Genesis 1 - God Loves
Tom Shrader teaches from Genesis 1:26-27 about what it means for humans to be created in the image of God. He outlines six ways humans are unique from all other creation: how we were made, our value, our calling, our morality, our completion through male and female, and bearing God's image. Shrader emphasizes that our worth comes from being created by God, not from our achievements, and discusses how this truth should shape our understanding of morality, purpose, relationships, and mission.
“You are valuable because of who created you and the value that God places on you.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Doctrine
Recorded: 2011
Duration: 52 min
Themes: identity, purpose, worth, creation, image, calling, morality, relationships, questioning self worth, seeking purpose, struggling with identity, new believer, young adult, parent, feeling inadequate, confused about calling
Scripture: Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 1:1, Genesis 1:3, Genesis 1:6, Genesis 1:9, Genesis 1:11, Genesis 1:14, Genesis 1:31, Genesis 2:7, Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 2:18, Genesis 2:21-24, Genesis 3:8, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Matthew 6, Ephesians 5, Ecclesiastes 12:13
Theological Themes: imago dei, image of god, anthropology, human nature, biblical worldview, creation doctrine, male and female, divine calling
Full Transcript
If you have Bibles, you can open them to Genesis chapter one. If you don't have a Bible, raise your hand. Guys will bring you a Bible, and I'm going to guess it's about page one that you're looking at.
Today is the fourth week in a 13-week series dealing with doctrine. You know the topics. They're there on the cover of your bulletin, starting in the upper right-hand corner. Work your way around all 13 weeks. Seven or eight hundred of you have purchased the book that we're using by Mark Driscoll and an associate of his, and probably another five or six hundred of you have the study guides. I was working around the room before the 8:30 service. I saw half a dozen people, and they're going through the study guides for today, and I'm hearing all sorts of great things about those. So you know where we are in that cycle. By the way, if you don't have those resource tools, you can still go over to the bookstore and pick them up. There's a few copies of each of them left, so you can grab those if you'd like.
Our Focus Text: Genesis 1:26-27
Today, we're going to look at Genesis chapter one, verses 26 and 27 as our text for the day. So let's read it. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image. According to our likeness, let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' And God made man in His own image, in the image of God, He created them, male and female, He created them."
At the opening of Driscoll's section on this image of man being made in the image of God, he writes this: "What does it mean to be human? The question has implications for seemingly every discipline from theology to sociology, history, biology, psychology and the like. It is the doctrine that answers questions regarding how mankind is different from God the creator and His creation. It also reveals why we can believe in such things as compassion and equality, truths that an evolutionary worldview simply can't permit." So this is huge.
A Teaching Perspective
I told in first hour, and there's a connection here. Whoever teaches on the Gilbert campus teaches four times that day. So you teach at 8:30, 10:30, four and six. I've been visiting the other campuses. By the way, I really encourage you to do that on Sundays. It's fun. I was at Arcadia last week. I encourage you to stop in all three of the campuses. Gateway's been open about four weeks. I just think this summer's a great time to visit them. You won't miss anything because we're all teaching the same material each week. So you'll stay right in your flow.
I really encourage you to do that. Not that you're going to attend there, but that you'll have a sense of what God's doing in Redemption Church. I just think it'll make it much easier for you when you meet people to go, "Hey, you live out there way out in the East Valley, you ought to try the Gateway campus. You ought to take a look at Arcadia." So I encourage you to do that.
If you teach here at Gilbert, you teach four times. We'll always debrief and I'll go, "How did it go? What did you think? How did you feel about it?" Essentially, every guy will say the same thing: the 8:30 service is the toughest service. It's the toughest because it's early in the morning, but what really makes it difficult is it's your first time through the material. So what happens is you see things and you go, "Gosh, that should be down there. This should be over here. That illustration didn't work at all." People will come up, they'll ask you questions, ask you to explain things.
Then typically, 10:30, this is when we tape. If you go on the website, what you'll see is whoever was speaking at 10:30, like this message right now is the one that will be on there. This is usually the best of the day. Four o'clock, you go home, you sleep, you have two burritos. Four o'clock, I don't want to be there, you don't want to be there. Six o'clock, my horse is heading for the barn, you can kind of see it, so we're skipping. We said, "Ah, we covered that this morning. It's on the internet, you can get it." So 10:30 is kind of it.
