Celebrating God's Handiwork - The Essence of Self-Acceptance - Part IV

Celebrating God’s Handiwork - The Essence of Self-Acceptance – Part IV

Periods of pain and darkness resemble the intermission period of a play.  Darkness falls on the stage; the lights go out and the curtains are drawn.  The audience eerily waits for the next scene.  The darkness causes wholesale anxiety and possibly some expectation.  However, behind the curtain a lot of activity occurs.  The stage crew is busily rearranging the setting for the next scene.  So, it is with the periods of intermission in our lives.  God orchestrates His “good, pleasing and perfect” will during those times. He brings together all of the details to spur us toward further interpersonal development and spiritual growth.

The times when dawn seems to delay are most necessary in the life of the believer.  Indeed, “pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress.”  Without it, we cannot realistically expect to obtain any measure of spiritual growth.  Recently, I learned of a person who has no feeling in her right foot.  Pleasantly, she cannot feel any pain.  Unfortunately, she had injured her foot unawares and proceeded to walk and go about life without knowing it.  In time, an infection ensued and she nearly lost her foot.  Whereas her inability to feel pain appears to be a blessing, it has a greater potential to cause very serious problems.  I thought about the spiritual applications of her physical predicament.  Without periods of pain and darkness, we lack catalysts for change and mile markers on the road of spirituality.  Thus, I hope that we will learn to embrace fully these difficult challenges, knowing that God providentially embeds the resolutions within the adversities.

As it relates to the main theme of self-acceptance, the thirteenth through the sixteenth verses are the heart of the Psalm 139.  These verses totally overwhelm the psalmist!  First, he accepts that the Lord of universe, the Creator of heaven and earth, made him in His image.  God creates the psalmist’s “inmost being.”  The psalmist acknowledges that he is a spiritual being first and foremost.  Mysteriously and majestically, God creates the psalmist in his mother’s womb.  Actually, the he says that God “knit me together.”  In observing the knitting of a sweater for one of my children, I noted that the plans and designs were crucial to the outcome.  I also recognized that time and meticulous attention is essential to a successful outcome.  Likewise, Almighty God created us with a plan in mind for us.  Although He is Lord of the universe, He painstakingly utilized His creative abilities in making every one of us.  Even though there are more than six billion of us in the world, not one of us is the same.

I marvel at the fact that anyone would seriously conclude that he or she evolved from an ape that evolved from a prior specimen which evolved originally from an amoeba in the water.  The orthodoxy of science and the theory of evolution demands that one believes that one resulted from the good fortune of chaos, the actual collision and explosion of matter at the dawn of the universe.  Tens of billions of years later, the evolutionary processes yielded humankind as we currently exist.  In forceful contradistinction, the psalmist determines that his origins start with the Lord of the universe.  He is God’s handiwork!  Imagine the wholesale change in society if each person genuinely believes that he or she is a child of God with a divinely ordained birth and purpose in life.  Again, the psalmist’s reference to knitting alludes to God’s intelligent design in the creation of the universe as well as each member of the human family.

He offers praise to Almighty God because he is “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  His creation is as majestic and mysterious as any of the wonders of nature.  It is as magnificent as any of the stars or solar systems.  It defies explanation.  It requires a lifetime of study and research to begin to comprehend God’s design in creating us in His image.  Yet, we face the difficulty of believing this word, the word of the Lord.  Do we believe it?  Again, I ask, “Do you believe it?”  I suspect that a lot of the aimlessness and brokenness that we observe in many people stem from their inability to believe that they have a divine heritage.  Most people probably do not see themselves as created in the image of Almighty God.  They do not realize that God, from the foundation of the universe, had them in mind.  That He chose to create them and put within them a divine spark of creativity and ingenuity.