Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you for a new day of life. Thank you for sustaining me through the night, and thank you for your patient forbearance with me, I deserve none of it. According to the greatness of your compassion, I ask this morning that as I read your word, you would speak to me and wash my heart anew. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Reading
Gen 1:24-31.
“And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26. 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.” 27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
28. 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.” 29. And 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. 30. 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. 31. 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.”
Meditation
There’s a very interesting part of our passage that has been much discussed over the years. Consider what we see in verse 26: “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.” Now if you collected all that has been written on this verse, you’d probably be able to fill entire rooms with the books. There are many opinions, but let’s consider the plain grammar for a moment: “Let us make man”. This phrase is a divine utterance written in the first person plural. Not “Let me make man”, but “Let us make man.”
Moses may not have understood this clearly, but in the fullness of scripture there can be no doubt: the Triune God of scripture made man in his own image, and God’s Triune nature introduces another important aspect of our creation in the image of God: that we are relational images of heavenly glory. But let me explain what I’m trying to open up here.
The first thing to affirm up front is the basic fact that God is triune. There is one God who exists in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now what this means is that God is not a singular being. He is not isolated, he is communal. There are three persons in the Trinity. In the Islamic belief system, God is a singular, distant personality. In scripture, however, he is revealed as being a God of love, and that love doesn’t depend on anything he has made, because perfect, infinite love has always existed between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are relational images of heavenly glory.
We find these things presented in our text as well. There is a communal “we” in the godhead, and then there is a relational, communal image affirmed in the makeup of the church (3:27). It was not good that man should be alone, therefore God made the woman and he sent them out together to go forth and multiply. Part of being made in the image of God means that we are created for relationship as communal beings. This is hard-wired into our spiritual makeup.
Be ye doers of the word…
Following on from these things, we may draw a very clear line of application for our own lives, here it is: you need relationships. It is not good for man to be alone. Firstly, you need relationship with God himself. Part of our nature as images of God is that we need to be in relationship with God. We are totally dependent on him. Even before the fall, we still lived by grace alone. We see it in 1:29, that life was a gift from God. So let me ask you now: Where do you stand with God? Is it will with your soul? Since mankind fell into sin, there has been a chasm between God and man. On that day, we died, our relationship with God was severed. Things are not ok in the world today. But God, in his grace, made it possible for that relationship to be healed. How? By sending his only Son, that whoever believes on him might have eternal life. So we need to be in relationship with God, but also with each other – which brings us onto another application from this doctrine.
As a secondary application, part of our relational nature also means that God is calling us to build our relationships with each other. You cannot be a lone island. To isolate ourselves is to work against the image of God in which we have been made. And so we especially need fellowship with our fellow believers, we need encouragement from one another, we need the ministry of one another, we need teachers to open up God’s word to us, we need servants to minister God’s grace to us – we need relationships. Each of us needs to then ask ourselves: How are my relationships with other believers going? And – more specifically – am I cultivating those relationship? Am I investing in the lives of others? Am I serving them with my God-given talents? Am I thankfully open to receiving the ministry of others too? Am I investing in the community of God’s people?
In John 13:35 Jesus said: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Part of the reason why love is such a powerful witness to the truth of the gospel is because it is a central aspect of God’s image in us. Our lives are supposed to be a restored picture of what human life was created to be in the image of God, we are therefore called to build our relationships together. And don’t be the one to get bitter because others don’t do it for you, be the one to take the first step and invest even when others aren’t. That is part of what it means to be Christ-like, that’s what Christ did for us. SDG.
Prayer of Confession & Consecration
Our Lord and God, I thank you for the gift of relationships. Thank you that you have called us in to relationship with yourself, even though once we were your enemies. Thank you for the people you have placed in our lives, and the gift of these relationships. Please forgive us for the many times we have acted selfishly in our relationships, and help us to love and serve one another as you have loved us. Please help us to consider one another to be more excellent than ourselves. Please help us to truly invest into the relationships that you’ve given to us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Day 32: We are relational images of heavenly glory (Gen 1:24-31).