Building on Previous Weeks
Here's why, and the reason I go through that is that's the same thing that's happened to me in this series. I have a better understanding and appreciation for week one now than I did then. In week one, Tyler taught here in Gilbert about the Trinity, about here is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons eternal and continuing in their personhood, individuals yet united, a perfect model of love and humility and submission, and why that's important, so we'll connect it today.
The second week, I was here, and we talked about God revealing Himself. So God reveals Himself to us in nature. We look around, sky, star, moons, creation. We look at that, and that points us to a creator, but then God revealed Himself to us in the Bible. So we spent our time there on 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17, that all scriptures inspired by God, good for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, so the man of God will be adequate for every good work.
Here's what we're saying: God speaks to us, reveals Himself to us in His word. So this word becomes our north star, our compass, an owner's manual. It tells me everything that God wants me to know about Him, about ourselves, about the world. It explains the world to us. I've said it to you a billion times. It really applies here in my Bible. Literally, page one and page two is God creating. Page three and a couple of verses is man's fall and sin. The rest of this is God redeeming and restoring what happened. It's His story. It's how do I get the most out of this?
So we said it this way: The Bible tells me what's right, what's not right, how to get
Last week, Neil taught about creation. He began in Genesis 1:1 and worked his way through this idea of God creating. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Here's what God wants us to know about how this began: that in the beginning, God created. The Hebrew word for God there is in the plural. It's God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In the passage we're looking at, Genesis 1:26-27, "Let us make man in our image"—plural personal. Here's this eternal God who begins to create. In the beginning, God created. We're going to talk about you and I being creative, but in terms of creation, the way God created, we could never do it because God did it from nothing. There was God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and He predates any creation. From nothing, then, God spoke this world into existence. That's what Neil took you through last week.
Verse 3: "Then God said, 'Let there be light.'" Verse 6: "Then God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of waters.'" Verse 9: "Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered.'" Verse 11: "Then God said, 'Let the earth sprout vegetation.'" Verse 14: "Then God said, 'Let the lights in the expanse of heaven be separated day and night.'" God speaks these into existence.
The Distinction Between Creating and Manufacturing
This is really important to get that distinction because I don't want, in any way, to think that somehow you and I and God are all creating. We manufacture. Let's say the craftsman that made this piano—we might say he or she is very creative. They took these raw materials, and they were molded into screws and nuts and bolts and keys and wheels and legs and all that. They might have even taken those raw materials and then assembled them, crafted them, put them together, added the wires, tuned it in such a way so that somebody really creative could sit down and make beautiful music here.
But they didn't create like God created. They manufactured. Get that distinction? They took raw materials and from it, perhaps in an imaginative, creative way, they fashioned a piano or a guitar or a drum set or a pulpit. But God took nothing and made this. Very big difference.
The Crowning Jewel of Creation
One of the things you learn as you work your way through this series—one week ties really closely to the next and easily could spill over. As Neil was teaching last week, when he got to that creation, he's coming on to this week's topic which is God creating man. By that we mean man and woman—people. God has creation. Next week we'll be teaching the fall. We're going to talk about Genesis 3. We're going to talk about how the world got as messed up as it is.
For us to really understand the fall, I think it's important for us to understand how distorted this world is from what God intended it to be. These all run together and I really encourage you—if you missed one of these you need to go back and listen to them. Even listen to them again because you'll start to see how we've put this together.
Here's this creation and now we come to what I think is the crowning jewel of God's creation. I think it because He says it is and that's us. That's mankind. That's why these views become so important.
Two Competing Worldviews
You have essentially two worldviews. You've got one: a lot of it is this all just happened. Don't really know how it started. In a sense this is just all an accident somehow. So you have generations now of young men and women who've been raised with the idea that they're here by accident and they're not going anywhere.
Doesn't that change the way you live as compared to if you think there's a creative God who created you, who has meaning for you, purpose for you, and there's life after death? Isn't it going to flesh itself out tremendously in the way you live? If you're an accident going nowhere, I understand. Whatever. Doesn't matter. I'll get all I can for me because it's all about me.
To take somebody who believes in this evolution random thing and then say mankind has value—I just think you have to ask why? What's the difference between us and a blob? We're all an accident, right? Just be consistent there.
The Biblical Worldview
The other worldview is that there's a Creator and we believe the biblical worldview is that there's a God who creates, that this isn't an accident. That there is a God—pre-existing eternal God. See how we build? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who exist in perfect harmony and unity but also they are creators and creative. So they make this world and everything in it. You've got God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Everything else is creation.
