At verse 26 the tone of the first chapter of Genesis changes. For the first time a reflective note is introduced. Up until that point, in the progress of creation, all God's decisions have been taken briskly and without hesitation. "Let there be light ... let there be a firmament ... let there be dry land ... let there be this, let there be that." The decisions follow each other like rapid fire from a machine gun. But at v. 26 we are allowed to eavesdrop on a soliloquy God has with Himself before He takes the decision to create man. It is as though He takes time to ponder before He does this, to savour the decision before making it.
It is not the kind of pause that comes when you cannot think what to do next ... as though the idea of creating man occurred to God only as an afterthought. Rather it is the kind of pause that comes when the critical moment you have been preparing for in an experiment arrives. All the preparation is complete, and before you take the final decisive step, you pause; this is where it can all go wrong or all come right. Or to change the figure, this is the moment when the key-stone is slotted into the arch, and the supports are taken away: will it stand, or will it fall?
There is a risk involved ... which God takes. He has fashioned a world which is ordered and beautiful - but incomplete. It is bursting with vitality: to maintain its order and beauty it needs a superintendent: "Now, let us make man to have dominion." God, so to speak, has played for high stakes; He has prepared for the making of a creature who will be the crowning piece of the whole edifice, and on whom the whole structure will depend.
What was God's dream for man? What place did God plan for him in the scheme of creation? These verses tell us.
The statement here of God's intention for man's place in the creation hierarchy has later to be modified in the light of what happens when he declines to follow orders. We shall come to the modified version in due course, but it must be understood that these verses in ch. 1 show us God's primary intention for man. We are here shown the dream - not the unhappy reality that has, for the time being at any rate, taken its place.
So we ask what it was
God had in mind when He fashioned man, and the answer turns on the
three key words that come in the text,
i. that man was made in God's image,
ii. that he was made male and female, and
iii. that he was made to have dominion.
The first thing to note is the limits that are set on the place man was given. He is a creature, and even when God's best hopes of him are realised, a creature he remains. These chapters are heavily weighted to prevent us exaggerating our position in the scheme of things, even in God's original intention.
It is made clear that whilst God intended man to be in charge of His world, he was by no means elevated above it to the point where he is viewed as a purely spiritual being who has no creaturely roots in the creation he is put in charge of. In the next chapter, we are sharply reminded that man was fashioned out of the dust of the ground, and later the sombre words will be heard, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Into this creature of mere dust God breathes His own breath, but this does not free him from his earthbound nature.
He is created, notice, on the same day as the animals; he does not even have a special day to himself. So much for our toffee-nosed pride! In this way our ties with the animal world are heavily underscored. "Man and beast Thou savest, Lord" ... in God's Social Services Department, man and the animals are bundled together!
Since God made the material world, peopled with creatures, and took an obvious delight in doing so, it ill behoves us to despise it. Biblical faith presses upon us a glad acceptance of the physical dimension of our life in this world, and a positive enjoyment of it. This extends to our sexuality, for God invented it ... and pronounced it very good. Sex was conceived in the mind of God, and He endowed us with it for our fulfilment and His glory, as we shall see.
The Bible is refreshingly realistic about our creatureliness. We are of the earth, earthy. "The first man was of the earth, a man of dust," we are reminded in I Cor. 15:47. An exalted creature man may be, but he was emphatically not designed to live only in the luxury penthouse of God's creation: he has his dwelling partly also in the basement. The psalmist reminds us that "we are like the beasts that perish" (49:12), and we share with the animals their physical needs and drives. This is frankly recognised in the Lord's Prayer, where Jesus tells us we must include physical needs in our approach to our Father in prayer. "Give us each day our daily bread". We are - even at our best - such creatures that the spirit of devotion is apt to burn very low indeed if our teeth are chattering with freezing cold, and we do not rise to heights of spiritual exaltation if our stomachs are knotted with indigestion pains. We are by no means lordly aristocrats of creation, free of those lowly necessities that govern the life of servants in their quarters below stairs. We stand before God as men of flesh and blood - frail flesh, and blood that runs, sometimes hot and sometimes cold. We stand, even before God, with animality as a real part of our make-up, and the Bible encourages us to accept it with simplicity and without shame. If our dream of sanctity includes the thought of ultimate freedom from the clinging flesh, our dream has lost contact with God's. Even in heaven we will have a body. The earthiness of our natures needs to be cleansed and sanctified, no doubt, but it is no part of God's intention for us that it should be eliminated as simply not fitting.
In his devotional booklet, "Every Day with Jesus" Selwyn Hughes, quoting John 1 ("Without Him was not anything made that was made. That which has been made is life in Him") makes the comment:
"Note two things:
(a) God made our instincts - His stamp is upon them.
