Word of Salvation – Vol. 24 No. 35 – May 1978
Image-Bearers In A Fallen World
Sermon by Rev. F. L. Vanderbom, B.A., Th.Grad. on Lord’s Day 3
Scripture reading: Genesis 3
Psalter Hymnal: 296:1, 2, 5; 430:1, 3, 4; 55:1, 2, 3; 380; 488
Our sinfulness is like a shadow. You can’t always see your shadow, can you? On an overcast day when the sun is hidden, you can’t pick out your own shadow. And even when the sun is out – or the light is on – you can always turn the other way. Man’s sinfulness is like that too! If the Light is there, and if you’re facing the right way, then you can see the shadow of your sinfulness.
But if you want to, it’s not difficult to hardly ever face up to the fact of sin-in-you. Most people think about their sinfulness even less than they do about their shadow. But the fact is that that dark side of me is always there. Whenever I stand in the Light of the God of the Bible, whenever I think of the way in which He made me: then I can see my sin. I can’t just move away from it.
But, according to the Bible, God does not want your sinfulness to have the last word over you! If the Lord Jesus has paid for your life, then the last word over you will not be ‘sin’, but ‘safe’. Safe because Jesus bought you and now owns you and will look after you. Your sinfulness need not be the last word! But if sin is not going to be the last word for those who belong to Jesus, is sin then maybe the first thing? Did the Lord God make man a sinner, just like He gave him a body and a shadow? Did God create sinners when He made us?
This is what the Catechism’s Question 6 asks. Question 6 is a strange one, every time you come across it and think about it! “Did God create man so wicked and perverse?” This question is an example of the Catechism’s roundabout and very human way of getting to the truth. The professor and the preacher of Heidelberg who put this Catechism together didn’t really think that the answer to Question 6 might be “yes”. They just wanted to use a good teaching method. High-brow questions and abstract answers don’t belong in a Catechism that has been memorised and loved as much as this one has. Sermons sometimes tell people things they don’t want to know or don’t need to know. But the men of Heidelberg ask the kind of questions that people ask, and Question 6 is often asked: “Did God create man this way: so sinful and perverted?”
Many people who reject the Bible argue along the lines of this Question 6. “If there is an almighty God, if there is a God Who is loving, Who is just and fair and cares about right and wrong: then why doesn’t He make this world better? Why allow all this sadness, hatred, suffering, bloodshed? If God is God, then He must bear the responsibility for all that we see around us: the suffering and the evil. God must be responsible for man being what he is, and for the world being the way it is.” And so: “I want nothing to do with that kind of God.’
There is a real problem behind Question 6. Did God create man wicked and perverse? How does God fit into the picture of life that we know so well? Even serious and well-meaning Christian people ask the question sometimes. When you are in a situation of stress, it will always enter your mind: “Couldn’t God have prevented this? Why did God allow Satan? Why did He allow the Devil to tempt Eve? Why the Fall? Couldn’t God have spared us so much trouble? Isn’t God somehow responsible for all this?” When there are people we meet who have these questions and are honestly wrestling with them, let us always be careful not to give them straight-forward, 1-2-3 type answers. Even the Bible doesn’t give us easy answers here. Think of the book of Job, the psalms David wrote when he was agonising over this “Why?” Think of some of the soul struggles of the Apostle Paul.
So try to help the person with these questions by getting to understand him, by getting him to talk, by pointing him to the Lord Jesus and the light He has shed on this whole area. Wrestle with the struggler, but make sure you do so as a believer. If you are a believer, or if you at least understand the basic message of the Bible, this Lord’s Day 3 of the Catechism is very helpful in pointing out the answer to our question. Again, no simple, 1-2-3 answer that solves everybody’s hang-ups! The Catechism points us to what the Bible says about God’s creation and our problems with sin and suffering. And the Catechism also outlines God’s solution for our frustrations.
The first thing the Bible says is: THE BASIC PROBLEM WITH EVIL IS: ME.
God is not the problem; I am. The Bible shows us so clearly and so repeatedly that the Lord had a wonderful plan for us and for our world. And that God never wanted suffering and hatred and rebellion and evil. The Catechism’s Answer 6 sums this up – (read it from the words, “God created man good…”).
Someone has asked: “Suppose that God were to decide, ‘I will eradicate, I will wipe out every trace of evil in one hour from now’. Would anyone of us still be alive an hour and five minutes from now?” That is the crux of the problem isn’t it? Would any of us be able to clean ourselves up if our life depended on it? Would you even want to change? Really? The fact is that the problem is not really with the Lord God at all, no matter how much we talk about what God could or should have done about sin. There are many things about God’s wisdom, His goodness, His plans, which we will never really understand. Trying to tell God what He should have done or should not have done is silly. Man cannot know or understand more than a tiny bit of the mind of God, but we do know: Jesus!
