Genesis 1:26-31

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel, and it’s my joy and privilege to be leading us through this first chapter of the Book of Genesis. And this will be our third and final study in chapter one. And we’re going to take a look at verses 26 through 31 in just a few minutes.

I want to remind you we’re calling this study In The Beginning, and that’s because, of course, that’s the way the Book of Genesis opens. It’s also the way the Gospel of John opens in the New Testament. And it reminds us that all three persons of the Trinitarian God; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, were all present, Father and Spirit mentioned in chapter one of Genesis and the God the Son mentioned in John chapter one. So, it’s really amazing that here we have this broad metanarrative all the way across the span and the scope of Scripture, and across all of history, which goes all the way back to the beginning. And in this case, the Scriptures begin not just with the beginning of space-time continuum, but with the Beginner of the space-time continuum.

Today we’ll be reminded that God created human beings in His image. And that God desires to reflect His glory through you and through me and through all of us that are human beings. And what do we do with the prospect of that exciting potential? This is a really powerful set of verses here. And we’re going to learn three things that the Bible teaches us right off the bat about what’s unique about humanity and God’s creation of humanity. How can we more faithfully serve God as part of His creation, is at least one of those questions I’ll ask and try to answer along the way, because it really does make a difference. You and I, all of us, we really do have an opportunity to have an influence for God and for His glory.

I want to begin with a quote by a man named Harry Lewis. He’s a former Professor of Computational Logic and Computer Science at Harvard College, which became Harvard University. This guy’s famous for a lot of things, but not the least of which is two of his students were named Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. He’s got a book called Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? And in that book, he says this,

“The big questions have not gone away. Does human life have meaning? Do suffering and death have a purpose? Are we more than our material selves? Is everything about the human condition explicable by biochemistry and physics? What is a good life? Is there any reason to lead a good life rather than a bad one? Shall I live for myself or for others?”
Harry Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?

And so, as I said in our previous two studies here in Genesis, it really addresses some of the big questions. And I don’t even know what the nature or level of faith Mr. Lewis might have, but he is asking those questions. Even if he weren’t a believer in God at all, those questions remain, and they nag all human persons eventually at some point in time in their life. And so, what’s really great about our Bibles is that here we are in the Book of Genesis, the first of 66 books in the library we call the Bible, and it’s already beginning to unfold some of the answers to our very big questions. What is the nature of the creation account we find in Genesis? How does Genesis present itself? What can we deduce from what the book actually says? And that’s very important for us, that last part of that question, especially because I think a lot of people will reach or try to stretch and make Genesis say something it doesn’t. Or they’ll try to deny something that it does say.

And I would summarize it this way: Genesis is not an explanation of how God created everything. Genesis is a declaration that God created everything. And we’ll continue to sort of drive that home as we go along through the rest of this particular chapter. Today, we look at what the Genesis record actually says about the creation of humanity. What does it mean to be a human? Yes, one of those big questions that Dr. Lewis was asking as well. What’s different about our role in all of God’s creation? I think that’s an important question. And how do we find meaning and purpose as we explore God’s original creation design for the human person?

This is really important. Well, let’s read the text without any further introduction. I’m in verse 26 of chapter one of Genesis. Let me pray for us: Lord God, I pray that You’d open our eyes that You might reveal to us those things that we can’t see on our own. Lord, what we know not I pray that You’d teach us, what we have not I pray that You’d give us in terms of whether that’s faith to trust You or courage to continue trusting You in the middle of a chaotic and darkened world. Lord, I pray also that what we are not You would make us. Be active in our lives, Lord, transforming us, changing us, filling us with Your inexhaustible hope. And I pray, God, that You would pour Your glory through Your people as we study Your Word today. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Verse 26 of chapter one of Genesis is God saying this, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’” Now, you probably noticed already that God is speaking here, and He’s speaking in the plural. And you may be wondering, “Well, what’s that all about?” Well, remember I just said this is Trinitarian. The Bible has a very Trinitarian view of God. God living in perfect relationship; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and together involved in the creation event as we learn in Genesis One. It’s also in John One as I said earlier. We also find reference to that in Hebrews One and in Colossians One. And so, it’s just everywhere.