(b) they are made to work His way, and when they do they come to
life.
"If we surrender our drives to God then they become 'life in Him.' We live abundantly, with inner serenity and poise. When we leave them to run themselves, they bring death. Outside of God there is only death; inside of God there is only life. Life knows its Master, and lives only when it hears and obeys the Master's voice."
Man is told to be fruitful and multiply, just like fish and birds and cattle and creeping things; he receives the same orders in this connection as all his animal companions do.
It is a blessing, notice. With the creation of the animals comes the first mention of a blessing being bestowed by God upon His creation, a blessing man shares with them: and the blessing is ... the power of procreation, the property of sexuality which we share with the animals. We are creatures, not gods; and in this way we are sharply reminded of our creaturely dependence on God, a thing we were never intended to outgrow. The capacity to conceive and to beget and to bear and to nurture belongs to man's very nature as man. It is in those areas specifically that God blesses us. Those capabilities promote man's progress as man (which is what 'blessing' means).
The 'carnal' element in our nature has often been regarded as a realm of sin and uncleanness rather than as an area of wholesomeness and blessing. But there is no trace whatever of that attitude in this creation story. Soon we shall hear that the man and the woman were naked together and unashamed. The blessing is 'natural' to man as it is 'natural' to the animals, and mankind is just not 'natural' without it! A frank and glad acceptance of our physical appetites and drives belongs to our wholeness as human beings.
There is a further blessing bestowed on man however, which is not bestowed on the animals: that he should have dominion - responsible mastery. But that too is for later. We simply note now that the twofold blessing bestowed upon mankind is increase and dominion.
The real difference between man and the animals is that God has made us - as He has not made them - so that He can speak with us, and so that we can answer to Him. God made man to be a creature who not only has a relationship to nature, but who has a relationship also to Himself. This is what makes us unique. No sooner has God created Adam than we find He is talking with him; He seeks the companionship of the man and the woman in the garden in the cool of the day. This He does not do with the animals. Tragically the intimacy is soon lost, and their language becomes the language of conflict, not of communion: even so God is heard saying to the man, "Where are you?" as He is not heard saying it to the animals.
Man is created so that something may happen between him and God.
We shall find the real meaning of our life therefore, not in our links with nature, but in our affinity with God.
That He can address me - there lies the key to the kind of being I am. It is as God, the great 'THOU', meets me and addresses His Word to me that I discover who I am, and what is my real nature, and what is my real worth. It was a Jewish scholar (Martin Buber) who said, "All real life is meeting." That is a simple statement of a quite fundamental truth about our life. And it is supremely true of our meeting with God. If I miss out on that, if I never experience a relationship with God, I miss the whole point of my life. It is only as God speaks to me that I begin, at the real centre of my being, to live at all.
Lest this seem a strange thought, let me suggest a way in which we may quickly get a feeling for its truth.
Have you ever been to a party where everyone ignores you, where no-one speaks to you, and if you catch their eye, they look away from you? ... and when you cross the room to meet someone they move to avoid you? I have occasionally had a nightmare where I enter a room in which a whole circle of people watch me and stare at me for a little while in tight-lipped silence, not answering me a word, and then they turn and speak to each other as though resuming a conversation they were having before I came in. And though I shout at them, it is as though my voice cannot break through a cone of silence that enfolds me, and nothing I do attracts attention. It is quite terrifying. I feel in some weird way that I am dead - have become unreal - have ceased dreadfully to be.
How different it is when we walk into a room and friendly people come over to greet us and talk to us. We come alive inside then.
Real life is meeting. When we are ignored we wither and die. When we are spoken to we come alive.
Now if we transpose this experience up to the higher level of our meeting with God, we can perhaps understand what it means that it is only as He speaks to us that we really and truly live. The person I have it in me to be is dead until God, by speaking to me, awakens me to life. Then I stand before Him ... and live (which is what we mean by being born again, of course). That is what it means that we are made in the image of God, after His likeness. Said Martin Luther: "That man is immortal to whom God speaks, whether in wrath or in mercy." It is as God speaks to us that we become the person He created us to be.
Psalm 139:13-18 illustrates this quite remarkably: "Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the hidden depths. Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are thy thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. When I awake, I am still with thee."
The psalmist, quite clearly, is thinking about his biological formation in the womb and his physical birth. He is not blind to his creaturely origin, not at all. But he knows that the biological framework in which his life had its beginning was really the vehicle for something else which was going on, a quite different process, in which God was playing a creative part, speaking again His creative word "Let there be ..." In this process God says "Let there be," and there is ... I!
