“Here We Come” Genesis 1:26-2:7
So it’s the end of the sixth day and here comes man, saved til last to complete God’s perfect creation. I have to wonder if the angels and animals watching were thinking “Oh no, here comes trouble”. If they had only known, yet God seems to be very excited about His upcoming creation.
What are we worth? It is estimated that the chemical components of a normal 150 pound human are worth about 12 bucks. The rest is water and is free. When we think about the electrical power we generate, it is figured that we would produce about 11,400,000 kilowatts per pound if it could be harnessed, so if we calculate this in terms of energy production, a 150 pound person is worth 85 and a half billion dollars, and this is thirty years ago.
But what are we worth to God? Well, it’s like the Mastercard commercials - Priceless. Let’s look at:
A. Our Creation
i. How? Did he create us
“Let us make man in our image” “God created man in His own image” “God formed the man out of dust”
Everything else in creation is simply created by speaking it into existence, but man was both created and made, or formed from the earth. This indicates the special significance of man. One way to look at it is that He created man, the person or soul, and made man, the body, to house the soul and spirit in the physical realm. God breathed life into the man, not as though he literally blew air into his nose, but more like how he sends the Holy Spirit which is best translated as wind which energized, or “turned the man on”. The trinity worked on this together and intentionally made man with the qualities that the Godhead himself has.
What is “their image and likeness”? Many say we must look like God, but God isn’t physical. Yet He could hear, see, smell, touch, and speak, and created us with bodies that could also do these things. And of course, God came to earth in a human body. Jesus was the perfect image of God because He was God, but man is more like a reflection in a mirror which has some imperfections because the mirror is not perfect either. I think of our children, they bear some resemblance to us but are not exact replicas either in looks or behavior.
This is what is meant by God’s image in the words of Elmer Towns:
a. Intellect. The ability to think, abstractly, i.e., put words to ideas, think in cause-effect relationships, remember, etc. Man has the ability to know the difference between right and wrong.
b. Emotions. The ability to feel passion and patience, and so much more.
c. Will. The ability to make judgments, decisions, i.e., choices based on intellect and emotions.
d. Self perception. The ability to know one’s self and discern one’s self beyond physical sight, i.e., self consciousness and self awareness.
e. Self direction. The ability to plan, dream or vision.
We are triune as God himself is. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are body, soul, and spirit. The Scriptures teach that man is a triune being. "For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit…" (Hebrews 4:12). This truth is repeated again in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Some say that one way to make sense of the Godhead trinity is to see the father as the “soul”, the Son as the “body”, and the Holy Spirit of course as the “spirit”. I don’t think there is any scriptural backing for this man-made interpretation, but it may be a useful analogy for understanding the difficult idea of God being three and one. The soul being the core of our being where understanding, will, and the power to act reside, with the body being the material representation, and the spirit being the immortal power source of the soul. As with Christ, the earthly body is temporary (because it is made of stuff) but the soul and spirit are eternal (because they are created out of nothing).
ii. Why? Did he create us
The easy answer is to have dominion over the earth. In other words God created us in His image so that we could be the physical caretakers over the earth, like His assistants. Don’t we all want our employees or assistants to be just like us? We needed the same qualities as God in the flesh in order to oversee His creation the way he would want.
He never really gave Adam and Eve detailed instructions, He just said don’t eat from that one tree. But He did eventually send us a perfect role model in Christ who would show and teach us how to be. But by this time He already knew that with our sin nature we would never be able to hit the bullseye, so He had to make a way for us to stay in relationship to Him, by sacrificing the role model.
Ultimately God is telling us that we are not animals as most of the evolution scientists have been telling us in school, on radio, in magazines, and on TV for over 150 years. We have been told this so much that it sure looks to me that people have started to live like animals. Survival of the fittest, because there is no God and we just came from the muck. That we have no real purpose or accountability other than to survive. As we have learned in the Truth Project, the theory of evolution has taken God out of the picture and caused us to live solely for ourselves and maybe those we choose to love.
Maybe most importantly we were created in the image and likeness of God to make the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ possible and understandable to us. If we had not been created in this image, Jesus could not have come to earth in a human body. God also gave:
B. Our Blessing
i. To Procreate
God told us to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth. Both these words basically mean to increase. Interestingly He only created one pair of humans, unlike the rest of the species on the earth. Imagine how long it would take one couple to populate the earth considering the length of human pregnancy. The most likely reason He created only one human couple is so that we would know that we all came from one stock and would therefore love one another as a family. Indeed the entire human race is one family from a common ancestor. Adam and Eve are everyone’s great…….. grandparents. We are truly all related, this isn’t just Mennonite game.
Some have suggested that the original sin was sexual but clearly here God is giving human beings the gift of sexuality. God invented sexuality and made it pleasurable, and to be used for specific purposes in a specific relationship. Even the physical design of man and woman literally allows us to become “one flesh”. Interestingly this very first blessing given to man became the most prevalent avenue for sin. In the old testament lust and sexual sin are the primary reasons for God’s wrath against His people. …The next blessing was:
ii. To Have Abundance
God also blessed us with abundance. He gave us control of every living creature and every plant for food. Some suggest that this means early man was vegetarian, yet He puts no conditions on how we are to use the creatures we have dominion over. There was no need for money, and I imagine there would still not be if we had followed the Lord’s instructions from the beginning. There would be no poverty or starvation, in fact there are probably a handful of people in North America alone who could eradicate worldwide poverty and starvation almost immediately if they used their God given resources to do so. And if we all committed to doing so over the long-term. There has never and will never be a lack in God’s creation. It is only our mismanagement and greed that creates a lack for anyone.
