Remsen Bible Fellowship; 10/15/2023
Introduction
What does it mean to be human? That may sound like a big, abstract, question. But while it absolutely is big, it’s not as abstract as it sounds. I would suggest that underneath many of today’s simmering (or boiling) controversies are assumptions about the answer to this question. “What does it mean to be human?” And those assumptions need to be examined.
Is it true that self expression is a core value, an important part of being a fulfilled human being? Does freedom truly mean having the ability to do whatever you want, or is there a definition of freedom that has more to do with fullness and joy?
We can’t plumb those questions at depth today. But to think about them intelligently, and biblically, we need a foundation. We need to know the origin story. You can’t know what something is for unless you know why it was made. And that’s what we’ll learn this morning.
We left off last week in the middle of day six of creation. We had read how God formed the world in days 1-3, creating the universe as we know it - and very likely created the world beyond what we can currently know - in those first three days. Then days 4-6 consisted of God’s filling work in creation. He made the sun, the moon, and the stars. He made the fish in the water below, the birds in the air above. He made every kind of creature that lives and crawls on the face of the earth. But then there comes the crowning moment in the creation story, the moment which will transform the creation from “good” to “very good.”
Text
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
God’s Determination
This scene gives us a peek behind the “fourth wall” of the Biblical narrative. While, very often, what we experience of the story in the Bible is the three-walled perspective (we can’t see into the mind of God), occasionally we get to hear from a prophet speaking on God’s behalf, or a divinely-inspired narrator will give us a peek “behind-the-scenes”, as it were. And the first time that happens is here in the creation story. Chapter one has moved along telling us what God did. But now there is a pause. And we get to hear what God thought.
Who’s Speaking - and to Whom?
Before we look at the thought - the spoken thought - we need to ask, who is the thinking speaker, and to whom is he speaking? Verse 26 begins, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Jewish commentators held that this was God consulting with the angels. As if he were addressing the heavenly courtroom, “let us proceed in such and such a way.” Some modern commentators still hold that belief.
But I think a simple, but careful, look at the text tells us this is not the case. God said, “let us”, and then when he does create man in verse 27, does it say “in the image of God and of angels he created him?” No, it simply says, “in the image of God.” So in God’s deliberation in verse 26, he is consulting not with the angels, but with himself. That’s significant, because then the reference to “us” combined with the distinction between God speaking throughout the chapter, and the Spirit of God hovering in verse 2, all comes together to give us the first hints of God’s Trinitarian Being. The One God exists, as the New Testament will make clear, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three Persons, One God. This mystery is profound, and while it is not spelled out explicitly for us in Genesis 1, we start catching hints. The same kind of language is echoed in Isaiah 6:8, where God asks, “whom shall we send, and who will go for us?”
So God is deliberating, but he is deliberating within himself.
What is he going to make?
What is the content of this deliberation? He is considering the nature of this crowning piece of creation. This creature, unlike all the rest, is going to represent God’s rule over all of the visible world. Which means he will need to be a certain kind of creature.
That is spelled out in these verses. God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Some have defined image and likeness as distinct, though I find that unlikely because hereafter the narrator uses only the word “image.” It seems that “likeness” is used as a further descriptor of what is meant by the word image.
Okay, but what is the image of God in man? Truckloads of ink have been spilled on this subject. Perhaps it is the capacity to think and to reason that sets us apart, and makes us God’s image. Maybe it is our social organization, if God enjoys an eternal Triune relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, perhaps the fact that we form families and organize governments is the image of God. Perhaps that statement simply speaks to the intrinsic value of each and every human individual. Could it be that we look like God? But elsewhere in Scripture we read that God is Spirit and thus does not have a body. Though Jesus took on flesh in the Incarnation, that is not part of his eternal Deity. So: where can we find this mysterious image?
Dominion
Again, I think the answer is to stick our noses back in the text and pay attention. God determined to make man in his likeness, in his image, to, “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” All of which to say, man had a job. And that job was to represent God’s rule over all of creation, by exercising dominion.
I want to back up here and think about something I’ve said on multiple occasions the past couple of weeks. The earthly creation is meant to picture heavenly realities. And this description of man may be the clearest example of that in Genesis chapter 1. If you lived in the ancient world, you would have been very familiar with temple language, imagery, and practice. There were pagan temples everywhere. And what did every temple contain? An idol. How else could we describe an idol? An image of god being worshiped. Well, if the first earthly temple was the garden of Eden, which in chapters 2-3 it certainly seems to be, then what God is doing by placing man in the midst of the garden is declaring his Lordship over the garden.