Look at the verse: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.'" We are literally a reflection of Him. We're a mirror of Him. Not perfectly. We'll do a little theology here.
God's Attributes
God has what we call attributes. God has incommunicable attributes and communicable attributes. God's incommunicable attributes are attributes that are unique to Him. His communicable attributes are existing perfectly in Him but they're also in us.
God's incommunicable attributes would be things like this: He's omnipresent. He's everywhere at all times and no creature is that. Even when we talk about the devil or Satan—so often the way people talk about him you get the impression that he's everywhere and all-knowing. No, he's a creature. God's omnipresent.
God's omniscient. He knows everything—past, present, future. He knows everything that happened. He knows actual. He knows potential. He knows you. He knows what you thought, what you said, what you did, what you didn't do, what you will do. He's God. He's all-powerful. He's able to do anything that He wills. Now this is important: He can't act contrary to His nature.
Say God can do all things. Well no. Can God sin? No. Can God make a square circle? No. Contradiction of terms. He's going to do all things but He's always going to act consistent with His nature.
God's immutable. It means He doesn't change. I like the way Driscoll says this. This is helpful too. He says God does not change in His essence, character, purpose, or knowledge but does respond to people in their prayers. God's immutable. He's not becoming. You and I are evolving, morphing, deteriorating.
There's a gal that comes in at 8:30 and about a month ago I noticed she's wearing a brace on her wrist. I've been having a lot of problems with my wrist. So the only thing, every week we just go, how's your wrist? She said, I noticed this morning, she said, I noticed two weeks ago I was trying to use a stool as an illustration. I couldn't pick it up. I had to bend over and use two hands to pick up the stool. Each week we try to, I try to get, because I don't want to go to the doctor, so I try to get from her what her doctor's telling her it might be because I'm sure that's what I have. The point being, I'm changing. I'm not immutable.
God's eternal. No beginning, no end. Not bound by time, space. And He's sovereign. He's in supreme control, absolute authority.
God's Communicable Attributes
Now that's not you. You aren't omniscient, you aren't omnipresent, you aren't all-knowing, you're not immutable, you're not sovereign, you're not eternal. But there are attributes that God has that are communicable. He has them perfectly and you have a portion of them. It's page 121. If you have the doctrine book, not a Bible here, if you have the doctrine book, it's page 121.
God's holy, so He's absolutely separate from evil. Now we mirror this in that we should hate sin and love holiness, but you all know from your own life that that's not perfect. He's love. God alone is perfect, perfect love, perfect goodness. We mirror that in the way we love Him and we love others, or try to, and family, friends, even strangers.
God is truth. He's a source of all truth. We try to mirror that as we reflect by biblical truth. He's righteous. Again, I like how it's stated here. He doesn't conform to a standard of right and wrong. The right and wrong flows from Him. And we do that as we try to bring justice and so forth into the world around us.
He is merciful and then He is beautiful. We try to mirror that as we create, as we enjoy beauty, and as we steward the creation that He's given us, and we express it in art or literature, some form around us. So you get that. So we say we're made in the image of God. It's not necessarily just these attributes, but you get a sense of that. When you look at us, we're a reflection of Him. We're a mirror.
Now we could jump to next week real quickly and see that we're a broken mirror. That what God designed and God intended has now been distorted by sin. We're going to get there, but we're going to get there next week.
What It Means to Be Created in God's Image
What's it mean that we are created in the image of God? Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and then He tells us a little bit after that to rule over the fish and the birds and the cattle. He created us in His image.
We get together every Wednesday at 11:45 and here is who has to be in the room. The guys that are going to be teaching on the Sunday that we're going to cover the material, and then everyone else in the pastoral team is invited. So like last Wednesday at 11:45, we were talking about next week. So I'll be teaching here. Matthew's going to teach at Gateway. He was there. Justin's teaching. So he was there and Tyler's teaching too. So there's four of us teaching next week. We were all there and then there were probably another eight guys.
We're there to talk about that lesson. What's God trying to say to us? What's the big idea that we want everybody at a redemption church, what do we want to see them walk away with? What's the action we can take? How does the gospel influence it? So when we get in those collectives, I'll tell you this because for however long, 25 years, I've done all the lessons essentially by myself. I don't do that. I love this. I learned so much. It's so helpful.
It's helpful to guys that they'll listen to some of them. I'll go, gosh, I got to remember not to say that. And then there'll be guys who will go, okay, this is it. Have you looked at this? They'll ask that question. Well, Justin taught essentially this lesson two or three months ago in St. Louis when he was there. So what we did is two weeks ago when we were working on this, we had all of that and then after that we added Justin's notes.
