Word of Salvation – Vol.53 No.34 – September 2008

 

Made in God’s Image

A Sermon by Rev John Haverland

Sermon 5 of 19, on Genesis 1-12

Scripture Readings: Genesis 1:26-31; Ephesians 4:17-32

 

Brothers and Sisters in Christ.

Theme: God created man in his own image and gave him the task of filling the earth and subduing it.

Purpose: To explain our relationship to God as his image bearers and our task in the world.

William Steig has written a picture book for children called Yellow and Pink . It is about two wooden figures who wake up to find themselves lying on an old newspaper in the hot sun. One figure is painted yellow, the other pink. Suddenly Yellow sits up and asks, “Do you know what we are doing here?”  No, replies Pink, “I don’t even remember getting here.”  Then these two figures begin to debate where they came from.

Pink looks over their wooden shapes and says, “Someone must have made us.”  Yellow disagrees. “No, I say we are an accident. A branch may have broken off a tree and fallen on a sharp rock, splitting one end of the branch into our two legs. The wind may have sent it tumbling down the hill and as it rolled it was chipped and shaped. Perhaps it was struck by lightning to splinter the wood into the shape of arms and fingers. Eyes may have formed by woodpeckers boring into the wood. With enough time — a 1000, a million, maybe even two million years — a lot of unusual things could happen. Why not us?”  So they argue back and forth.

In the end their discussion is cut short by a man who comes out of a house nearby. He walks over to the two figures lying on the newspaper in the sun and picks them up to check their paint. “Hmm, nice and dry.” he says, and tucks them under his arm and wanders back to the house.

Yellow peers out from under the man’s arm and whispers in Pinks ear, “Who is this guy?”  (Quoted in C Colson, How Now Shall We Live?)

That is a good question. It is related to other questions we might ask about ourselves, such as: “Who made me? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going?”  These are vital questions. Each person needs to answer them if they are to live in the world with meaning, purpose and hope.

Genesis 1 answers many of these questions. It tells us that “this Guy” (and we say this with reverence) is God the Creator. He made us, and he did so for a purpose, for a reason. He gave us a task to perform, a job to do. So today we come to look at the creation of man.

First of all we will see that GOD MADE US IN HIS IMAGE.

Having completed the creation of the world, we read in verse 26, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’.”

We notice from this that we have arrived at a very important event. The Lord God now comes to the climax of his creation and so there is recorded for the first time a consultation among the persons of the Trinity — “ Let us …”  The Father, Son and Holy Spirit confer together about the creation of man. The importance of this is emphasised by the repetition of this event in creation in verse 27.

When it says that we were made in God’s image we should not think of this as something physical. God is a Spirit and so he has no physical body or form. When Moses wanted to see God’s glory, the Lord allowed him to catch a glimpse of his splendour but Moses did not see any physical form or shape (Ex 33:12-23).

We were made in the image of God in a moral sense.

When God came to the end of all his creative work at the end of the sixth day he saw “all that he had made and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). In other words, it was perfect, there were no manufacturing defects, no faults. Everything was as he wanted it to be and there were no flaws, and that included the creation of Adam and Eve.

The Apostle Paul explained this in his letters to the Colossians and Ephesians where he wrote that we were made in true righteousness, holiness and knowledge (Eph 4:24, Col 3:10). When God first made us we were righteous and holy and we had a true knowledge of God. We were without sin.

We lost all this after Adam and Eve fell into sin, as we’ll see when we come to Chapter 3. But in the beginning we were morally perfect, in God’s image, like him.

The image of God also refers to how God made us as human beings .

God is a spirit and he made us as spiritual beings. He gave us a spirit, a soul. He made us so that we could relate to him, know him, live with him, talk to him, honour and praise him.

In the modern period many people in the Western world denied that we were spiritual beings and they put all the emphasis on the physical and on our mind. In this postmodern period more people are recognising that we are spiritual. Spirituality is a growth industry. An article on religion in a recent Canvas magazine claims, “It’s doubtful whether religion and spirituality have ever been more visible or varied.”  Yes, God made us spiritual beings, but the Bible says that he made us to know him, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (Jn 17:3).

God also made us relational . He made us male and female so we could relate to each other and to others in society. We were created for community. God made us so we could relate to him in a vertical relationship and also to others around us in horizontal relationships. God made us social beings and designed us for companionship and friendship. We need other people.

He also made us rational — that is, he gave us a mind so we could think and reason and plan and design. And he made us volitional — that is, he gave us a will so we can make decisions between one action and another. We have the capacity to make choices.

We resemble God because he is a Spirit and he has a mind and a will and he lives in relation to others, especially within the three Persons of the Trinity. We are made in his image.

This has some important implications.

It means we are not the end product of an evolutionary process. We did not crawl out of the slime billions of years ago. We are not the end product of chance mutations. No, God made Adam as a full grown living being in a deliberate creative act. We were created by God and we are like him.

Because we are all made in God’s image we must treat others as his image bearers. That isn’t easy to do, especially when you can’t see much goodness or holiness in a person or when they act more like an animal than a human being. But everyone in this world bears God’s image, whether they are beautiful or ugly, intelligent or simple, good or bad, and we must treat them as such.