Thus, the dominion given to man is meant to point to the True and Ultimate dominion of the One who made man in his image. It is not the idol who finally owns the temple, the god does. And Yahweh, the Triune Creator God, owns the world and everything in it. And he puts that on display by making man in his own image and likeness.
So I think, when we consider what the image of God is, we shouldn’t go looking for something in us or about us. Man himself is the image of God. To be a human is to be made in God’s image and likeness. Does intelligence play a part here? Yes. As does love, and relationships, and the ability to plan, create, etcetera. All of these things that set us apart from the rest of creation are given by God for the purpose of reflecting him, mirroring his rule, to the world around us.
God’s Action
Verse 27, then, introduces us to the actual creation of man. God deliberates, but unlike a committee, God actually acts. He creates man.
Creating
It is probably worthwhile here to pause and think about that language of man. God created “man” in his own image. Why that gendered term? Well, linguistically, this is actually the Hebrew word Adam which will become the proper name of the first man. And it is from this first man that all of his descendents take their name.
This is theologically significant, because Adam is held responsible as the head of the human race. Thus, it is Adam’s fall - not Eve’s - that brought the entire race into sin (Romans 5:12). This begins the biblical pattern of male headship that continues on through the biblical family order (Paul calls the husband the head of the wife in 1 Corinthians 11:3), and in the church (where qualified men are to be pastors and elders, Titus 1:5-9). These aren’t mere cultural oddities, they are built into the pattern of creation, and this becomes incredibly important, because even that pattern of headship in the family and the church is meant to point toward how the gospel works: Jesus, the true man and second Adam, becomes the new head of the race in his atoning death and life-giving resurrection.
As the first Adam dragged us all down by his sin, so the last Adam will raise to new spiritual life - New Birth - all those who trust in him (1 Corinthians 15:45ff). Thus to be under the headship of Christ, part of his church, is to be currently in the process of being renewed “in knowledge after the image of [your] creator” (Colossians 3:10). But these blessings flow only to those under the headship of the Second Man, the second Adam, Jesus.
So, this language of man in reference to the entirety of humanity is significant. This doesn’t mean we need to be silly and run away from all gender-neutral terms (I put “human” in the title of the sermon!). Oftentimes that makes the most sense for making clear that we are speaking of both men and women with no distinction. We just need to be aware that the Bible isn’t failing to use gender-neutral terms because of backwardness. There is freight loaded in even the term “man” being used for humanity as a whole.
But this would also be an appropriate point to caution: some people think then that man is made in God’s image, and because woman is made from man (as we see in the following chapter), that women are somehow less than men. Which is abject nonsense. And demonstrates an inability to read the text before our eyes: “In the image of God he created him [speaking universally]; male and female he created them.” Man and woman are both made in the image and likeness of God. Further, there seems to be a significant part of what it means to be human that is only possible to realize as man and woman come together. And we see that in the blessing God pronounces in verse 28.
Blessing
We should notice in this verse that God blessed them. Man was blessed by God, and man and woman were blessed together. It’s interesting to note that this blessing also functions as a charge, a set of instructions. So let’s read the specific content of this three-fold blessing.
* Fruitful & multiply. God is telling the man and woman to produce. Obviously our minds run first to children. Like the birds and the first are charged to multiply on day 5, so now man and woman are told to do the same. And this sets the normative pattern for humanity. While you certainly can have a meaningful and God-honoring life apart from marriage or after marriage, and marriage can be meaningful and important even if children never come, the normative pattern in Scripture is that “a man shall leave his mother and father and hold fast to his wife” (2:24). This is for the purpose, Malachi 2:15 says, of godly offspring.
Our society is so worried about people “getting to know themselves” or “getting established” before entering into the covenant of marriage that we kick this can down the road. And then what people find out is that they didn’t actually know a lot about themselves, because part of how God has designed for men and women to grow into who he wants them to be is by stepping into the roles he has given. God’s plan is pretty simple: get married and have babies. Now, obviously: don’t just marry anyone. Marry a person who wants to grow in godliness together and learn to honor the Lord together as your family forms. But he says, be fruitful and multiply.
It’s also worth thinking about other forms of fruitfulness, besides marriage and childrearing. What we are going to see in the next part of the blessing is the call to fill and subdue. This is for the purpose of exercising God’s rule, and part of how humans do this is by seeking to be fruitful and productive in our labors. God put man on earth, first of all, as a sub-creator. We are not to be mere consumers of the resources God has provided.