And so, God, within the godhead, speaking to Himself, no longer in the third person, this is, “Let us make man in our image.” This is the first-person plural. This is amazing, “according to our likeness.” So, there’s the image of God. And then, “Let him rule over the birds of the sky.” And so, there’s reflecting the image, there’s a vice regency, sort of ruling with God. There are so many wonderful things about what God says here as He goes into the process of creating humanity. And He describes that vice regency, that they’re to, “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Really, really powerful.

“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female, He created them.” And I love that. That’s just awesome too. Evidently reflecting the image of God takes more than just males. It takes males and females. He has created humanity, male and female. And by the way, it’s the only part of all the entire creation record or account where the distinction between male and female is actually mentioned. This is really powerful, significant, what’s being said here.

“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” And so, there’s this reflecting God’s glory. That’s part of it. There’s the vice regency, the ruling over creation. And then there’s also just this reproduction, that God wants our first parents to reproduce and to fill the earth. And this is really powerful though. “God said, “Behold, I’ve given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, every tree which has fruit yielding seed, it shall be food for you.’” I love it that God loves food. That’s just awesome. “‘And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth, which has life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so.”

And notice how God is providing for His creation, His creatures in His creation. Notice how God has taken the time to do that and used His amazing power to create out of nothing, “ex nihilo”. Create the system where things will be able to reproduce, whether that’s the creatures, whether that’s the fruit trees, whether that’s the vegetables, whatever. It’s all going to be a system, complete system, complex, beautiful, amazing, astonishing, and all glory goes to God. And verse 31 is this beautiful sort of summation, the last verse of chapter one. “God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good,” we’re told here. Heretofore, each and every other time, one of the creation days as mentioned, it says it was good, but here He’s looking over everything and He calls it very good, and I love that. That’s awesome.

“And then there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day,” and that’s the first time the definite article, T-H-E is actually there, even though some of your English translations will have, it’ll say the sixth day or rather it’ll say the fifth day or the fourth day or whatever. But it’s really supposed to be day four, day three, day two, day one. Here we have the sixth day. There’s something really significant about that because God, of course, is going to rest on the seventh day. He will have completed His creation work. It’s also the sixth day that He creates the only part of creation that He creates in His own image, humanity. And so that’s really a signal to us that there’s something very special going on when God created humanity.

So, let’s take a look then at what this says. This is truly one of the most amazing passages of Scripture. And I think if you’ll let this sink in a little deeper than it might have before, when you’ve read it before, maybe when you read it as a child or you saw the flannel graphs and people were holding up the different kind of animals and the different trees and plants and all that sort of thing. That’s all great, that’s wonderful. But let this sink in, that what God has done in creating humanity in His image is really, really significant. And it impacts you. It impacts me as well. It’s a beginning of an answer to our big questions like: How do we all get here? Who or what am I? Who or what are you? That’s another question to ask. Is there evidence to suggest that human life has any meaning and purpose at all?

And these questions, they’re big. They really have an impact on our everyday lives, and not only in our intellectual life, but also on our moods and on our view of work, our view of play, our view of relationship, it’s all included in this. So, we want to get right inside of this. I want to go back to the very beginning of your life and of my life and of the creation of humanity. There are those that would just say, “Oh, human beings are just creatures. They’re just animals. They’re just a smarter monkey.” So, they would posit the notion that this, and I’ll put up three photos here for you, here’s Rodin’s Thinker. They would posit the notion that Rodin’s Thinker is just a smarter version of this:

And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but how do you think the monkeys feel about that possibility? Yeah. There are three different views on it. I’m sure they have their different views. Well, Francis S. Collins has been in the news lately because he’s the Director of the NIH, The National Institutes of Health. He’s also the former Director of the Human Genome Project, and he’s the author of a book called The Language of God, which I highly recommend to you if you’re interested in studying in a little more depth some of the beautiful and complex design in God’s creation, which ends up being as Francis Collins will say right here, “God’s language.” Look at this quote.

“As the director of the Human Genome Project, I’ve led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan.”
Dr. Francis Collins

And so here we have, when you think about it, this is somebody that’s studied all this in great detail from a scientific standpoint, who also happens to look through the lens of being a person who’s a believer as well. And so all that you might have heard about all scientists thinking that religion and theism and all that’s nonsense. That’s not true at all. There are just so many. I could rattle off name after name after name of great scientists, amazing scientists, who have led the way in their field and who are also believers. But he’s talking about the complexity of the human person. Take a look with me at some photographs, the development of a human baby inside the womb. And these are all courtesy of webmd.com. You can look at these if you want. But here’s what conception basically looks like.