Six Things That Make Us Unique
So I thought at least this section I'd follow this on the image of God. Justin outlined it here and we're going to outline it as well. Six things that are unique about man, that separate us from all of the rest of His creation. And we find all six of these points here in Genesis chapter 1, Genesis chapter 2. So we'll be going back and forth.
Here's the first point, that we are unique in the way God made us. So I took you through that. God said, let there be light, there was light. God said, God said, God said. When you get to chapter 2, when he talks about, Moses talks about how we were made. Verse 7, he said, "Then the Lord God formed man from dust, from the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being."
There was something different about the way we were created, and there was a sense of intimacy that we have, different than the rest of the creation. Our relationship with the creator is different than that of a tree, or a rock, or a whale, or a mountain. When you look, we'll get there next week, in chapter 3, when you get to chapter 3, Adam, Eve, Eve tempted, they eat, you know the story. Chapter 3, verse 8, it said, "They heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day." I take from that, that that
was normative for them. They were created in this union with God. God is communicating to them. We see dialogue with them. We see God speaking all in this after the fall, but He was communing with them. There's an intimacy that God has with you that He doesn't have with your dog. There's a distinctive that's there.
Here's the second unique thing. There's a uniqueness of our value, or we use the term here even, perfection. Chapter 1, verse 31. So up to this point, God creates. Makes the heaven and the earth, sees the light, it was good. Sees the earth, it was good. Trees, it was good. Birds, it was good, it was good. He looks at man, and He beholds man, and He said, "It is very good."
There's something that's unique about man as compared to all of creation. In Matthew chapter 6, Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about the fact that you can't have two masters. He's talking about worry, and He's talking about provision. He's talking about how God cares for us. Worrying isn't going to add one day to your life. And then He says, let me illustrate this. You're worried about what you're going to eat, and what you're going to wear, where you're going to live. He says, look at the birds. The birds, they're not planting, and they're not harvesting, they're not sowing, and yet God takes care of them. And He asks this question, "Are you not worth more than they?"
Now He doesn't answer it because until about now, everybody understood the answer was yes. I probably spent about an hour a day checking news, and just stuff on the internet, and just working my way through it. And I came across this story on the internet this week, and then it kind of played itself out in the media.
When Society Loses Sight of Human Value
The city of San Francisco, which is trying to ban circumcision, pets of all sorts have added to that list now, goldfish. So here's the note. "It's the classic first pet. One at a fair, given as a child's first taste of responsibility. But San Francisco is trying to ban the sale of goldfish as pets. The city which is also trying to ban circumcision, has renewed its purse, trying to ban the sale of all pets." Which might not be a bad idea. "The Animal Control and Welfare Commission said that fish are often kept in humane conditions." Well they're in water. Humane conditions would be if you put them out on the sidewalk, it seems to me.
This is a logical extension of not understanding the creative God of the universe, in some vain attempt to try to bring meaning to a life that you say is accidental. It's a fish. Archie Bunker said years ago, the best pet there is, is a goldfish because it dies way before you get tired of it. It's a fish. You are more important than a fish, than a cow, than a bird.
Now we should be, I want to be really clear here, we should be really the ultimate environmentalist. In that we should not abuse God's creation. We should understand God's creation. But let's understand that God put us here and gave us a call and gave us dominion over all things. That's what He said. Rule. God made cows. Why? To eat. To milk. To serve you.
I just read this morning, they're trying to put, California has never seen a government program they don't like, so they're going to put this fast rail through there and they're rerouting the whole thing right through the middle of all of these farms because they're coming down here and they've hit a bird sanctuary. I've got news for you. Bring it through there and those birds will go somewhere else. I don't want to be disrespectful, but here's all this farmland you're going to tear up. Here's a bird sanctuary. The bird's going to go somewhere.
We go to Cannon Beach almost every summer. And Cannon Beach on the fourth of July is amazing. Cannon Beach is like, it's like the little town of three thousand on the fourth of July. They have this amazing, wonderful parade. Starts with the fire truck and the firemen are throwing candy. And then people bring their own floats. There was a lady who had a wiener dog, cut a French roll in half, taped it around the dog and that was her float.
