Genesis 1:26-27:‘Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image.”
You notice God is talking in the plural, which occurs several times in Scriptu re. This is the mystery that God is one, and yet more than one.
‘Let Us make man in Our image according to Our likeness.’
Now, those are two words: image and likeness. The Hebrew word for image recurs in a different form in modern Hebrew, in the phrase to take a photograph, it describes the outward likeness.
Then the likeness is the inner nature, a Triune God created a triune man: spirit, soul and body.
But there was that in the outward appearance of man, which in a way represented God. Some people find that hard to accept, but let me suggest you this.
It was appropriate that when God was manifested in the flesh, it was in the form of a male human being, not in the form of an ox or a beetle or a bird.
There was something about the outward appearance of man that could receive the inward form of God.
And then God goes on to say, ‘Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’
‘So God created man in His own image.’
Notice we come to the singular here: ‘His own image’.
‘In the image of God, He created him; male and female He created them.’
That’s very important.
There’s a lot of controversy on that particular theme at the moment in the papers. But God created two kinds of persons: male and female. They’re quite distinct, and there’s nothing in between.
And God created them to rule over all the earth. They were God’s vice-regents.
Years ago, when I was born in India, there was a viceroy over India. He was the Vice Regent of India, representing the Monarch here in Britain. And that was the position that God planned for man. He would be the viceroy, the Vice Regent, the one who reigned on behalf of God Himself.
So that was God’s plan and God’s program.
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And then we read the description of how he was made.
And one verse, Genesis 2, verse 7, contains such a wealth of riches that we could expatiate on it for a long time. This is how it came about.
Genesis 2:7:‘The LORD God formed man, (molded man, the Hebrew says) of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.‘
Living being does not adequately represent it. The union of Spirit from God and clay from the earth produced a soul. The soul is the unique individual, the thing which has the capacity to say ‘I will’ or ‘I will not’. The thing that makes decisions. The thing that determines the course of a life.
It came into being through a creative act of God when the Spirit of God, the inbreathed breath of God, came into the clay and man became a unique individual, a living soul.
I’m so glad to have Jenka here because I think like an African in many ways, having spent a good part of my life in Africa, and we Europeans were sort of rather a long way behind in some ways. We don’t see these things so vividly.
But I like to picture this. You see, God said the problem with Lucifer was he was too glorious, he was too beautiful, he was too powerful, he was too wise.
So we’ll start the opposite end. We’ll just take some dust, just dust, mix it with a little water, make some clay and mold it into a body.
And there it was, the body formed by God. A more beautiful piece of sculpture or statuary or whatever you want to call it, than even anything that Michelangelo ever produced. Perfect body. But it was just clay.
And then it says, ‘The LORD breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’
Hebrew is a very vivid language. The sound of the words is related to the thing that they describe.
And where it says, ‘He breathed’, in Hebrew it says ‘way-yip-paḥ’. Phonetically. The p sound is called a plosive. It’s an explosion. And then there’s a head which no ordinary English person can say but the Scots can say it. It’s a missing sound in our English vocabulary and that’s a long breath-out sound, an outgoing, long drawn-out sound, yip-paḥ…
And that contains such a sense of dynamic. God didn’t just breathe languidly into that body of clay. He breathed Himself into it. He imparted Himself… Through that breath, God came in, and that piece of play was marvelously transformed, miraculously transformed into a living human body, into a living human birthed person with all the faculties that you and I enjoy.
They came out of clay… through the inbreathed breath of God, a man became a living soul. That’s our origin. That’s where we came from.
We’re not insignificant. We’re very humble in our origin. But we have a divine destiny. We were formed and molded by the hand of God. We were inbreathed by the Spirit of God, the breath of God.
You know, I believe that, because of that we have an eternal destiny that life in us cannot die. It’s the life of God and it’s a very solemn thought for all of us, because we will never cease to exist.
We only have two alternatives. We can exist in the presence of God, or we can exist in eternal banishment from the presence of God. But one or other of those, each one of us here tonight is going to experience.
There is no such thing as extinction of a human soul. It’s eternal, for better or for worse. So that’s how we came into being. We are divine workmanship. We’ve mistreated it. We’ve failed to appreciate it. We’ve squandered God’s riches in unrighteous living, in foolish enjoyment and sinful pleasures, but we’re still in the likeness of God.