[see video for images]

At this moment the genetic makeup, and take a good look at this, is actually complete, including the sex of the baby. Within about three days after conception the fertilized egg is dividing very fast into many cells. It passes through the fallopian tube into the uterus where it attaches to the uterine wall, like this photograph has. And the placenta, which will nourish the baby, also starts to form. Here’s the eight-week-old human person inside the womb. This baby is now a little over half an inch in size. Eyelids and ears are forming. You can see the tip of the nose. Arms and legs are well formed. Fingers and toes grow longer and more distinct. Here’s 16 weeks, baby now measures about four and a third to 4.6 inches and weighs about three and a half ounces. The baby’s eyes can blink, the heart and the blood vessels are fully formed. Baby’s fingers and toes and fingerprints are there as well. Can you imagine that? The fingerprints and that sort of development – all of this is coming about and that just at 16 weeks.

Look what 20 weeks looks like. Baby weighs about 10 ounces and is a little more than six inches long. The baby can suck a thumb, yawn, stretch, and even make faces. Isn’t that awesome? 28 weeks: Most babies weigh about two, maybe two and a half pounds, becoming more active and could survive outside the womb if given the right opportunity and care. And then here’s something similar to what you looked like when you burst forth into this world. Yay. All right, I love this too. Welcome to the world, little image-bearer. All right.

How did all of this become possible? The complexity of this, the way that each cell, as it began in that tiny, tiny little single cell and then developed, how did all those cells know what to do and what to become? How did some of them know to become a kidney or a heart or a lung or a nerve ending? I mean, there’s just so much amazing about you and about what God has done in creating you and in creating me. Are we just random cosmic accidents? Or are we the product of some kind of intelligent design and of a creation event? Because you need to know, we’re not the first people to ask this question.

Saint Augustine of Hippo in Confessions says,

“Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

That’s so true. I mean, the evidence for intelligent design, the evidence for the complexity and beauty of who you are, not only in your eyeball, but right inside your nose. I mean, the way the ear works, I mean, there’s so much that it is just mind blowing. All you have to do is begin to explore it a little.

In his book, Does God Exist?, J.P. Moreland, and I won’t put this quote up here because he’s really just paraphrasing something that the Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle has said. Hoyle calculated the chance possibilities of life arising spontaneously on its own, without a designer, without a beginner, if you will. And he basically compares it to a tornado blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously forming a fully functional Boeing 747 out of the trash. And incidentally, if you’re interested in reading that book, it’s called Does God Exist? He’s sharing basically in a debate with the atheist Kai Nielsen, a leading atheist thinker. And then he’s got additional comments in that same book from Peter Kreeft, William Lane Craig, and the former atheist Antony Flew. Some of you may have heard of him as well. He has come to the conclusion that theism actually makes more sense.

Now, if the theory of naturalistic evolution is true, that is, the material world is all there is. There was no designer, there’s no God, there’s no spiritual realm at all. And so naturalistic, atheistic evolution is sort of the claim that leaves out the immaterial; it leaves out any kind of being that would’ve created everything that exists. And in the naturalistic, atheistic evolutionary track and way of thinking, there are variations on the theme. But the idea is that it’s just all on its own and that everything’s just a sort of a random co-location of atoms and chemicals.

But how did, I’d ask this question, how did the minimum required number of not one human person, but two, and that, distinct as one male and one female, so that they could then procreate and have a third human individual appear, and then begin to establish the human humanity and the entire human population on earth. How is it possible that all of that happened at precisely the same time, in the same part of the globe, in the same globe in the universe, et cetera, et cetera? I think the more you start to think about the origin of all things, it begins to make much more sense that there’s a God.

There’s an intelligent designer, that we would call God, of course, that has revealed Himself in the Scriptures, right from the very beginning. Because God is, in chapter one of Genesis, guess who’s the subject of every verb? Yeah, God. So, this book begins not so much about you and not so much about me, not even so much about creation. It talks about that, that’s true. But this book begins with and is all about God. And running through all the way to Revelation, it’s a story of how God has been in pursuit of a people that He can call His own, a people that would respond to His lovingkindness and His grace and His mercy.

