We Are His Offspring

SEARCHING FOR … “WE KNOW NOT WHAT” — “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

“‘In him we live and move and have our being,’

as even some of your own poets have said,

“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’”

[ACTS 17:26-28]

We must not permit ourselves to go to seed on this knowledge, but it is nevertheless true that there is a spark of divinity in every person. I don’t mean that each person is a demigod, or even that each person reveals divine characteristics. We are fallen creatures, and we spend our days labouring under the curse of sin knowing that sin is a reality that leads to death. However, it is God Who gives us our being. Thus, each person bears the image of God. That image is marred as result of the sin of our first parents, and we only add to that sinful stain as we grope through our days in this life.

In his apologia before these learned members of the Athenian ruling class, the Apostle didn’t hesitate to reach back through the dim mists of time to the very beginning of mankind. I realise that we have been challenged to look back to the beginning of mankind is recent messages, [8] but since the text presents Paul’s defence of God’s interaction with mankind, it will be necessary to examine mankind’s origin once again.

This necessitates a return to the opening chapters of the Word of God. In the first chapter of Genesis, we see how the Lord GOD called into existence all that exists. When all had been created and made ready for the apex of His creation, God made a man. Whereas God had spoken everything into existence up to that point, He was intimately invested in man. The passage we are provided in the first chapter of Genesis provides an overview, reading: “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’” [GENESIS 1:26-28]. The man and the woman were the crowning glory of the Creation Week.

The chapter concludes with God’s instructions to the man He made. Thus, we read, “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. 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” [GENESIS 1:29-31].