Again though, we were given this natural abundance that would have surely sustained everyone. Greed became the next great sin leading to poverty, broken relationships, violence, and many other travesties. So the two first blessings we received were very quickly manifested into self-destructive sin by man, and these continue to be the most prevalent reasons for sin today. Greed and lust.
However these blesings are still great gifts, and God wants us to get back to using them as He intended, and He is ready to bless us even now if we turn and use these gifts for His glory.
There is a rather awkward break in the action as God talks about the seventh day when He rested. So we need to talk a little about the Sabbath.
C. The Sabbath
What about the Sabbath? A more accurate translation of “rested” on the seventh day is “stopped or ceased”. God didn’t need a rest, but He is saying that everything is completed that day, He has no more to do. The implication is that he has been at rest as far as creation is concerned, since then. The entire plan was in place at the end of the sixth day. “So God blessed the seventh day and made it Holy because on it God completed all his work in creation.” …There is nothing Holy about the Hebrew word Sabbath, it simply means intermission, and probably the best practical way of looking at the Sabbath is as a Holy day where we focus on our creator.
The Hebrew people had a tendency to turn everything into rules, many of which were man-made interpreted from something God said. Jesus said “I am the Lord of the Sabbath” in Matthew 12:8 and in Colossians 2:16-17 there is a very powerful statement: “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ”. In other words they are not real. Another interpretation of the word for shadow is “darkness of error” or “faint representation”.
I hope we realize the implications of this? Not only has God finished all of creation but He is also saying that all his work had been done including the great plan of salvation, and the sending of Jesus. This is so much more than just the creation of stuff. It would be like one of us planning and building the Coop gas station, planning everything that would ever happen in the gas station, and deciding the day the gas station would be no more, all at once. Then just sitting back and watching, listening, and helping the people who come and go, for the entire life of that gas station. If that sounds mind boggling, how about doing that with the entire universe?
So of course the question is: Can we or our animals, or our employees work on Sundays. I believe the answer to this is yes as long as we take one day off per week. But the most important part is that we keep one day of the week Holy or clean, or dedicated to the Lord whether we work or not. We are not breaking the 5th commandment by working on Sunday, however, that tends to be the day that the Christian church has set aside.
The exact day of Sabbath is entirely a man-made creation. God did not create a calendar but He did say that one day in seven we should observe the Sabbath. The Jewish people just extrapolated this in their calendar when they called a certain day of the week the first day. It could have been any day. Jesus worked to pick grain, feed people, and heal people on the Sabbath. The Jews were referring more to commerce. So each seven days take a day off from your job, give your animals a day off, and give people working for you a day off, and dedicate at least one day per week to the Lord in whatever you do, like spending time with your family.
Notice the strange transition from the end of chapter 1 into the first few verses of chapter 2. Through chapter 1 we are essentially getting the creation story from God’s perspective and it is all, God said, God saw, God blessed. Then in chapter 2 verse 4 we seem to be getting another account of creation and the term “Lord God” or Yahweh instead of Elohim is used exclusively and for the first time. Yahweh is a more personal, covenantal term now being used by human beings. The change in name is moving God from pure power, to a more relational God.
The word “account” is also of some significance. A better translation is “generations”. This is how the main sections of Genesis begin from now on, “this is the account” or “these are the generations”. Really what it means is “this is the history of”. Basically verse 4 begins a more detailed description of the creation of man and the story shifts more from what God did in creation to what His creation is doing and how God intervenes now that everything is going full steam ahead. Finally we see:
D. Our Evaluation
Did God give us this story so that we who were already sinners, could see how we became that way? Why didn’t He just create us perfect without a sinful nature in the first place? Did He really have the whole thing planned out even before creation? What would be his purpose for going through all this? Entertainment?
These are questions that plagued me even after I became a believer. I am now convinced that we have no business questioning this. It would be like a cup asking why the potter made it to drink from.
However, God said it was “very good” after we were brought on the scene. On this sixth day everything was perfected in his eyes. We know he has no needs so to say that He created us for a purpose doesn’t really make sense does it? That would imply need or at least desire. I think He did it just because His nature, which is love, could not be contained and therefore spilled out in creation.
I believe God wants us to experience the love that He experiences as He pours it out, more than He wants us to feel the love that He gives us. He does want us to be like Him in every way, and the love that He gives is the highest manifestation of His nature. I think He wants us to know the feeling of giving perfect love and how much better it is even than receiving it. We just need to look at what Jesus says so many times about sacrificial love:
Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it up again (John 10:17).
This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends (John 15:12-13).
Then what does Jesus most loved disciple say:
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16).
By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren (1John 3:16). Isn’t it interesting how John 3:16 and 1John 3:16 are so perfectly complimentary, coincident?
But 1John 4:16-21 is very clear about the issue though it requires a lot of thought
: read
Love is also the first fruit of the spirit. There are so many references to God’s “agape” love, over 175 verses in the New Testament alone refer to this sacrificial, selfless love. I admit I don’t love like that, do you? That is why we were created and God said it was very good, so I trust that some day we will love like that. Let’s pray.
Oh Yahweh, we know you love us, but Father I believe you want us to know what it is like to love like you do. Total surrender, total trust that if we give our lives to someone, that your love and provision will sustain us. We know that even if we sacrifice our physical lives for you or another person, there will be a great future with you. Yet you don’t often call people to die for you or others, so Lord show us the ways we can give our lives completely for you and other people in the special way that you have destined for each one of us. Thank you for making us, and thank you for making us righteous in your eyes through your son Jesus. Amen