Well back a little more on the scientific side of things, Sir John Eccles, was an Australian neurophysiologist who was the 1963 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine and Physiology for his work on the synapses of the human nervous system and the neurotransmitters in the human brain. He said this,

“The amazing success of the theory of evolution has protected it from significant critical evaluation in recent times. However, it fails in a most important respect. It cannot account for the existence of each one of us as unique self-conscious beings.”
Sir John Eccles

In other words, that’s kind of what I was talking about there when I said one, not just one but two, and a male and a female so they could procreate, because that’s necessary, and for all of that to happen? How could that?

And then he’s just stretching it out a little bit and he’s saying, “Each one of us is self-aware. We have brains. That we’re sentient creatures. We’re aware of our existence and we’re aware of what’s going on around us. And yet none of us are the same person. We’re all unique.” The millions and millions and millions of us that have ever existed are each a unique individual and image-bearer, I would argue, of God who has created us.

So then this leads us back to these questions at hand. What does Genesis actually say? We just read it. What does it actually say and teach us about the creation of humankind? And what do we learn about what it means to be a human person here at the end of Genesis One? Well, the answer you arrive at to these kinds of questions is so important as I said earlier, and I’ll tell you why. I’m going to put this up on the screen for you. How do you view your own life? It really will affect that. Does my life have any meaning? Is there any value or purpose to my existence? And if so, how do I experience that? Is that about finding a greater number of followers on a social media platform? Is that about accumulating more wealth? Is that about being the most paid attention to famous person in the world? Or what? What is it that gives value to human life? That’s very important.

How you view your own self will be impacted by how you answer the question of what it means to be a human person that we find here in Genesis. Also, how you view the lives of every other person. This is massive. This is really important in our own day and age, when we’re becoming more and more aware of other persons – not only right here in your own household or in your own neighborhood, your own school, your own church, your own place of work, in your own city, state, and the United States and on and on around the world, but down through all of history. How you view other human beings is greatly affected by whether or not you think we’re all just a result of random chance co-location of atoms, or you think there’s some divine designer who has made you and implanted in you His image and granted to you the dignity of bearing His image.

This is amazing when you stop to think about it. Because you may not consciously make all those connections, but it trickles down in the way you view other people, especially other people who don’t look like you, don’t think you, don’t talk like you, aren’t from your neighborhood or your nation. Very important, because we can have it pounded into us, where somebody’s just forcing from a humanistic level to make us think that all other human beings are of the same and equal intrinsic value. Or at some point we’ll run out of patience for that, or we’ll become so selfish that we’ll start to demand our own way. Or is there a God who designed them all, who’s planted His image into every single human person, whether or not they even believe in God? If there’s a God that’s done that, then the value that is in every human person is intrinsic. It can’t be taken away from them. It’s part of what it means to be a human person. And so, when you have that perspective, you see, it just changes the way you view other people.

And thirdly, it really impacts the way you view the world in which we all live. And I’ll touch on that a little bit more, but when you think about the rest of God’s creation, what it says here in chapter one about your role and my role as part of God’s creation, granted that we’re uniquely created in God’s image and no other part of creation is, but yet there’s still something He says here, that God has designed us to do something as well as to be something. And this is just again, mind blowing.

All right? So, Genesis teaches us that human beings, number one, I’m going to give you three things. Number one – are created beings. We’re created beings. We are not an accident, no matter what you think or no matter what you’re feeling. Sometimes our feelings drift over into our mind where we’re doing our thinking, and we need to be careful as Dallas Willard says in Renovations of the Heart, we need to let the proper organ that was designed for thinking be the one that does the thinking. Your mind is the one that is supposed to do your thinking. Your heart is supposed to do your feeling. Great, we need both, no question, but land the airplane with your mind and enjoy being blown away by a sunset at the beach or the mountains with your heart as well as your mind. And again, they work together. I get it. But this is really important for us. You’re not an accident. I’m not an accident here.

We were created, and we are created, but we’re not the creator and we are not self-created. And I know a lot of people would like to think we can do that or self-recreate. But we were never designed to carry that burden. And it breaks my heart to see the folks who suffer under the delusion that they need to be the one to bear the burden, to recreate who they are. No, God is our creator, and life is a gift given to you and a gift given to me. And we need to receive from Him what we can’t achieve on our own.

