Perfect Word Pictures Reveal a Perfect God: How to Forever Think Differently About What We See Before Us!

By Richard G. Starshak

Is it really possible to look out at everything in front of us, all the visuals, images and word pictures, in fact, all of creation, and still miss the main point? Are we missing what God is shouting out to us to see? Are we missing so much of a perfectly designed universe, filled with multitudes of pictures and images right before us, as we hurry through life? Herein lies a much deeper discovery of how much God has laid before us, in declaring who He is, what He is doing through His perfect creation, through His own figurative language, and through an unlimited amount of visual images specifically revealing a God who wants to be known ... and how we are to respond to it all!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664278554

Richard G. Starshak

Although operating a family garden center by trade, Rich has his passions in reaching out and being active in his local community. His involvement includes youth outings, basketball outreaches, coffee houses, music groups, and neighborhood improvements. At their family garden center, they offer visitors a colorful walk through their nearly one acre display gardens, as well as providing free landscape designs to anyone, design workshops, and kid’s activities daily as part of their community outreach. Rich has also published “Perfect Design Using Math and Geometry to Build Great Landscape Designs!” which brings a whole new way to look at visual design!

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Copyright © 2022 Richard G. Starshak.

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and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from The New American

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-7856-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7855-4 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 12/12/2022

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One Building Meaning Through Word Pictures and Images

Chapter Two Speaking A Different Language

Using Figurative Language

Chapter Three Five Basic Tenets

1. It’s All About God

2. God Created Us Not to be Uninformed, Irrelevant, and Unwise, Without Direction, Hope, or Understanding

3. God Desires to Deeply Reveal Himself to Us

4. God’s Revelation is Described in Human Terms, Using Everything That is Given by Him, to be Seen by Us

5. God Commands and Compels Us to Know Him In Every Way Possible

Chapter Four God’s Perfect Plan

God’s Call … For Our Attention

God’s Call … To See His Works

God’s Call … To See His Pictures

God’s Call … To Acquire Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom

God’s Call … To Love

Chapter Five How God Continually Speaks To Us

God’s Dimensional Creation

God’s Pictures in the Natural World

God’s Pictures in Our World

God’s Pictures in Life and Death

We don’t live to sleep, we sleep to live!

God Speaks to Us in the Scriptures

Six Seven Word Pictures in Scripture

1. The Natural World

2. Things of the World

3. Positions in Life

4. Authority and Headship

5. Conflict

6. Money

7. Choices

Chapter Seven God’s Name in Word Picture

The Old Testament

The New Testament

Chapter Eight Proverbs … Practical Pictures

Chapter Nine Parables … Personal Pictures

Chapter Ten Prophecy … Predictive Pictures

Chapter Eleven Pictures of Grace, Mercy, and Blessings

Grace

Mercy

Blessings

Chapter Twelve Picture the Change in Me!

See It!

Engage It!

Use It!

What’s in it for me?

What’s me in it for you?

DEDICATION

This is so written and given to anyone who is simply looking about and wondering if there is more to life than what you might be seeing. Are there things you are observing but not perceiving? Are you missing something that you are seeing but not fully understanding or comprehending? Are you living life but missing God? This is written especially for you as an easy read, but also with the depth to challenge everything you see and sense before you, in every moment, of every day going forward! Enjoy the challenge in the words, pictures, and images that you are about to encounter!

PREFACE

Not a single man or woman has ever looked out upon our world and not grasped the uniqueness, the beauty, the awesomeness, or the intricacies of it all! Have you ever seen a sunset that leaves you speechless? Have you looked up to see the tops of the trees way up there, a mountaintop in the fog, or a spectacular cloud formation?

Is there a time when you saw the approaching storm clouds, saw the display of lightening, and maybe even trembled a bit at the sound of thunder? Do you remember the snowfalls you played in as a child, or maybe the blizzard you endured one particular winter? Do you recall the first days of spring, ballgames, swimming, birthdays, graduations, or weddings?

On a bigger scale, have we all not pondered over the size of the universe or how it got there, how gravity works, when was the beginning of time, how small is the tiniest particle, or how does life know how to live? Have we not considered how complex the human body is? How can it all work together? We live. We breathe. We move and talk. Our hearts beat steadily for 80 to 100 years. In all this, we think, reason, contemplate, communicate, draw, design, and create things. We have purpose. We grow, love, encourage one another, protect, and nurture. We also feel for those who need help. We give things away. We work and relax. We can also be mean, self-centered, and proud. We are truly the most unique of all living things!

Who among us has not asked, Is there a god? Or who among us has gone further to ask How can there not be a god?

This book is written to all those who have the thirst and desire to look at the world around them and acknowledge that there must be something more, a bigger picture to all of this, a purpose that encompasses the entire meaning of life if I only had the eyes to see what is really going on! Are we truly seeing and grasping a bigger picture that captures the meaning of it all, a picture that surrounds us each and every day?