Well, the beach at Cannon Beach, it's a long, Cannon Beach is long miles of flat beach. On the fourth of July, everybody just went down and started firing fireworks. That all stopped five years ago because out on the rock, it's a bird sanctuary, and they found this was alarming to the birds. You know what? It might ruffle their feathers for the night, but they're still out there on those rocks. You're more important than a bird, or a duck, or a goat, and for sure a cat. So you're more important than those.
Our Unique Calling
There's a uniqueness also, the third one, to your calling. And we touched on it there. Verse twenty-eight of chapter one. "God blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every other moving, living thing on the earth.'" This is before the fall. We work, we cultivate, we create, we develop. God put you here and you're unique. And God has a design and all that that goes with it.
Our Unique Morality
Here's the fourth way you're unique. You're unique in terms of morality. You have a sense of right and wrong really bred into you. Chapter two, verse sixteen and seventeen, God gives them a moral command. He doesn't give a command to any other part of the creation, but He says, "For us, from any tree of the garden you may freely eat, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for the day you eat of it you shall surely die."
You and I have a sense of morality, of rightness, of wrongness. There's a spirituality to us. There's a sense of something bigger than us. You never see a group of javelina who are carving images to something bigger than them. You never see a group of animals, other than a cat, worshipping themselves. You never see an animal out worshipping. A sense of morality, of right or wrong that's in you.
You're different. You're more valuable. You're unique. Here's the fifth way. There's a uniqueness of the way God completed us.
The First "Not Good" in Creation
Let's spend a second on this. Look at chapter two, verse eighteen. Then God said, and here's the first malediction, so everything up to this point has been a benediction. It is good, it is good, it is good, it's very good. "It's not good for man to be alone, so I'll make a helper suitable for him."
Now that word that's translated "helper" is also used to describe God Himself. It's not a demeaning word. It has this idea of completion. It's an idea of completion and a sense of needing one another.
So out of the ground, the Lord God formed the beasts of the fields and the birds of the sky and brought them to man to see them and He would call them whatever He called the living creature. That was its name. Man gave names to all the cattle and the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field, but for Adam there was no helper found suitable for him. Adam's all alone. He's trying to hook up. He's going, "Well there's a dog. I don't think I like that. There's an elephant. Too big." He goes through the whole thing. There's no helper suitable for him.
God Creates Woman
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept, and He took out one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into the woman that rib which He had taken from him and brought her to the man. And the man said, "This is now bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man." For this reason now, this is marriage, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
There's a completion that takes place. God created man and now He created male, under this idea of mankind, male and female. And He created the male and female, and Dr. Grudem points out in chapter 22 of his systematic theology, for at least three reasons that reflect the image of God. Number one, for this harmonious personal relationship. Number two, the idea of equality and importance. And number three, the difference in roles.
Marriage Reflects the Trinity
So look how this all works out. Modeled for us week one in the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit absolutely equal, eternal in existence and yet the Son submits Himself to the Father, still fully God. He doesn't give up His deity, or He doesn't relinquish that. He voluntarily yields to the Father so that He's in the garden. And He said, "You know what, tomorrow's a big day. I don't know about this. If there's any other way other than Me to go to the cross, if there's any other way, do it. But Father, not My will, but Your will be done." "I came to do the will of the Father."
Now as He creates us, male and female, He says when you come together, there's an order. So God's very clear. This isn't even complicated. God's very clear in the distinction of how He creates man and woman and then how they come together.
So when we get to Ephesians 5, here's what He said. He said, "Here's the order for a marriage. Wives submit to your husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church." That's the order for marriage. It's not a matter of equality or importance. Both are of equal value. Father, Son, both of equal value, but different roles. See how it all flows from creation. That's God's plan.
God's Design for Marriage
He's not saying men are better than women or women less than men. He certainly doesn't speak of that in terms of the community or the culture, but He says within the context of marriage, just as children are to obey their parents, husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and the wives are to submit to the husband. That's God's design for marriage. That's how marriage works.
By the way from this, and apparently based on just the news that we watch, we should go back and retrace this. God's plan for marriage is that it's permanent, monogamous, and heterosexual. God's design is not for two men or two women to marry. That's one of those areas where you're in collision with the culture.
A Real Email About Sexuality
I got an email. It was a while ago now, and I'll just read it to you. "Dear Tom, my partner and I recently moved to Arizona, Gilbert to be exact, and we're looking for a church to attend. We are an openly gay couple. We've been together five years, and we want to attend a church in which we will in no way feel uncomfortable about our sexuality. At the time it was East Valley Bible Church. EVBC is near our home and would therefore be most convenient. How does your congregation feel about homosexuality? Your input will be helpful."