Do you know all human beings share 99.9% of the same DNA? But that one-tenth of 1% makes a huge difference. I mean, it represents millions of little differences in your fingerprint, in your personality, in the way you look and the shape of your ears and your nose and all that sort of thing. We each have 46 chromosomes, in a human cell arranged in 23 pairs. And yes, I understand there are just minuscule number of differences to these kinds of things that I’m going to say. But it’s quite clear that the natural order of things includes 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs. They carry genetic information that has been passed from a parent to the children through heredity.

And it’s because our chromosomes exist in matching pairs, with one chromosome of each pair being inherited from each biological parent. And that’s really important for us to know. That’s why you want to know, for instance, about any kind of difficulties, physical ailments or tendencies that your parents might have, so that you can be prepared yourself for working against those or by guarding yourself against all of those. But we all have an average. I don’t know if you know this or not, but your brain weighs about three pounds. Sometimes I feel like mine is probably down to two pounds, but they’re comprised of about 100 billion cells. Do you understand? I mean, you began as a single cell. This is just amazing. And your brain alone has a hundred billion cells in it. The human body is made up of an average of 30 trillion cells that renew and replace every five to seven years. So, I can literally say to you today that you will be a new person in five to seven years, because every cell you have right now will be replaced. It’s really amazing when you think about all of this.

And I find, by the way, great freedom in knowing that I’m a created being. In knowing that the burden isn’t mine to find out who I am, to establish who I am, to assert who I am. I don’t have to do any of that. I’m set free from all of that because I find my life in Christ. In Christ alone, I find all I need for life, and even beyond that. He’s my hope even beyond that, you see? So, it’s really important for us to learn how to rest in the love of our creator and in being part of His creation that He’s created in His image so uniquely and so beautifully.

Isaac Newton was the English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian and key figure of the scientific revolution. He says,

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of God’s existence.”
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Ah, yeah. So how about you? I grant, by the way, that you could listen to me spew all of these statistics and you could listen to all kinds of stuff and still come down with a different conclusion. I would argue God’s given you a mind, and He’s inviting you to come and to reason with your mind and ask some of these questions. And I would even say these questions are a gift so that we might be led to Him.

So, Genesis teaches us that human beings are created beings. Secondly, it teaches us that we bear the image of God. And I know there’s been a lot of speculation about what does that mean to bear the image of God? Well, at the very least, what we have learned here about God in chapter one and the previous verses, is that He’s relational, He’s loving, He’s communal. Father, Son, Spirit, all agreed, “let us make man in our image.” It’s right there. And then it teaches that we are also created to bear that image. He creates us for relationship. He creates us to be loving. And we’ll learn more about that in chapter two as we get a closer look at the creation of the man and the woman. It’s really wonderful. Communal, relational, rational, moral, creative, productive, communicative. So, for us to be able to understand when God says, “Go and fill the earth,” we have to understand what is He saying? What does that mean?

Rather than being created without reference to any kind of true north or any kind of creator or any kind of designer, rather than just appearing out of nowhere, or as we said before, climbing out of the primordial ooze and turning into a tadpole or into a monkey and going through the zoo and then coming out me and you, that’s not what happens here. We’re talking about a God who has created humanity on the sixth day, however long a day was. He did that for a reason. He wanted to create a being that would bear His image. And this is such a beautiful thing. And it takes both of us, all of us, if you will, to bear that image. And He made that very clear when He created them, both of them, male and female, He created them to bear His image. This is really awesome.

So, when reflecting the image of God, male and female human beings are a unity and yet a diversity, and a complimentary diversity as well. It’s just so amazing, kind of mind blowing, when you start to think about it. The image of God is the basis for Christianity’s belief in both the intrinsic value of all human life and the dignity of all human life. It means that, for those of us who are Bible-believing Christians, we believe that every human person has value. No matter how famous or obscure, no matter how rich or poor, no matter what age they are from the womb to the tomb. No matter how informed or malformed they may be. Every human person has value, intrinsic value, and dignity of human life and the image of God. No matter what the color of our skin, no matter what the passions of our heart might be, no matter what we believe or don’t believe, there is this image of God that has been imprinted on every human person.

