Well, what a privilege we have this morning to open God's Word and read it. And in reading it to hear from God directly. God gives us these words, and He gives them to us for our own profit, for our benefit, to teach us what to believe. To expose where our lives have veered from what is true and good and beautiful. And to realign our lives back to God's order, back to what is truly best.
Back to being His creatures, His image-bearers. When we heed God's word, we are ordering our lives according to that which is best. according to that which God says is beautiful and true.
So with the full assurance of faith. Let's read this word together this morning. We're in Genesis 1, verses 24 through 31. A passage that describes for us the sixth day of creation, the climax of God's creative work. Genesis 1:24 through 31.
This is the inspired, inerrant, authoritative. and sufficient word. of God. And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds. Livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and it was so.
And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kind, and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 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.
So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. 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. 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 and its fruit. You shall have them for food. 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. 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. Let's pray. Holy Spirit, we need you now to enable us to understand things that are. Spiritually discerned. Give us faith and understanding as we meditate on this portion of the Word of God that our lives might be conformed to the image of God.
Lord, show us. While you have made us to be. and then make us to be that. Fulfill your purposes in the hearts of your people now, I pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.
Each person in this room has a skill set, a knowledge base, an area of expertise that makes us good at something or knowledgeable of a particular thing.
Some of you are engineers and you can lay out the steps for constructing some theoretical object in the physical world.
Some of you are teachers, and you understand how to get information into the mind of another person, or how to get a skill into the hands of another person.
Some of you understand people. You know how to lead them towards a specific goal.
Some of you can make music or create art or fix cars or fly things through the sky. But no matter what our particular skill or knowledge is, there is one thing we all share in common. We learned what we know from someone who taught it to us. We learned how to do what we can do from someone who showed us how to do it. We are creatures of imitation.
We aren't originators. There are no true OGs, as the young people say. At least, not among the human race. There's always someone who came before. We're imitators, reflections of what has come before.
Even when it comes to what we might describe as intuition or instinct, that comes from something prior to us. Of course, there was a first human being, so in that sense, there is an original. But even that original man came from someone before him. And was what he was, and knew what he knew because that someone who existed before him. Imbued the original man with that knowledge, with that skill, with that intuition or instinct.
Our text today takes us all the way back to that point of origin of the human race. And the attention of that momentous occasion is all focused on God, the Creator, giving man, the creature, something to imitate, something to pattern his life after, something that would define his very purpose for existence. To put it simply God made mankind to bear his image. Therefore, we will only ever find our purpose as human beings by imitating him. That's the theme of this text.
God made mankind to bear his image, therefore, we will only ever find our purpose as human beings. by imitating him. To the degree that we pattern our lives and thoughts and morals and values after our Creator, we will be happy, fulfilled creatures. To the degree that we reject our Creator's values, and truths, and instructions, and example, we will be miserable, unfulfilled, and self-destructive. We are made to imitate our Maker.
And as we will see, what a magnificent purpose this is.
Well, let's walk through our text today. and discover our purpose on this earth. The account of the sixth day of creation begins with the creation of what Moses calls living creatures. And these living creatures are classified according to three kinds in verse 24: livestock, creeping things, and beasts of the earth. Livestock refers to large domesticated animals that man is able to breed and train and use for his own benefit.
Creeping things seem to refer to small animals. And beasts refers to wild, untameable animals.
So at this point, everything is ready for life in this new world that God has made, except one thing. His magnum opus, his masterpiece, his crowning achievement of creation, the creature who will rule over the earth as God's vice regent. Man. is created. As we come to the creation of man, the story slows down to a snail's pace, and every detail is relished and told with great ceremony and weight.
Whereas before it was all, let there be this and there was this, let there be that and there was that.
Now, the creative process begins with God pausing to think. to consider, to deliberate. Verse 26. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness. The old Puritan Matthew Henry points out that in God's creation of everything else, he speaks as one having authority.
But in creating man, he speaks as one having affection.
Something important is going on. God is getting ready to do something unusual, something different from before, something that will reflect him and reveal him in ways that the sun and the moon and the oceans and the plants and the animal kingdom cannot convey. Let us make man in our image.
Now the first thing that likely catches our attention at this momentous juncture in creation week is the use of plural pronouns. Let us make man in our image.
Who's the us there? I think I must have consulted nine or ten different commentaries in my sermon preparation this past week, and I think every one of them, without exception, made a point to say that the meaning of these plural pronouns is hotly debated. Who is Moses referring to?
