If a random person on the street walked up to you and asked, “Who are you? Tell me about yourself,” how would you describe yourself? Usually we think of identifiers like: name, characteristics, where we live, church we attend, our job, what high school we attended, maybe our political leanings, even who we’re related to. Lately it seems that many want to identify themselves by what they like, or what they desire to be.Maybe it’s time we shift our perspective on this. What if who we are is more than what I think I am at any given moment? What would happen if we all acknowledged we have a Creator who loves and cares about us? What if we stopped trying to define ourselves and look to how God perceives us.I think maybe David was thinking about who he was and how to define himself when he wrote Psalm 8. Perhaps as a lad when he was tending the family’s sheep, after gathering the sheep into the pen at night, he laid down at the gate. Staring up at the sky, he begins to marvel at the grandeur of creation. But then he gets struck by the thought–what is man? We are so small in comparison. Compared with the beauty of the sky and earth, humans are rather insignificant. Yet, God is mindful of us, He cares for us–why?He continued to say that God made people just a little lower than the heavenly beings and made all creation (Ps. 8:58). All that is left to say is, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (vs 9).Perhaps David pondered on the creation in Genesis 1, where it says, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27).What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Our first thought is visual, that we look like Him. But that’s not the idea here. First of all, we don’t all look the same. So being in God’s image is not physical, but deeper than that. We were created to think, to reason, to choose a course of action. But more than that. We were created with an eternal nature.God created everything by just speaking the word—except for man. Instead of speaking us into existence, he formed us from dirt, and then ...
