Created For My Glory

¹“Even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” (Isaiah 43:7). On each of the first five days of creation, after God had placed dazzling lights in the heavens and shaped majestic mountains and awesome oceans and arrayed the lilies of the field in all of their splendor, when He was finished with these breathtaking creations He looked on what He had made and saw that it was good. But when He had created Adam and Eve on the sixth day, He saw that these ultimate creations were not just good but very good. With our imperfect vision and our limited perspective, we sometimes decide that certain of our features or attributes are flawed, ugly, defective mistakes. We become ashamed of who we are. We assume that God must have been a little rushed or a little absent minded when He worked on us. Whether we are thinking of our looks or our personalities or our mental or physical health or are propensities towards certain activities or our aversions towards others, when we add it all up it seems to us that God must be embarrassed to claim us as His creations. This is a lie. First of all, every single person on this Earth is God's child. Each of us has a divine origin and a divine destiny. But more than that, God created each of us for His glory. He didn't create us on a whim, or to meet a quota, or as a failed experiment that He decided to just keep anyway. If the Mona Lisa were destroyed and the Louvre had to pick one work of art to replace the most famous painting in the world, God would offer up any one of us for that honor - and He would talk all of our ears off on why this is one of His absolute best works. He is so unbelievably proud at how each one of us has turned out and He's getting prouder all of the time at how much more wonderful we are becoming every single day. Yes, all of us have flaws and weaknesses and sins that easily beset us. But God did not create any of us to be the weird, ugly creation that He hides away in the basement. We were each created for God's glory. If none of us would ever dream of denigrating God’s glory, then I hope that also means that we will never participate in dishonoring ourselves or each other.