Whether you come from outside the realm of a deity, or maybe from the standpoint of an acknowledgement of a higher power or some kind of great designer, or maybe you are one who both acknowledges and affirms that a God Almighty set this all before you, this book will speak to you.

I assure you that this will arouse the curious, the wanderer, the seeker, and all of you in between who desire to see God and His revelations afresh, with a deeper, fuller, more overflowing, more descriptive, more meaningful, and more exhausting set of eyes than ever before. And if you are considering who such a God might be, how could such a One not be so insightful, wise, and powerful to establish Himself before us, that in every way imaginable, we see His attributes being continually revealed in a way that we can understand? Not as God would understand, but as we would understand in human form? Is it possible that we are missing something that seems inconceivable to miss?

Yet, what if every last thing was actually designed, and thusly created with us in mind, to reflect a bigger picture or deeper truth? Could a God who put it all in motion from the beginning possess that kind of ingenuity and power to have actually taken every piece of the creation into consideration? Has He created us people, with all our attributes and endeavors, to reflect a world of Himself? And to make sure we get it, has He assigned some to write out words that match what we are seeing of Him, most visually, all around us? Are these words built upon those very images we see every day that pass through each of our lives?

If God has such arrayed His glory before us, in an unimaginable array of things, objects, pieces of nature, light and dark, mountains and valleys, animals, gardens, kings and queens, and an endless parade of visual images from morning till night, is it too much to acknowledge, even with casual observation, of His extraordinary entity, that it is all here for a higher purpose? That everything is set in its proper place? Is not one piece is a mistake? Can anything be missing?

If God has indeed laid out both a perfect physical world, and a set of perfectly descriptive words, then God has indeed established a definitive way that He can communicate to us in our own human terms. If He speaks of glory, He can use the mountains. If He speaks of suffering, He can choose the valleys. If He alludes to authority, He can show forth a king, or He can choose a servant to depict service, obedience, and humility. We build our house on the solid rock and not on sinking sand. We work through the storms of life. We walk the winding road and enter through a narrow gate. We need our daily bread to nourish our spirits as we look for a lamp to light our path. We sow good and truthful words to yield a harvest later. There are open doors and walls to scale and bridges to unite. We invest now for a better return later. We look for windows of opportunity.

We see such big things described in even daily occurrences and happenstance. How would we even come close to picturing entering into His house someday (as we discuss deeper in Chapter Five), if it were not for the entering into the myriad of houses that we do over our own lifetimes? Some are of humble means, others moderately decorated, and some (if only in magazine pictures) of beauty, glamour, royalty and richness. We can only picture His house someday because we can picture our houses today! We have the images now to imagine later.

Each of us experience a multitude of images every day, as we clothe ourselves with things, redeem valuable things, purchase necessities, inherit good things in due time, and sacrifice any number of things now for something better in the future. Does He not showcase His power in the lightening and thunder and His vastness through the oceans? Do our courts reflect His courts? Do not our images of justice come from somewhere? Is it not a reflection of His justice?

Does He not give us the description of Himself as the good shepherd? Who established both the lion and the lamb and set in place their natures of both the king of beasts and the gentlest of animals? And how can one individual possess both of these natures together in perfect form? Are all of these animals just a chance outcome of a random design brought about by enough time, or are they all so designed to be used to illustrate and communicate particular visual references of deeper truths?

We also have a history of the world of royalty, showcasing kings and kingdoms over many millennium of time. So, as the king’s subjects well know, it is their own lives that may be required to be given up for the will and sake of the king. This is a great image of power, authority, and loyalty. However, in God’s kingdom, in stark contrast, it is the king who lays down His life for His subjects, and such subjects that He deeply loves, as we see pictures of such irony in so many facets of life. If it were not for the nations and kingdoms of our physical earth, how would we have the basis to contrast His kingdom to ours?

Let us set out to explore a most fascinating creation, beyond what most of us may have considered, that of a created world held together by an invisible hand and revealed through an overwhelming and inexhaustible number of word pictures and images that surround us, encompass us, and never leaves us. Let us look at a world of word pictures, and all their accompanying images, that reveal a perfectly intended revelation of a most perfect God!

ONE

Building Meaning Through

Word Pictures and Images

The best teachers are the best story tellers. Why is this so true? This is because the person who coined this little phrase understands that it is not words, but images (from the words the we read or hear), that teach. It is the images that the words create that give the words themselves their meaning, understanding, comprehension, retention, and emotion. Words are but a way to insert images into our minds so that our minds can digest them and thusly glean the message intended for us as accurately as possible.

Who hasn’t sat before a speaker, and at some point, begun to daydream and wander off a bit? Then, at just the right moment, the speaker might say something like Let me tell you about the time this happened to me. Or they might simply interject You probably won’t believe this, but… and they have immediately grabbed our attention. Wait! What just happened? How can my brain be so far away, then instantly be drawn back into the lesson? What else? It is the imagery generated within the story! Even the