A vital theme running throughout the Bible is the importance of man to God. Both Old and New Testaments declare again and again that God is the divine, infinite, and only creator, all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing, and eternal. But they also tell us that God made man in His likeness to bear witness to His glorious nature. They affirm that God gave man dominion and eternally loves him most tenderly. They reiterate that God maintains man's identity, supplies him with all good, and rejoices over him with a joy that even surpasses that of the most devoted human parents for their children.
Today Christian Science takes up this theme: that God is All-in-all, to be acknowledged as supreme, and man is invaluable to God—even indispensable to Him—as His expression. It teaches that God is the divine, universal, omnipotent Father, eternal Life or Principle, and He can never be without His expression, spiritual man. Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health: "God, without the image and likeness of Himself, would be a nonentity, or Mind unexpressed. He would be without a witness or proof of His own nature. Spiritual man is the image or idea of God, an idea which cannot be lost nor separated from its divine Principle."Science and Health, p. 303; Science explains that God does not allow a single individual to be harmed, destroyed, or separated from Him, but sustains them all forever as perpetual witnesses to His own perfect being.
This was the thought Christ Jesus once expressed in simple terms to "an innumerable multitude of people"—a crowd that, according to the Gospel of Luke, was so vast that they were treading on each other. Showing them their great importance to God and how God loved them all, Jesus said, "The very hairs of your head are all numbered."Luke 12:7; This was a message of assurance and hope to these people, who lived in a land occupied by Roman legions, where the average individual did not seem of much importance. And it surely is for us today when it is sometimes hard to see how a single individual could have much value among the world's four billion people.
