This video is doing the rounds at the moment. If you're of the female persuasion, I'm very interested in what you think of it. Christian or non-Christian, though it seems targeted at Christian lasses.I'd be more than happy if you watched it and maybe wrote some thoughts in the comments before reading my couple of bread-crumbs. It'd be great to understand your initial response.
My thoughts?
Well, women are totally awesome creations. You're made as the final piece of the jig-saw puzzle, co-pinnacle of creation. You've been given the role as the image-bearers of the triune God to the rest of creation, ruling it as God's stewards. As psalm 8 would say it, you're made just a little lower than elohim (God or the gods). So personally, I've got a lot of time for a lot of the things old mate says. I like how he's trying to combat false self-image with truth.
But as he goes on, he starts messing up the truth part. He might be trying to be nice, but he's actually messing things up for women everywhere. He'll mess up your whole sense of value if you go with this. Seriously. Because he makes out that your value is something that's independent from God.
And that's something I care about.
The brooding "I wish you could see how amazing you are" bloke in the video gets the cart before the horse. He says that God looked at women and saw something worth dying for. It goes the other way around.
God made women to be of amazing value. It is God's generous gift that you are such. This is why the same psalm 8 that says you're a smidge short of divinity itself also asks:
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?Your value isn't something that flows from you and God recognises. Uh uh. It's something that flows from God and you get to be thankful for. It is a humbling self-esteem boost. A value that flows from relationship rather than an independent declaration of 'inherent' value.
And it's this, of course, that means that the great psalm talking about the glory and splendour of humanity both starts and ends with:
Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!You just won't praise God from the heart like that unless your glory and splendour is bestowed, rather proved or earned. (Bonus Mini-crumb) This is just basic human value. Without even taking into account sin messing us up, our value flows from the grace of God. Now I'd love to go into how that works for the post-fall humanity and how the gospel is where we find our value (ie, in Christ), but I think it'd be too long and you'd stop reading, so I'll just give an example of it.
If I was as attractive as the dude in the vid (is he, by the way? I've been wondering) I'd make a similar video.
I'd look moodily into the camera, and try to get you to believe that God loves you. Not for who you are, but as you are. That you're a treasure because you're treasured by Him. I'd try to get that false idea out of your head that God couldn't possibly really love you because you're convinced you're not loveable.
Or maybe I shouldn't. God probably says it better. And because response videos copying the style of the original are lame.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by his favour you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might express the incomparable riches of his favour, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. (Eph 2:5-7)He has set his love upon you, and that makes you valuable. In a way nothing else can. And he's inviting every woman on this planet to experience that love.
At time of writing the video has 191,870 shares on Facebook.