* Fill & Subdue. You might think fill is synonymous with multiply, but we’ll see at the tower of Babel in chapter 11 that people can multiply and refuse to spread out. But God created the world to be inhabited. And as man spread out, his purpose was to subdue the earth. It seems, as I pointed out the last couple of weeks, that though we’ll come to the end of day six and God will call things “very good,” there was actually work left to be done, that as humanity matured and expanded, God desired for us to keep growing in our knowledge and abilities. We have been given a world to master, and bring into submission to God’s rule.
I certainly think this could be taken the wrong way. Some folks think that this subduing language is carte blanche to rape and pillage the earth, “cause it’s here for us to use, right?” But then we simply need to ask: is that how God has treated you? No. So don’t treat creation that way. We rule it. And this side of the fall, that’s even going to include causing death. But we were not created to be Tyrants over nature, but rather stewards over what belongs to Another.
* Which brings us to the third aspect of the blessing, a re-stating of dominion. It really is an amazing privilege and high calling that as human beings we have been given the role of God’s representatives here on earth. And it is all a gift from his hand.
Providing
Part of the provision God so abundantly provided was food. And, in the beginning, it was a vegetarian world. That doesn’t sound great to us now, but apparently at first there was enough nutrition to be had from seed grains and tree fruit to perfectly sustain human life (v29).
It’s also probably worth noting, that outside of a few traveling tribes, these basic forms of food have continued to by and large sustain human life. Bread is a product of grains like wheat or barley or milo or oats. Corn is a carefully bred and developed form of grass, and is dependent upon human beings for its existence and survival. These grains still make up the basic building blocks of most human lives.
And God provided for the animals, as well. The beats were given every green plant for food (v30).
God’s Satisfaction
When we get to the end of the chapter, verse 31, what we find is that God was very pleased by what he had made. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.”
God stepped back, as it were, and was pleased with what he had done. Do you ever step back and just take joy in the goodness of what God has done in creation? Listening to the rain fall outside on a dreary day. Enjoying the sunrise on an early morning. Taking in the breathtaking whiteness of a fresh layer of snow. Admiring the slow and then sudden change in the color of the leaves in the fall.
Do you ever sit and watch animals? When I was out in Idaho bear hunting this spring, that first morning we hiked to a spot and sat down to watch an opposite hillside. And I marveled as this herd of elk milled around - and then suddenly seemed to vanish. How do creatures that weigh 400-800 pounds just disappear? I was at Orange City for a Dr. Appt. on Friday, and they have birds in the waiting room. And I was amazed just in that little cage, at the various colors and beak shapes. The variety and creativity in creation is astounding. God could have made a world that was completely drab and gray. But he chose not to. He made a beautiful world. And then he placed us within it and said “rule it in a way that represents Me.” And this arrangement of things he calls, “very good.”
Conclusion
Now, I saw all of that, and I realize this: we often aren’t satisfied in the world God made. We live east of Eden, south of the Fall. Our dominion often doesn’t go so well, and honestly, we don’t even know how to rule ourselves, let alone anything else. And we are left deeply unsatisfied. We live in a world desperately seeking satisfaction in all the wrong places.
The transgender boy seeking solace and peace by paying a doctor to mutilate his genitals and pump him full of hormones won’t find peace. The man looking at pornography won’t find the comfort or control he seeks. The woman who tries to climb the ladder at work while ignoring her kids won’t find the validation she deeply desires. The girl posting pictures on social media to gain popularity and affirmation won’t find the relational security she is grasping for.
How can we find satisfaction in God’s created world? How can we reflect him, rather than simply putting on display our fallen shortcomings? It begins with submitting to him. And this side of the fall, that means submitting to his assessment of who you are: a sinner, a child of Adam, deserving God’s judgment. But it also means gladly receiving the salvation accomplished by the second Adam, Jesus. Because Jesus paid for your sins, if you trust in him, you can, as Paul says in Ephesians 4:22-24, “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
And the new self will be characterized by living in keeping with the forms and roles God lays out in the Scriptures. It will mean looking for what sort of life he prescribes, and following it not because you’re afraid he’ll zap you otherwise, but because you trust that as a good Father, he knows how life is meant to function in the world he made.
We look for satisfaction out of bounds and it leaves us empty. But by embracing the limits of our creatureliness, and settling into the roles he has assigned to us, we can begin to find a life of joy. A life that delights in reflecting the character and goodness of God through our hard work, through our loving relationships, and through our care for what little slice of the world God has entrusted to us. Don’t look for some “true you” within, and instead embrace this truth: To be human is to be an image of God. And in consciously embracing that role you are on the path to satisfaction in God’s good world.
