Identity as a Reflection of God’s Glory
Who am I really? Do I have a purpose? Is it okay to even ask these questions?
The Radiance exhibit at the Creation Museum is an inspiring walk through the answers that God’s design for our identity provides. Every person God created has immeasurable worth and a unique way of fulfilling his purpose for them.
If you feel like your identity doesn’t fit neatly inside of one of the categories the world offers, there may be a good reason for that. The categories we are offered by mainstream philosophy, media, and influencers are often focused on just one small part of who we are as a whole. And in many cases, those pieces of our identity are further confused by the brokenness of our sinful world.
Only God’s complete and carefully crafted design makes sense of all the aspects of who we were meant to be.
How Can I Be Radiant?
Being created by God means we all have a mind-blowing purpose to accomplish: We were made to reflect the glory of the God of the universe!
This sounds amazing, right? But how do we make sense of this when some people we see in the world don’t seem very glorious—or even good.
When God created the first humans—Adam and Eve—and gave them this amazing purpose, they rejected it. They weren’t content to just reflect God. They wanted to be like gods themselves (Genesis 3:5–6). They disobeyed God’s command, and sin and death were introduced into creation.
It didn’t end with Adam and Eve either. We have all rejected God’s right to define our lives in one way or another. A lot of times, it’s as simple as choosing to define ourselves as our own greatest authority—so that what we think or want to do outweighs what God wants us to do.
Instead of shining brightly as reflections of God, we often reflect the darkness of our own sin. God’s glory is still visible in us as His works of art, but we often only reflect a weak flicker of the light we were created to.
But there’s hope!
The one person who reflected God perfectly—His Son Jesus—died to take the punishment for our rebellion and rose again from the dead to make it possible for us to be transformed back into the glorious reflections we were made to be.
When we repent of our sin and trust in the power of Jesus’s work, we can shine God’s light gloriously, even in this broken world.
What Is the Image We Were Created to Reflect?
The better we know who God is, the better we will know who we were made to be. The Radiance exhibit discusses how God’s design reveals the ultimate purpose for our identities: reflecting him. This truth is rooted in God’s creation of every human in his image (Genesis 1:26–27) and is highlighted throughout the Bible as a glorious calling of the Christian life (2 Corinthians 3:18; Matthew 5:16).
Determining who we were made to be requires learning about the God we were made to reflect. We can be thankful that God gave us the information we need in his Word so we can discover more about who he is and which of his qualities we are capable of reflecting.
Read MoreAdditional Content
We created these videos to supplement guests’ experiences in the Radiance exhibit and to cover some common questions about identity in more detail.
Resources
Behind the Scenes
Making an exhibit takes a lot of prayer, planning, research, sketching, model-making, and experimentation. Check out the photos below to see a little bit of the journey.
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