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Based on Gen. 1:26-31
On July 14, 1789 the people of Paris stormed the Bastille and began to tear down this hated symbol of tyranny. So many had been brutally tortured an imprisoned there. No one seemed to know what happened to the stones until Joseph Gies in doing research for his book Bridges And Men discovered that the director of France's 18th century bridge and highway authority used the stones from the Bastille to build a bridge across the Seine River. The very same material used to build a prison to deprive people of freedom was used to build a bridge to enlarge man's freedom.
This illustrates that good or evil is not in the material, but it is in the manner in which it is used. The same knife that is used by a surgeon to save life, can be used by the murderer to take life. The same pen can be used to write the Gospel or a hate letter. The same tongue can be used to bless or to curse. Unlike many religions and philosophies of the world, Christianity believes that matter is good. When God finished the creation of the universe He said it was very good. Matter is no accident. It is God's creation. God used matter to communicate a message about His being and His love. All of the material creation declares the glory and wisdom of God.
The very concept of beauty is meaningless without matter. Beauty is an abstract concept, but matter is concrete, and if the abstract idea of beauty is to have any meaning, it must be embodied in a concrete example. The beautiful idea of any artist is impossible to see until he puts it onto canvas, or into some material form. Matter is also God's means of communicating to man the abstract message of love. God became flesh in Jesus Christ in order to communicate in a concrete way the love He has for man. We use the matter of bread and juice to convey the greatest spiritual truth in the universe, for they represent the body and blood of Jesus. When we baptize we use physical water to convey the message of being buried with Christ and resurrected to new life. We use material means to express spiritual truth.
Every spiritual message in God's revelation is communicated through matter. The Bible is written on matter. It uses paper, leather and ink, but these material things convey the spiritual message of God command. God spent the greatest part of the creative weak making matter, and all the things that are without life. Even when He made life it was combined with matter. When He comes to the climax of His creation He forms man from the dust of ground. Man is made of matter. He is composed of the same elements as the rest of creation. The atoms that God created were like the stones of the Bastille. They could be used to make a mountain, a maple, a moose, or a man. We want to look at the 3 phases we see here in the making of man.
I. GOD'S CONSULTATION ABOUT MAN. v. 26
God pauses before He creates man. All of the rest of creation He has called into existence with no mention of reflection, but before man is created He holds consultation with someone. The great debate through the centuries has been over the question of whom it was with that He had this consultation. Jewish scholars have felt He consulted with the angels, but the great Jewish scholar Cassuto has rejected this, for there is no evidence that God created with the help of angels. He feels, as many Christians do, that the plural is the plural of majesty. A king often referred to himself in the plural. This has not satisfied many who prefer to see this as a clear reference to the Trinity. This might be a hint, but in itself there is nothing triune about plurality.
The best way to see it is that it does not teach that God is a Trinity, for a plural can be two or four as well as three. On the other hand we see that the New Testament does reveal God in 3 persons. We can look back and see that in this text God was keeping open the possibility of reading the Trinity back into the Old Testament. The New Testament makes it clear that Christ was the Creator, and this plural in the Old Testament makes it possible to see how that can be so. From the New Testament perspective this is a reference to God the Father consulting with God the Son about the making of man.
The Trinity of God is not the main truth we want to see here, however, for the unity of man is even more basic to a proper understanding of biblical theology. Bernard Ramm in The Christian View Of Science And Scripture writes, "The unity of the human race is one of the most important matters in Christian theology." There have been man attempts to deny this in science and theology. Some have felt that different races have had different origins, but science has rejected this as being highly improbable. In theology there are some who believe in a pre-adamite theory that says all of the fossils of cavemen were before Adam, and they all died before Adam was created. Some like the well known R. A. Torrey believed that some of these pre-adamite people were still alive at the time of Adam. Some feel that it was from these people that Cain took his wife.
Time does not permit to show that all of this is conjecture opposed to the biblical picture. All we can do now is to point out that the whole redemptive plan of the New Testament is built on the assumption that Adam was the first man, and that all in him die, but all can be made alive in Christ. Paul calls Adam the first man, and Gen. 3:20 calls Eve the mother of all living. This makes it clear that no persons existed but those who were born from her. Cain's wife was also then a child of Eve. The natural evidence of the unity of man is vast, but if we believe the Word of God, we need no further evidence. Paul in Acts 1:25-26 said, "..He gives to all life and breath, and all things, and has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth."
God's consultation to make man then was a reference to Adam the first man from whom the whole of human race came. Any speculation about pre-adamites has no right to call itself biblical sense it is in direct conflict with what the Bible teaches. Mankind has one origin, and is a unity.