Now, I hope that most of you intuitively assume that the us of verse 26 is God. There are those who think God is consulting with angels about the creation of man. And I just want to point out that if that's what's going on, it introduces a few problems. Number one. It would mean that angels are creating something out of nothing.
Creatures can't do that. Only God creates from nothing. Number two, it would mean that humans are created in the image of God and of angels. But that idea is foreign to Scripture. In fact, there are passages in Scripture that explicitly draw clear distinctions of kind between angels and men.
And then number three. The end of the book of Job and passages like Isaiah make the point that when God sets out to create and act, He does not consult anyone. Where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the earth? God is sovereign. God alone is creative.
Creator. God has been the subject of the entire creation account. He's the one doing the creating. And the account of the creation of man is no exception. God is the us of verse 26.
The question then is why is it plural and not singular? Various theologians answer that question in various ways, but. I think the most obvious answer is that these plural pronouns are used to point to the Trinitarian nature of God. That is, he is one God who exists in three persons.
Now, we have the benefit of having a completed canon of Scripture and thus a fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. Moses' original audience had limited understanding of these things, as did Moses himself, no doubt. But God certainly has not changed. The God of Genesis 1 is the triune God, whether the original readers of Genesis 1 fully understood that or not.
Furthermore, there are other subtle references, clues sprinkled throughout Genesis 1 that point to the Trinitarian nature of God. For example, the name for God in this chapter is Elohim, which is a plural form of the Hebrew word for God.
However, when Elohim is used to refer to the triune God, it takes a singular verb. Let's do a quick review of elementary grammar. Verbs have to agree in number with their subjects, right? If I'm talking about me by myself, I would say I am going to do such and such. If I'm talking about me with a group of people, I would say we are going to do such and such, not we am.
The verb changes based on whether the subject is one or many. When it comes to Elohim, he is a many. The name is plural. In Hebrew. He is a we.
But when the Bible describes Elohim doing something, the verb, the action, is singular. We am going to create. Grammatically, it's odd. Theologically, it's profound. God is a He and a them.
He is a one and a many. He is one God who exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He and He alone is the us and the our of Genesis 1:26.
So God says to himself, let us make man in our image. Man is made in God's image.
So let's wrestle for a bit with what it means to be made in the image of God. And once again, every commentary acknowledges that this question has spawned many, many differing views.
Some have suggested that since the word image most typically refers to physical likeness. Humans bear God's image in that they look like God.
Now I think that a well-catechized child quickly knows that's not the right answer. What is God? God is a spirit and has not a body like men. Others have speculated that to say man is made in God's image must mean that man is Trinitarian in nature. And different theologians divide man's nature up in different threefold ways: body, soul, spirit.
Mind, will, emotions, rational, volitional, moral. But at the end of the day, none of these philosophical categories are explicitly identified in Scripture as the essence of God's image in man.
So they are at best speculative. Others look to the context of Genesis 1 to define what the image of God refers to. And this, of course, is always the best starting place, right, for a proper interpretation of Scripture. The context. In the context of Genesis 1, shortly after declaring man's image-bearing status, Moses.
describes man's dominion over creation. Perhaps then, the essence of what it means to bear God's image has something to do with exercising dominion over the earth. God obviously exercises dominion of creation by virtue of the fact that He created it, He sustains it. Man would certainly be reflecting that dominion in his role as God's vice regent.
So maybe image-bearing refers to exercising dominion over the earth. The immediate context also describes the fact that man is made male and female. No one gender alone defines the essence of what it means to be a human being. We need both male and female. God also exists in more than one person.
It makes sense then that mankind exists in more than one person, so to speak, as male and female. Perhaps that's the essence of what it means to bear God's image. Although we might point out that animals also exist as two genders, yet they are not made in the image of God.
However, perhaps at least in part, image-bearing entails this plurality of persons, male and female, as it reflects God's character. Trinitarian nature. Moses also describes God's command to man to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. God has just filled the earth with good things.
Now He's commissioning man to fill the earth with more good things. Maybe procreation, having babies, making more image bearers is what bearing the image of God refers to.
Now, I'm going to define my understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God, but first, Isn't it strange that something this central and important to who we are as creatures is really not all that clear to us? That's a bit odd, isn't it? You would think, would you not, that something that's as big a deal as man being made in God's image would be crystal clear in scripture, or at least be intuitively obvious in our minds. I mean, we're talking about the fundamental essence of what it means to be human here. We're talking about that part of us that we most intimately share in common with our Creator, and yet when pressed to define it, we come up short, or at least confused.