Think about Jesus: His coming, His cross, His death for us! The Bible makes it so clear, doesn’t it? The basic problem is not God and what He has done. The basic problem is with man, with Adam, with Eve, with you and me. And then it becomes clear that all these questions: why didn’t God prevent sin? why did God allow the Fall? why does God allow this and that to happen? is He really good? all these questions of ours are ways of avoiding the real issue. These questions try to shift the blame and the responsibility for sin onto God. Because of sin, man is always trying to avoid doing anything about sin. We can get right with God, but we would rather God took the blame for our situation.
In Genesis chapter 3, we read that Adam already did that. Immediately after the Fall, God came to Adam and Eve. He came to them in judgement, but also in grace. He came to them to confront them with what they had done, but He also came to forgive them for what they had done. But Adam wasn’t home when God came. He wasn’t interested in God’s judgement, nor did he want to seek God’s mercy. “Adam, where are you? What have you done, Adam?” But Adam could only point away from himself.
“The woman, Lord, she tricked me; the woman You gave me!” So: it was God’s fault all along, really, you see? And Eve? She passed the blame on too, to Satan. You can almost hear her saying too: “God, You allowed it to happen!” Again, it was God’s fault.
And we use the same basic tactics today. “That’s the way I am.” “I’m only human, you know!” “Don’t blame me it was my upbringing, my parents, my genes, and bad world we live in these days.” And there is a tendency among Reformed people to take the Bible’s teaching about God’s total sovereignty, wisdom and control away from its true context in the Bible, which is one of comfort and assurance. It is so easy to think about ‘election’ not as the Bible does, as a source of immense comfort. ‘Election’ then starts to make us think: if God is in total control, what can I usefully do? Isn’t God responsible for all this, somehow?
The Catechism’s language in Answer 6 is very clear: “By no means! No way!” God is not to blame for the Fall into sin, and for your and my sinfulness. Question and Answer 7 also make this very clear (Read Q.&A.7 here). The well-known Negro spiritual sums it all up very beautifully and very simply:
“It’s not my sister, or my brother, but it’s me, O Lord,
standing in the need of prayer
It’s not my father, or my mother, but it’s me, O Lord,
standing in the need of prayer.”
This is the first part of what the Bible tells us and shows to us clearly. The basic problem with evil is with me.
The second part of what the Bible tells us about this problem of our sinfulness is this: GOD HAS DONE EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO OVERCOME THIS PROBLEM OF SIN. God gave His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ to the world, to overcome sin and Satan. Instead of you and I having to carry the overwhelming weight and punishment of our sinfulness, the Lord Jesus paid that punishment Himself. When Jesus died on the cross and paid for sin, He took away the power that sin and death would have had over the lives of millions and millions of people. The cross of Calvary has opened the way for the Lord God to come to change the living and the dying of anybody who believes the Gospel. Belonging to Jesus means the power of sin broken, and the Holy Spirit at work, re-making my person towards what God intended me to be.
Everybody who listens to the message of God’s Word and receives the Good News with an open and willing attitude also receives God’s goodness and His forgiveness in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Close your mind and your life to the message, and you close yourself off from everything that God has done to overcome this problem of evil and suffering and brokenness that we see in ourselves and all around us, in church, community, and world.
The well-known English writer, C.S. Lewis, has pointed out very clearly what a waste of time it really is to try to work out how evil and sin and Satan came into existence. As we have seen, many people have turned their backs on the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, simply because they can’t work out how a good and powerful God can allow evil and sin. “Did God create man so wicked and perverse?” C.S. Lewis reminds his readers: nobody has the answer to the problem of evil. The believer can’t fully explain evil; nor can the unbeliever. The answer is hidden in the mind of God. What creature can hope to know what the Creator knows? You might as well ask a dog to explain the origin of the tree or the post it uses every day. Just because something is well-known and exists as a fact doesn’t always mean you should be able to explain it and work out how it came into being!
The thing we have to face up to as people is not the origin of evil, but the fact of evil. And the only solution to the fact of evil that the world knows about is the solution that God has provided in His tremendous goodness: the Lord Jesus Christ! The Lord Jesus is God’s way of organising the clean-up campaign, we might say. This is something we need to be reminded of again and again, isn’t it?
The tragedy is that most people talk only about the dirt of sin, and not about God’s clean-up campaign. People will talk long and loud about dirt in its many forms: moral decay, bad teachers, communism, terrorism, corruption in police and government circles, strikes and greed and tax dodgers. People talk with great gusto about how the dirt needs to be cleaned up, how ‘they’ should clean it up. Maybe also about how the dirt of sin should never have been allowed to get there in the first place.
But so very, very few of us human beings will go to God and actually ask Him to clean me. So few will join God’s clean-up campaign. Only the very few will face up to the fact that God has done everything necessary to overcome the problem of evil, and the problem of dirt and sin. The Question and Answer 8 point out the one and only solution, but not many people will accept the fact (Read Q.&A.8).
And yet, the beautiful thing is that when you are “born a second time, or regenerated by the Spirit of God”, then that new beginning also allows God to start re-making us into His image; the way we were intended to be, the kind of person outlined in Answer 6. Answer 6 refers to the two New Testament verses that mention the “image of God”: Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10. But the answer doesn’t stay just with those two verses. The Bible shows us many ways in which man was created to be like his Maker. The Catechism puts it this way: (Read Answer 6 from the words “His own image”).