James makes that very practical when he observes that, “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness… My brothers, this should not be” (Jam 3:9).

Being made in God’s image also means that we will only understand ourselves properly when we know God. One of the most important books to be written during the Reformation was “The Institutes of the Christian Religion” by John Calvin. He began the book by saying that true wisdom consists of a knowledge of God and ourselves, and that we will never understand ourselves without a true knowledge of God. That is a strong incentive to read and study the Scriptures and so seek to know God better and understand ourselves more.

Not only has God made us in his image, he has also given us A TASK . This has two parts.

Verse 28: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth…”

God made this world for us. On the first five days of creation he set it up as a place for us to live in. He gave us dry land to live on, mountains to climb, lakes to swim in, an atmosphere to breathe, gravity to keep our feet on the ground, plants to eat, and senses to be able to appreciate and take in all this beauty around us.

Some of the environmentalists almost give you the idea that people are aliens on this planet, as though the world would be better off without us. But that is a complete misunderstanding of God’s work and plan. God made this world to be inhabited. He designed it as a place for us. He wants us to live in it. This is why he told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. A lot of people think we have achieved this. There are 6 billion people on earth; that is quite enough, they say, and they warn that if we carry on as we are that the world will be over-populated.

However, in more recent times there have been concerns expressed about declining populations in many Western countries. In the developed world each woman needs to have 2.2 children to replace the present population. But many countries in Western Europe are well below that replacement rate. In years to come their populations will be old and declining and this will create enormous problems for those countries.

The fear of overpopulation is misplaced. We don’t have to worry about a lack of space because there is a vast amount of unused land in the world. Nor is the problem a lack of food because we can easily produce enough food to feed the current world population plus many more billions. For instance, each year the whole population of Rwanda could be fed on the amount of food wasted in Canada alone.

There are about 3000 edible vegetable, grain and other plants that grow on earth but we only use about 300 vegetables, about 10% of what is available. In the US, Britain, and Europe the government pays farmers not to grow certain crops, and in Canada milk and egg producers are restricted by quotas so they don’t flood the market. The problem is not a lack of food but an unequal distribution of food; and that is usually the result of human sin evident in laziness, greed, corruption and war.

God has blessed us with the ability to reproduce and he has commanded us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. This is an ongoing command that still applies to us today.

The other task God gave us is to subdue the earth and rule over it.

At present we see the world being polluted and spoilt; the earth’s resources are misused and mismanaged; trees and plants are exploited and food is wasted. All of this is the result of sin and greed and envy.

But God’s will is that we look after his world, care for it, develop it, draw out its potential and harness its resources. God wants us to drill for oil, mine for gold, dig up coal, use the rivers for power, the trees for building, the sea for salt. This is why he put so much of the world resources very close to the surface of the earth.

He wants us to write books, compose music and paint beautiful pictures. He wants us to use our minds and abilities to build bridges and construct roads and to develop smarter computers. God wants us to explore the universe, to draw maps and to study the marvels of the world, and he gave us the ability to do all this.

He also placed us as rulers over the fish and birds and living creatures; he put us in charge of them. Adam began that task of ruling over the animals when he named them, and we have continued that task since then. So we have dogs and cats in our homes, tropical fish in aquariums, birds in aviaries, lambs in the back paddock.

We also use the animals to do all sorts of tasks for us in society and in farming. We gather animals in zoos and animal parks so we can look at them and admire them. We spend time studying them and classifying all the thousands of species of bird and fish and animals. David celebrated this great task in Psalm 8: “You made him ruler over the works of your hands, you put everything under his feet.”  God also gave us all the plants and trees for food so we can live and work (vs 29). We have all we need to function effectively.

God wants us to do all this as his agents on earth. He has appointed us as caretakers of creation. We are his representatives on earth. We do this on his behalf. We are exercising his dominion on earth; we are extending his kingly rule. We are God’s partners, his co-workers. He has made us the administrators of this world. This means that we are accountable to him. We are to obey all his commands and we are to give him the praise and the glory. We are to do that because he gave us these gifts and all these resources. It all comes from him anyway.

God has given us a very broad mandate. Sometimes it is called the cultural mandate, or the kingdom mandate. Every one of us has a part to play in this great task. Each one of us has a job to do, a role to play, a responsibility to fulfil.

Young people, look for a job, a vocation, a calling, that will enable you to play a useful part in God’s world. Examine your own abilities and gifts and look for a suitable avenue to use those talents. Everyone of us is part of this large work in God’s world and in his kingdom. We are all in full-time service for the Lord.

We can serve like this because of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have already seen that God’s original creation was marred and broken by the fall into sin. But what was lost in the first Adam is restored in the second Adam, the Lord Jesus. He is the Head of a new humanity. “If anyone is in Christ Jesus he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). That has already happened in principle but it is also in process. We are already new, but we are not yet perfect.

So God is at work in us, through his Spirit, so that we are being renewed to be like God in righteousness and holiness and with a true knowledge of our Creator (Eph 4:24, Col 3:10).

In and through Jesus Christ the image of God is being restored in us, and through him we can go about this great task of looking after this wonderful world he has made.

Amen.