Why would that be? Why isn't it obvious to us what it is about us that reflects the image of God?
Well, we're going to get the full answer to that mystery in chapter 3 of Genesis, where we read about man's fall into sin. But as a preview, a spoiler of sort, of that part of the story, the reason we struggle to comprehend what it means to be image-bearers of God is because sin has marred that image and diminished our capacity to even see and understand the few vestiges of it that are left in us. It's not as if we could ever cease to be human. We cannot stop being image bearers of God. But the actual content of our life is at odds with the underlying reality of our life because sin has broken us at our very core.
Our existence in this world is a paradox, you see, because on the one hand we bear God's image, but on the other, we don't even understand what that means. An old Lutheran pastor from the Protestant Reformation said that. Adam's knowledge of what it meant to be made in the image of God could be compared to a person who had been born with sight but later became blind. He would have some recollection of what different colors looked like and would be able to articulate a description of visible things from memory. But all the descendants of Adam were born already blind.
We can listen through Moses to Adam's description of what image bearing is like. But at best, this is the blind leading the blind. Our comprehension of it is severely limited, and yet Scripture gives us enough hints of its meaning that we long for its restoration. But let me give you another spoiler to the story. There is a man of Adam's race.
who was not born blind like the rest of us. but who possessed the image of God fully intact. Listen to these verses. Colossians 1.15. Jesus Christ is the image of of the invisible God.
the firstborn of creation. Hebrews 1:3, Christ, the Son of God, is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. 2 Corinthians 4.4. The God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. who is the image of God.
Friends, if we want to know what it means to bear the image of God, we have to look no further than Jesus Christ. He is the perfect image of God. If we want to rightly bear God's image in our lives, We gain both the understanding of what it is and the capacity to carry that out through and only through the redemption that faith in Christ brings. The restoration of God's image in the redeemed sinner is a progressive restoration from glory to glory, but one that begins now and will be perfected at Christ's return. John says in 1 John 3:2, we are God's children now.
But when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
So, all who have sinned have marred God's image and have lost the capacity to even understand what they've lost. Christ has broken into creation as the perfect image-bearer of God, and all who belong to Christ through faith learn not only what image-bearing looks like, but also regain the capacity to bear God's image faithfully. A capacity that begins slowly and on a small scale in this life, but one that will flower and bloom into full maturity at the return of Christ.
So what is the image of God in man? What does it mean to be God's image-bearer? It means to have a life that is conformed to the moral character of Jesus Christ. He was gentle and lowly. gracious and full of glory.
Obedient to the point of death. It means to have a life that engages in the work of Jesus Christ. He taught God's truth, exercised dominion over creation, healed the sick, fought the devil, resisted temptation, overcame death. It means to have a life that shares the values of Jesus Christ. He loved his bride and gave himself for her.
His food was to do the will of the Father. He wept over unrepentant Jerusalem. He longed to have supper with his friends. To bear the image of God is to be like Christ. And we can only be like Christ if the sin that has ruined our Christ-likeness is washed away by the blood of Christ.
But I'm getting ahead of ourselves. In Genesis 1, the fall of mankind into sin has not happened yet. And so we actually get a glimpse of what pre-fall, pre-sin image bearing entails. And I think we can reasonably read into this description some clues as to what image bearing, even in this fallen world, entails. God's image in man grants us dominion over the earth.
Look at the latter half of verse 26. 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. Notice that the beasts, those untameable wild animals from verse 24, are omitted. This just means that in the new heavens and the new earth, it'll be even better. We know this because Isaiah describes this as a time when wolves and lambs will live together, and leopards and goats will sleep side by side, and cows and lions will graze next to each other, and children and cobras will play together.
Our dominion now is just a small taste of the dominion God's redeemed image-bearers will enjoy then. Nevertheless, we have God's commission now to exercise dominion, rule. over the earth. In this way, we imitate God's sovereignty. Overall, we aren't sovereign like God is sovereign, and yet we are imitators of that sovereignty in that we are to bring order from chaos.
We are to manage, we are to steward, we are to organize and structure. We are to fill what is empty with good things. This is one of the ways. And perhaps the primary way in which we bear God's Image. Also, we bear God's image by being in relationship with each other and with God.
First, we're in relationship with each other. Look with me at verse 27.