If God has broken the power of Satan over your life and future, then you will want to be the kind of person the Lord wanted you to be. In other words, “in the image of God”, or “born again by the Spirit of God”, as Answer 8 puts it in the new translation approved by our Churches.
Let us look at what that image of God – that born again person – is like. Basically, it means that we have a three-way relationship. First, we will be RELATED TO GOD. God is related to Himself: we remember from the Bible that Father, Son and Holy Spirit speak to each other, listen to each other, work together. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness”. After the Fall into sin, the Lord says, (Genesis 3:22) “The man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil.” God is a relating God, relating to Himself in His Tri-unity, as well as in other ways.
If you belong to this Lord, you will reflect His image by relating to Him. We show this relationship in many ways. By our respect and loyalty to Him. But also by a happy and fully-rounded love relationship with God: a love that shows itself in our work (wherever that work may be this week), in our worship, in our whole style of living our priorities, our values, the way we spend, and the way we live, eat, and get around.
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A loving relationship to the Lord doesn’t just happen, though. The Lord Jesus often went aside and alone, to cultivate that relationship. He also spent time and used many methods to cultivate that relationship with His Father in His followers. You have to work at it if you are going to show this side of the image of God! Regular times of Bible reading and meditation and prayer…! A willingness to learn, to think about yourself and God’s way for you; much patience with yourself, and with others.
Reflecting God’s image is like being a good mirror. A mirror is made to reflect something, but it doesn’t do that automatically, all the time. It has to be kept clean, the glass has to be smooth and polished, it needs to be in good condition. The same things are true of you if you are going to mirror God’s image in a community full of dirt and brokenness.
Secondly, the regenerated, born-again, in-the-image-of-God person will show that image of being RELATED TO OTHER PEOPLE in a world where such relationships are often fouled up, bitter, or totally broken. The Lord Jesus, especially during the 33 years of His incarnation, is the Number One image of God. And Jesus related Himself to people. He washed their feet and healed their wounds and diseases. He formed relationships with outcasts, notably women and tax-collectors in those times. He gave food and He told people what God is like and what we are like. He cast out the spiritual powers of darkness in the people and institutions around them, and He brought back the physically dead and the spiritually dead.
If you have faced up to the fact that you, and not God is responsible for your sin, if you have become part of God’s solution to the power and destructiveness of sin, then you will want to carry the image of God. Following Jesus, you will show that image by relating yourself to people. God has always wanted to be related to people. Remember Question and Answer 6: God did not create man so wicked and perverse. The Fall into sin has corrupted our nature, so that the relationship between God and most people is cut off. But the Creator Father doesn’t want it that way. God sent His Son to show that He wants to be related to us. And Jesus told His followers in John 13:15, “I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” So show God’s image, by sharing in what the Lord Jesus did for people.
The image of God also means: to be RELATED TO THE WORLD. God the Father is the Maker of this world and everything good and useful and beautiful that we have. He looked at what He had made, and said, “It is good.” Christian people who have been born again by the Spirit of God, people who have been re-made in the image of God, are people who realise that they are living in God’s world. We breathe the air that God made. The water we drink comes ultimately from God. The sunlight we enjoy is given to us by God. The food of the world is not our own, or the farmer’s, or our country’s. It is the food that belongs to the world which in turn belongs to God.
A Christian remembers that the power and influence we have comes from the God Who gave this world to man, male and female (Genesis 1:27-28). And why did the Lord give this world to mankind? So that we might be fruitful and multiply, and subdue God’s world, and exercise control over it. What a twisting of God’s will it is when people use that wonderful gift of power and control to waste God’s created things! When we waste, and misuse, and ruin, and destroy, and foul up, and spoil, then we are not reflecting God’s image: we are doing the very opposite: lining up with the fallen and rebellious part of God’s creation.
People who have come away from their corrupted and fallen nature recognise their responsibility. They reflect their Maker by caring about this world. That will come out whatever you are doing, and wherever your work may be. The way you use your head, tools and the power supply; the way you drive a car, use petrol, and dispose of your rubbish; the way you talk about that very complex subject of uranium and nuclear power; even what you do with your garden. Martin Luther once said that even if he knew the Lord was going to return tomorrow, he would still go out today to plant a fruit tree in his backyard. Because Luther wanted to reflect his Maker by putting down beautiful and responsible signs of his God-given dominion over the earth.
Related to God.
Related to our fellowman.
Related to the world we live in.
This is also an important aspect of what it means to be made new people. New people meaning no longer living images of what the Devil wanted to do with God’s creation. When the Lord makes a new beginning with you and me, we will be grown into the image of our Maker, and Father. Becoming that is a big job! But also a beautiful thing! We can’t change into that image under our own power. But with the work of God’s Spirit, sin will be pushed back. No longer do we blame God for our problems and our world’s suffering. No longer do we just talk about how terrible things are. When God sets you free from Satan through the cross of the Son, you turn your back on that kind of talk, and you get busy. Do your best for Him, let the Son shine out into this dark world!
AMEN.