to good, caring, orderly, disciplined, progressive, tireless, healthy, principled. In fact, every lovely quality of the Father's nature is expressed by His idea, man. More than wishful thinking, the understanding of man's spiritual identity has the power of God behind it. Spiritual, right knowing helps dispel the illusion of material existence by confronting the false belief in it with the truth of God's creation, of man made in the divine likeness. Authority for the fact that God made man wholly good is found in abundance in the Bible. One such verse from Ecclesiastes states, "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" (7:29). While affirming the pure and perfect nature of God's idea, man, this verse also explains anything unlike God to be an "invention," lacking authorization from the one divine creator. On this basis, we can deny the reality of ungodlike traits and actions by understanding that they lack foundation, that they have no grounding in God's creation.

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