So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. Being an image-bearer of God is not merely a vertical relationship between God and man, it also entails a horizontal relationship between human beings. Just as God, as Trinity, is in an eternal relationship with Himself, so we are to be in relationship with each other. Bearing God's image means that we not only imitate God, but that we also show dignity and respect and honor to those who bear that same image.
Anger and murder is a sin precisely because it is an assault on the image of God in man. Genesis 9.6 makes that point explicitly. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. Here's the reason: for God made man in his own image. We are to live in a relationship With other image-bearers in a manner that is worthy of the dignity of one who bears the image of God.
The most intimate of these relationships, of course, being the marriage relationship between man. and wife. And so God logically turns next to the topic of marriage. Specifically, the sort of image bearing that's demonstrated in procreation. Verse 28.
And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. God created man as His image bearers. Man, in turn, with woman, is to create his own image-bearers, children, a posterity, generations of people who will likewise bear the image of God to the ends of the earth.
Now, verses 28 through 30 are not just about having children and filling the earth. These verses are describing a covenant. Between mankind and God, the command to be fruitful and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion are actually blessings from God to man. This fruitful dominion over the earth is a covenant blessing that God gives to man upon the stipulation that they faithfully bear his image in the world. It's both a blessing and a command.
Be fruitful, and I'll make you fruitful. Exercise dominion, and I'll give you dominion. Man, as God's image bearers, are to be in relationship not only with each other as human beings, but also with God. God's blessing continues in verse 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.
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. God charges man to exercise dominion as vice-regent over his creation, and then God proceeds to provide every single thing that man needs to carry out that charge. A wife, food, authority. And the divine blessing of fruitfulness.
What a gracious God. What rich purposes he gives us to fulfill. And then the account of God's creative work comes to a close in verse 31. With an unqualified declaration that everything God had made was very good. Very good.
Friends, everything we have is a gift from God. including the ability to carry out the duties that garner God's blessing. To the degree that we recognize this fundamental reality, we will be happy, fulfilled bearers of God's image. Why? Because God made mankind to bear his image, therefore, we will only ever find our purpose.
as human beings by imitating him. Of course, as we mentioned earlier, this is only part of the story. A major train wreck is about to happen as the entire human race in Adam and Eve fall from this place of dignity and honor and perfection. But as we close, I want to point out very briefly some implications that we should draw from the fact that we are made in the image of God. First, God's image in us says something of God's love for us.
God's image in us says something of God's love for us.
Now understand, God loves all of his creation. He declared all of it very good.
However, he took special care to give a unique dignity to human beings. We possess a relationship with our creator that no other creature enjoys. God loves people because people bear his image. God's image in us also says something of our responsibility to God. Of our responsibility to God.
If God loves us enough to give us His image, we had better be good stewards of that image. That good stewardship looks like obedience to the blessings and commands of Genesis 1:28. That mandate given to the human race at creation has not been rescinded. God's world, even though marred by sin, is still God's very good world. This means that all God-ordained work is profitable.
There is no such thing as mundane work. when it comes to the stewarding of God's creation. God's world is not some ethereal harp-infested place in the sky that we go to after death. This is God's world. This is the place God has commanded us to subdue and fill and exercise God-imitating dominion over.
This universe is God's. and He reveals Himself to us in it. He made plants.
so that we would nurture them. When you garden, you are doing the Lord's work. He made animals so that we would tend them. When you do husbandry work, Is that still a word? You're doing God's work.
When you bring order from chaos. As a law enforcement officer, as a politician, as a teacher, you are doing the Lord's work. When you marry and have babies and change diapers and correct your child a thousand times a day so that they will learn to fear the Lord and obey him, you are doing the Lord's work. When you cook a meal that tastes very good. and not very bad.
You are imitating and honoring the one who declares everything he has made very good. Church listening to Christian radio and going to the mission field are not our only options for living a fulfilling and purposeful life. God has richly given us all things to enjoy. and order and take dominion of and subdue and Phil.
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do. Do all to the glory. of God. Let's pray. Lord, you make good things because you are good.
Help us. to be good, so that we can imitate our Creator in doing good. Lord, we know that apart from Christ, the perfect image bearer, we have no hope of Ever recovering from the mess we've made of ourselves and of your world. Thank you that in Christ we have have not only the hope of forgiveness, but also the hope of eternal life. In a new heavens and a new earth where sin and death And temptation will be no more.
So until that day, help us. more and more to bear. The image of our God with dignity and honor for the one who has bestowed that image. Upon us. for your glory.
And in the name of Jesus Christ, I pray. Amen. Yeah.
