Humans
... Reflect God’s Hierarchical Design, Like Other Aspects of His Creation
God’s creation has a fascinating fractal design. That is, smaller parts reflect the pattern or shape of larger parts in hierarchical order. A twig looks like a branch looks like a tree. A puddle looks like a pond looks like an ocean. Atoms look like solar systems look like galaxies. A parent looks like a principal looks like a president. Families look like communities look like nations. Hierarchies abound, the smaller parts adding up to a larger whole that looks and behaves like the smaller parts comprising the whole. A chain is only as strong as its links, indeed its weakest link if one uses the whole chain. A nation is only as moral and virtuous as its citizens. A justice system is only as just as it treats its weakest members. The design and integrity of the large depends on the design and integrity of the small, while the small also depends on the large.
God’s fractal, hierarchical order appears not just in the material and social worlds but in the spiritual realm, too. Idolatrous individuals make up an idolatrous nation. When one family worships Baal and another worships Molech, or in modern parlance when one family worships pleasure and leisure while another family worships power, influence, and security, the families together comprise a pagan community. God concerned himself with so few as one Israelite’s idolatry. Israel’s history proved that the idolatry of one soon became the idolatry of hundreds or thousands.
But God’s fractal, hierarchical order goes even further and deeper into the spiritual realm. God himself is both unseen and seen, unseen and unseeable as the Father while also seen and even touchable as the Son. God is both incorporeal and incarnate, both without and with body. Likewise, God made creation both heaven and earth, divine and natural, design and design’s expression, unseen and seen. And God made us both incorporeal soul or spirit and corporeal flesh. We have the nature of God, the Bible calling us his image. We also have something of the nature of God’s creation, as both material and immaterial, knowable and unknown. We are each God’s temple, even as the heavens and earth are likewise the abode of God.