Listen, this is the strongest basis, I would say, for any belief system, that human life has intrinsic value because it is a life created in the image of God. Not just because some professor is forcing us to think one way and not another. This is us coming to the place where we believe that God has actually created every single one of the human beings in His image. It eliminates all racism, it eliminates all prejudice, all bigotry, any sense of superiority in any and all classifications or groups of human persons. Why? Because we all bear this image. Now, when I sin, I distort that image. It’s kind of like a carnival mirror and I’m looking in. You can look in a carnival mirror and sometimes your head’s like this big or body is or whatever, and it just changes everything. It distorts the way the human person is supposed to look. And that’s what sin does to our souls.

And so, it’s important for us to know that God is at work to transform us and redeem us. In Jesus, what He’s done is He’s come and become a human person. He’s showing us what this looks like to be a real human person, redeemed, recreated — the original, the most human, the best human we could possibly ever be, we see in Jesus. He is the most fully human, and this is what’s powerful. We place our trust, hope and faith in Him, and He begins to redeem us. And God, the Holy Spirit, begins to transform us into the image of God’s dear Son, Jesus Christ, which is really powerful.

Derek Kidner in his commentary on Genesis says,

“As long as we are human, we are by definition, in the image of God. But spiritual likeness — in a single word, love — can be present only where God and man are in fellowship. Hence the Fall destroyed it, and our redemption recreates it and perfects it.”
Derek Kidner

So wonderful.

Thirdly, Genesis teaches us that human beings: One, are created beings. Two, bear the image of God. Three, serve as God’s vice-regents. We’ve been given the privilege of being created in God’s image, but with that comes this amazing responsibility. And we see that, don’t we, in verse 28. “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” This is why it’s so important for us to study a book like Genesis. The book reveals to us God’s original design, His intention for humanity, and for humanity in the context of all of creation. And it’s that we would be, at least in part, not only His image-bearers, but also, we would be His vice-regents, that we would be the ones caring for creation.

And this is something that’s so important for us as Christian persons to believe in and to do. And again, I think we have a much greater motivation than just some government telling us to recycle or whatever. This is more important because it’s at a higher level. We were actually created to care for creation, you see. God’s creation is as near as your own body. The body of your best friends or your spouse, God’s creation is in them as well. Everybody that you know. His creation is in the place you live, the place you work, the air you breathe, the water you drink. His creation is anywhere that you might even have some kind of influence yourself. So, on social media, in an email, in doing your daily work. How are we doing at treating others as if they were created in God’s image, as if they were bearing God’s image, as if they also could participate and join God in His mission in the world to bring about God’s glory?

Lesslie Newbegin says, it affects all of life, and I’m going to just put this quote up on the screen for you.

“The redemption with which He is concerned is both social and cosmic, and therefore the way of its working involves at every point the re-creation of true human relationships and of true relationship between man and the rest of the created order.”
Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of Church

And we’re learning this together, aren’t we, what that means in the context of real relationships? When the watching world can look at the church and see healing and reconciliation in terms of our relationships with one another. When the watching world can see racism receding and anger and all of that turning into joy, rejoicing in the fact that we were created by God. He’s planted His image in each and every one of us. We find inexhaustible hope in Jesus and in the Gospel. When the watching world can start to see that, the glory of the Lord is made visible and audible. And this is exactly what God intends to do in the world in which we live.

I’ll close with this quote from A.W. Tozer.

“The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source.”
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

I wonder, do you need to return to the source today? Have you distance between you and God? Do you need to return to Him today? And the Bible has a beautiful word called “repent” for that. And we’re all walking in a way of repentance. It’s not just a one and done thing. It’s a way of life for us.

And so, we turn away from our sinful selves, and we turn toward the Lord in repentance and in faith, believing. Do you need to get back on track with hearing from His Word? I hope you’ve got a one-year Bible plan going. If you need to spend more time in prayer, realize that’s another one of the things He created us for, that we might be in fellowship with Him. And that part of that is communing with Him and delighting in Him and expressing our adoration and love for Him.

This is why we study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We need to be reminded over and over and over again of this relationship God wants to have with us. God alone has the power to create. That’s true. And He created everything out of nothing. God alone has the power to forgive our sins. That’s true. And He’s eager to do that for you and for me. And God alone has the power to raise the dead. And no matter where you’re at, no matter how far you’ve drifted from Him, no matter how dead your soul may feel, I just want you to know, He loves you and He’s drawing you to Himself, that you might know Him. And not just know about Him, but actually know Him in a loving, reconciled relationship through faith in Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.

(Edited for Reading)