We live in an age of unrealistic body image. Everything is touched up, air brushed, and edited to look perfect. One model for one of popular magazines showed her actual image compared to the cover and the cover looked so different with the eyes, lips, and other edits it wasn’t her. What is damaging is that young women made in the Image of God (Genesis 1:27) compare themselves to these doctored photos of models and beautiful artists and it can create body dysmorphia, where they see themselves as deformed and ugly, even fat when their rib cages are showing! I will not say men do not suffer from this as well, that seeing Chris Hemmingsworth, Henry Cavill, and others with the photoshop polish and six pack can make you feel as if you are subpar. Adding to this is Deep Fake technologies, and the ability to make anyone look beyond beautiful and sexy, when it is all a digital lab.
We are drawn to beauty, but the photoshop world we live in is like fast food, where our eyes are craving what is not real, like how your taste buds become addicted to excessive sugars, sodium, and fillers of fast food so that natural and normal chicken, beefs, and greens taste bland; in the same way the hyper focus on the perfect body image has distorted real beauty, so that it now is bland without all the air brushing, photoshopping, and deep faking.
Beauty does not last. Look at the great knock outs, they had there moment in the limelight and then when they no longer met the criteria for gorgeous, they were replaced. Like a cut red rose that dies, the petals peeling, so is the quest to remain looking like the unrealistic images. Scripture tells us how to ser priorities, “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” (Proverbs 31:30). Indeed how fleeting is beauty now when most of it is fake and doctored by computers! But those who reverence the Lord Jesus should be praised and treasured! You can have all the beauty, but if you are not gonna be in hereafter, and are headed for hell, what is the point? Time erodes the flesh, but the spirit is eternal, and what matters is if a person knows Jesus, not if they can imitate unrealistic and insane standards of beauty that is in actuality is a lie as models have exposed.
I have great sympathy for people bating body dysmorphia, beautiful and handsome people thinking they are ugly because they see nothing but the grotesque. I blame the industry of beauty which uses doctored photos that not even the model in the photos looks like! The whole industry is a lie, ensnaring people into believing that its unrealistic photo doctoring is true beauty. I pray that people see through the lie, and cherish that they are in the Image of God, and get help battling the lens that makes them see themselves as not measuring up, that they ask Christ to step in and show them how He sees them, a beautiful bride, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure”— for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:7-9). Amen.
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