II. GOD'S CREATION OF MAN. v. 27
There is higher view of man in the world than the biblical view. David in Psa. 8 says that man was made just a little lower than God Himself. Here God declares without any vagueness that He made man in His own image. This verse makes it clear that this honor holds true for all females as well as males. Some women haters of the past, even in the church, have denied this and have sought to defend that only men are made in the image of God. Christians in general have recognized with Luther that women are equal in righteousness, wisdom and eternal life. Luther said, "The women should not be excluded from any honor which human beings enjoy, even though she is the weaker vessel." This is not hard to swallow for most men because they like women.
The creation of man in two sexes allows man to share in God's power of creation, but this is true of animals and plants as well. This is not a part of what makes man uniquely created in the image of God. Some have tried to defend the idea that the body of man is in someway in the image of God. The Mormons hold this view, but this is rejected by most because God is Spirit and does not have a bodily form. The body of man is just another evidence of the marvelous wisdom of God. It use to be thought that the body was only worth less than a dollar, but the DuPont Foundation has declared that man is worth 85 billion dollars in potential chemical energy. The human body can produce 100 thousand red cells in a fraction of a second. It has about 26 trillion cells all under the central control of a 4 pound brain. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, but this does not tell us what the image of God is.
The subject of the image of God in man is a vast literature. We cannot begin to get into that issue. Our text tells us nothing about the image of God. It only states the fact that man was made in God's image. We have to go to the New Testament to get an idea of what it means by comparing the description of the new man in Christ with what the first man must have been. In Col. 3:10 Paul says that in Christ we "..have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator." Adam then it is assumed had full intellectual power, and the fact that he named all the animals on the day he was created confirms this. Man's ability to think and have true knowledge of reality is part of the image of God.
In Eph. 4:23-24 Paul says, "An be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." Calvin said on the basis of these verses: "We conclude that before the fall the image of God consisted in the light that filled man's mind, in the righteousness of his heart, and in the soundness of his faculties." This is what man was, and this is what God is working toward again in renewing man in Christ. Christians are to be growing into conformity with Christ, who is the express image of God. Christians are to be the best examples in mind and spirit of what man can be, and thereby bring glory to God. This ideal ought to drive all of us to see our desperate need for the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. How can we dare neglect prayer and a search for God's wisdom in His Word when we know what His goal is, and also see so clearly how far we are from it? God made Adam in His image, but he fell. Now in Christ we who are redeemed are again objects of God's creative hand. He is seeking to restore that marred image. Is our pattern of life helping, or is it digging deeper the scars of sin? God is still creating man in His image in the lives of those who have received Christ as Savior. The third step after God's consultation about man, and God's creation of man is
III. GOD'S COMMUNICATION TO MAN. v. 28
God's first words to his highest of creatures were similar to those He spoke to lower creatures, for He said to be fruitful and multiply. The facts of population explosion indicate that this is one command that men have obeyed consistently. There have been those who taught that sex and reproduction were the result of the fall, and that they were not a part of God's perfect original creation. This is a flat denial of Gen. 1. Fertility in plants, animals and man is directly ordained of God, and it is stamped with His approval when He declares all to be very good.
God said man was to fill the earth and subdue it. Here is the great commission of the Old Testament to go into all the world and gain control and supremacy over all life. Man was made to be king of the beasts. The Great Commission of the New Testament is to go into all the world and subdue men to Christ, who is King of Kings. God's original desire to have godly men in control of the world can only now be fulfilled as the church obeys the New Testament commission. It is man himself that now needs to be subdued.
The second thing God communicates to man is in reference to his diet, and it appears from the text that man as well as all animals was originally made to be vegetarian. Many feel that eating of flesh came with the fall, and that before this there was no killing for food. Luther felt this was the case, and also the Hebrew scholar Delitzsch who wrote, "God did not originally will the violent breaking up of the life of one living thing by another for the purpose of enjoying its flesh..." Others, like Calvin, are equally convinced that flesh was eaten. Dominion over animals implies the right to kill them for food, and it is obvious that the flesh of sacrifices would be eaten. Arguments are good on both sides, and it boils down to the reality that we don't know. We do not know how many angels can stand on the head of a pin either, but we are no worse for our ignorance. The basic idea is that God had provided for all life, and from His perspective it was very good.
It was all good for its purpose. Everything God made is good in its place. Dirt is good in the garden, but in a person eye it is not good. Because good things can be out of place there was always the potential of what was bad even in a perfect world. Adam stepped out of line and started a chain reaction of disharmony that we feel yet today. If it was not for the good news of the coming of the second Adam, the perfect Son of God, to restore what the first Adam lost, we would have only a message of despair. But Christ has come, and it is possible to get back in line with God's will and plan. In Christ it is possible to be a part of the new creation wherein God is again in the process of the making of man. We who have come to the cross need to be more grateful and more dedicated to the task of becoming mature in Christ, for this is God's goal in the making of the new man.
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