It is as a complete person, capable of responding to Him, that God beheld me when I was still only a microscopic dot of matter no bigger than a full stop on a printed page. Already He knew my name. Already He anticipated my coming days, my life history, even to the thoughts I would think and the words I would speak. (v. 1, 2) Already I was a complete person before His face; already He knew me. (See note 1 below) And this sense of wonder in his personal being that made the psalmist able to enjoy a conscious relationship with God reaches a climax in the statement, "When I awake I am still with Thee."
This for the psalmist is the real meaning of his life.
He has not shut his eyes to his physical origins. But he refuses to understand himself only with reference to them. He insists on understanding himself in his relation to God. What impresses him is not that he was made a little higher than the monkeys, but that he was made a little less than God! That we have been made in the image of God means first and foremost that we have been so made that with us God Himself may enter into relationship, able to pour love upon us in ceaseless bestowal, and so that we can respond to Him with trust and filial obedience and in that free response rise to our true being.
It is interesting that at the point where God contemplates the making of man He says, "Let us make man ..." (See note 2 below) It may well be an example of what the language experts call "the royal 'we'." Nonetheless it does suggest plurality in the Godhead, and thereby the whole dimension of relationship is suggested as the dimension in which our life really belongs.
It is in our relationships that our life takes on meaning and value. Unless I am appreciated by others, unless I am of worth to someone, I am nothing. And the bottom line of that is that our life takes on its full meaning and value only in our relationship with God. If we see humanity as related only to nature, we never see ourselves or our fellows as being anything higher than a naked ape. But if we see ourselves and all others as related essentially to God, then there is no limit to what we may become, for we may be (in the Bible's own phrase) 'partakers of the divine nature.' (II Peter 1:4) Man can be as God is. We have it in us to reflect the splendour of our Creator.
It takes the whole Bible to spell out what those splendours are: His compassion; His faithfulness; His patience; His strength; His gentleness; His tenderness; His swift sympathy; His generosity; His nobility; His justice; His mercy; His integrity; His righteousness
And incidentally, that our text says, "So God created man in His own image, male and female ..." surely implies that all those qualities which we associate intuitively with a woman's nature belong in God as well as those we associate with a man's; it takes the full kaleidoscope of our human nature as its colours appear in both man and woman to glimpse the fulness of the divine nature.
The point is, God made us to be noble creatures, reflecting His own glory. He made us to absorb and re-transmit His own splendour. All have sinned and fallen short of that glory; but we should never lose sight of the fact that God's purpose in undertaking our redemption is that He might fully restore it. He did not fashion us to be small-minded, mean-spirited, mealy-mouthed creatures distinguished more by a capacity for whining and whingeing, mocking and condemning, and grasping and hoarding than by a capacity for bearing up and going on, affirming and encouraging, and giving and bestowing. We are made to bear the image of His own Beloved Son Who bears the very stamp of His nature.
Note finally that all this is said of a creature whom God made out of nothing, whom He fashioned out of dust, who begins his life always as a mere biological speck too small even to be seen by the naked eye.
Martin Luther said: "God created the world out of nothing. Until you are content to be nothing in His hands, He can make nothing of you."
We begin as mere nothings. If we miss Him, that is all we shall ever be. But if we soak up the light and warmth of His love which He shines upon us where we lie in the soil of this earth, and receive the gentle and abundant rain of grace which he showers down upon us, and fit snug into the good earth of truth which He packs with all its nourishment around us, then there will kindle in us such life as shall cause us to grow into a thing of beauty and a joy for ever before His face. When we hear the Gospel call to forsake all others and keep ourselves only unto Him, it is to that destiny - to that goal of glory - that we are yielding ourselves to be led.
Note 1:
This has enormous significance in the abortion debate: the question
"When does the foetus become a person, as distinct from a mere blob
of tissue?" is answered by the Bible, "From the moment of
conception."
Note 2 on the Plural
form:
The use of the plural has occasioned much debate. That the Spirit has
already been mentioned in v. 2 is cited in favour of a Trinitarian
view; but whether the second person of the Trinity could have been in
view in the author's mind (along the lines of Prov. 3:19 [John's
Logos = 'Wisdom' ?] is open to question, as is the suggestion
that the 'Angel of the Lord' of the O.T. who is revealed in the New
to be the incarnate Son might have been in view. (It at least has
greater merit than von Rad's suggestion that the 'we' includes the
angels in general as 'sons of God'). But the plurals of fulness or
majesty are surely to be preferred. At any rate it is to be observed
that some notion of society within the Godhead was present from the
beginning (how can God be love without reciprocity?).
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author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!