“every life matters … because we’re made by God in his image”
We’ve all seen the ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘All Lives Matter’, ‘White Lives Matter’ slogans – even movements – that have sprung up recently. Some of this is proving to be a force for good, but some of it seems to merely inflame existing, and deep-rooted tensions.
Rather than enter these debates for now, I wanted to take a step back and ask: why does any life matter? And to whom does it matter? When we claim that a life ‘matters’, any life, what assumptions are we making?
And assumptions are probably a good starting point. 
We make assumptions based on our ‘worldview’, the way we address the big questions such as ‘who am I’ ‘where did we, and everything else come from’, ‘where’s it all going’, and so on.We have to have a worldview to be able to live in the world, but that doesn’t mean we’ve necessarily thought it out. Very often we just absorb one from maybe our parents, our friends, or the media.
Whether we have or haven’t thought it out though, a worldview is a belief, a ‘view’. In other words, something that takes faith. 
Paul in Athens
There’s an account in Acts 17, of when Paul was in Athens. As he walked around he saw a city full of idols. They loved to collect new ideas – so much that they even had an altar dedicated to an unknown god – just in case they’d missed one!
While we might mock the idea of worshipping stone statues, it’s interesting how our bronze statues have stirred up strong feelings. But I wonder just how different the idea of the various different worldviews that are all around us today is from that collection of idols in Athens?
Paul was disturbed by what he saw, and started debating with the Jews and ‘devout people’. But eventually he was asked to speak at a place call the Areopagus (or Mars Hill). Kind of “let’s all hear what you have to say”. Look at what he did say:

Acts 17:22-31
There’s a lot in that passage, but I want to highlight just a few phrases that are relevant to the question of ‘Whose lives matter?’.
Firstly the “God who made ..everything”. Acts 17:24To make something, you can’t be part of it. So it’s important to understand that God is not ‘made’. He ‘is’ and always has been (which is the meaning behind his name of YHWH – ‘I am’).
Secondly “He made from one man every nation of mankind“. Acts 17:26The early chapters of Genesis describe how (amongst other things!) God made a man from the dust of the earth. Not from another animal, but the earth. From that man, he made a woman. And from that first couple, every human being who ever lived is descended. And ‘mankind’ (male and female) is uniquely declared to be ‘in the image of God’. 
One Family
Simple but profound. We’re all related – one human family – without distinction. And we’re all made in the image of God, which gives every person equal dignity and value of the highest order.
This is the Christian, Biblical, worldview. The consequence is that every life matters, primarily because we’re made by God in his image. So if a person or group feel that their lives don’t matter, or are treated as if their lives don’t matter, then something is seriously wrong.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was explaining who a ‘neighbour’ is. He makes the hero of the story a Samaritan, someone from a race who were hated by the Jews. Raw racial prejudice. But the point of the story was to illustrate God’s command to ‘love your neighbour’, and that included enemies – in this case cultural ones.
I said earlier this was simple. Of course it isn’t that simple, but the Biblical worldview does explain what we see. It covers the different races by describing the sudden dispersion of families at Babel caused by God separating people with different languages.
Going back earlier in history, there’s the account of Adam and Eve disobeying God and bringing death and suffering into the world – which includes the whole human race.
But the Bible also describes a God who is loving his enemies, and providing a means to undo and reverse the effects of that Fall.
Which culminates in the person of Jesus. The one man not descended from Adam, so not affected by the Fall. But who came in order to both live and die for us, so that he might become our ‘new Adam’, or new representative to reconcile us with God.
Back to Athens
Back to Acts 17, and Paul brings his presentation to a close by saying how God ‘commands all people everywhere to repent’ Acts 17:30That’s everyone – we’re all under judgement, and all commanded to repent. But the point here is that there is no distinction. Repentance has to do with turning – turning from our old ways and turning to God. The fact there is a command implies a (good!) consequence for those who do repent. The consequence is forgiveness and eternal life: John 3:16 and John 5:24The proof of this (and so the validation of the Biblical worldview) is in the resurrection of Jesus. Historical, verifiable fact. Which makes acceptance of the Biblical worldview entirely rational.
And so it follows that any other worldview is not only incorrect and irrational, it is also idolatry.
But there’s more – in the book of Revelation there’s a description of who’s going to be in heaven.Look at Revelation 7:9-12There’s going to be people there “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages”
So every life matters – a great deal. And every life matters to God. That fact should provide us with great comfort and security. But just as God is pro-active in our salvation (Revelation 7 again “Salvation belongs to our God”) so we should use our position of security to be proactive in reaching out to the lost, proclaiming our worldview and encouraging people to be reconciled with God and enjoy their full dignity before him. Our relationship with God is intimately tied up with our relationships with others, so reconciliation with God may well involve reconciliation with others – in turn involving repentance and forgiveness.
Because we have a solid basis for doing so.