In many cases, the spiritual meaning of "own," both as a verb and as an adjective, is relatively literal. When people are described as the "Lord's own," however, it specifically means those people who know Him and have His Word. This has taken various forms since the dawn of humanity; in the prehistoric church known as the "Most Ancient Church" the Lord's truth -- the direct expression of His love -- flowed into people directly. In the Ancient Church the Lord's Word was recognized in nature and in the form of deeply representative stories, some of which were passed on to us in the early chapters of Genesis. Among the Children of Israel the Lord's Word was expressed through the Ten Commandments, the laws of Moses, the very history of the nation of Israel and the various psalms and prophecies. The early Christians had those stories along with the teaching and inspiration of Jesus himself. We now have the whole Bible, including the teachings of Jesus, and can understand the Bible's true meaning. Each of these churches, then, was at some point the Lord's own.

18. Anyone can come to an inner assurance about the presence of infinite things in God--anyone, that is, who believes that God is a person; because if God is a person, he has a body and everything that having a body entails. So he has a face, torso, abdomen, upper legs, and lower legs, since without these he would not be a person. Since he has these components, he also has eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue. He also has what we find within a person, such as a heart and lungs and the things that depend on them, all of which, taken together, make us human. We are created with these many components, and if we consider them in their interconnections, they are beyond counting. In the Divine-Human One, though, they are infinite. Nothing is lacking, so he has an infinite completeness.

We can make this comparison of the uncreated Person, who is God, with us who are created, because that God is a person. It is because of him that we earthly beings are said to have been created in his image and in his likeness (Genesis 1:26-27).