We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
Yes, each of us is in the image of God, and as there is only one of Him, there's only one of each of us.
Yes, I know the Divine Nature is a Triad, but then, we are too. In fact, the deeper our experience of God becomes, the more we know ourselves, and see how we are potentially perfect copies of His nature—that is, when we allow Him to finish creating us, with our cooperation—that is synergy in its theological meaning. That's why the same rules simply do not apply to all or in every situation.
Law is a placeholder for love until love appears, and then love can be trusted to be our guide, and ceases being a feeling, a sentiment, an ideal—it becomes... a Person!
Yes, He!
Yes, the Living God who in Christ has joined us to Himself, and shown us how unique, and how loved, each of us is.
Scripture does not exaggerate when it calls all of us ‘first-born sons and citizens of heaven’ (Hebrews 12:23 Jerusalem Bible). That means women as well as men, of course, because the writer of the letter to the Hebrews (some say it was the apostle Apollos) just wants us to know that each of us, regardless of our sex, age, race or any personal characteristic, is as important and loved by God as much as a first-born son is by his father and mother.
We are ‘the apple of His eye,’ and there are so many of us!
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