It doesn't even matter how, I don't care how the congregation feels, it doesn't even matter how I feel. What does God say about it? And so this is really tough stuff. Because if you want to come here and feel comfortable, that's going to be tough. You should feel welcome. See, let's get it away from, because right now to even deal with the issue is so explosive that all of a sudden you're homophobic if you begin to just say, "Here's what God says."
But it's the same thing as gossip. It's the same thing as any, take, here's what God calls homosexuality: sin. He doesn't call it a legitimate expression of my sexuality. He calls it sin, a distortion of what He created.
Sin Is Sin
How do I feel about that? Well, I feel about it the same way I feel about gossip or anything else. I certainly don't think it's any worse. Tell you what, in fact, I'd rather have this guy and his partner here than some people who are here that are gossiping, yipping, yapping, and factious. I'd rather have them go away. But in both cases, I'd rather have the people repent and say, "That's not what God wants."
So it's not a matter of feeling comfortable. I'd be disappointed in us if you were openly engaged in sin, whatever it is, and you felt comfortable here. You should feel welcome, but there's that sense in which almost every week you go, "Guys, I just thought, this is not, what I'm doing is..."
The Challenge of Truth and Love
It's a very difficult place for us to be in. Because you want to declare the truth, and yet you want so much to be able to say, "Listen, God loves you. He loves you, and He created you, and we care for you." But the reality is, whatever the sin, it doesn't even matter what it is. We can't condone that. Not because we don't like you—because if we didn't like you, the easy thing would be to do would be to stay silent. It's because we do love you.
So, okay, Susan's got her cancer, right? We got people we don't even know sending us blenders and mixers and doctors who work out of their van and make house calls, and all sorts of stuff. They don't even know me, and they don't even know Susan, but they care and love her so much that they want to provide some relief, maybe a cure for her. Nothing wrong with that.
If you love somebody, let's get homosexuality and gossip out of the way. If you've got somebody who doesn't know Christ, the loving thing to do is not try to make them feel better about their spirituality. It's to confront them in a loving way with the claims of Christ, the uniqueness of Christ. Because at the end of this life, no matter how good or bad they behave, presumably, if I'm in this ongoing, openly gay, sexually active experience, I presume I'm not a believer. If I am, the discipline is coming.
Same thing, don't get hung up on that. If you're openly involved in gossip, and I try to pick something like that—you know, God says your body's a temple, and you're downing a dozen Dunkin' Donuts a day. That's not right. That's sin. I don't want you to feel comfortable about it, but I want you to feel the tension in there. You feel the tension, and in this particular area, so you get into something like the other night you saw in the state of New York. By the way, the toothpaste is out of the tube. This is done now. It doesn't even matter what the rest of us do. We want to stand, and we take a stand, and all that goes with it. But do you see that? That's God's uniqueness there.
The Sixth Point: Made in God's Image
Now, there's a sixth one. Sarah told me after the first service I didn't make the sixth point, so let me make it. We're unique in our image. It's the end of verse—chapter 1, verses 26 and 27. So we're made in the image of God. We rule over His creation. We're made in His image, and it makes us unique or distinct from everyone else.
When we're talking about being made in the image of God, in his discussion on this, James Boyce points out three things. He said being made in the image of God means three things. He says it means you have personality—so clearly he hasn't met all of you—personality, morality, and spirituality.
So I have a sense of personality, meaning I have feelings, knowledge, I have a will, I'm linked to God in a special way. I have a religious affection. I worship. Again, like I said, not something you see in a dog, or a whale, or in a piece of grass. There's a sense of morality, of freedom, and responsibility, of rightness or wrongness. And then there's a sense of spirituality.
Let me put a bow on this, and there's all sorts—and I encourage you, if you have the book on doctrine, you know there's way more than this. If you have Grudem's book on doctrinal beliefs or systematic theology, a lot more on this. If you have commentaries on the book of Genesis, a lot more on this. If you go online, a lot more information. So I don't want to just read to you the book that you already bought.
Our Inherent Value
What does it mean, and this is a big point for us, what does it mean that we are created in the image of God? What does it mean in a practical way? It means He's established our value—get this now—and that we have inherent value because of who created us and the value He places on us. Again, if you say this is all an accident, the only thing you can do is assign some arbitrary value to mankind based on your best guess. But God values you, God created you. We are valuable because of who created us and we are His creation in what He says.
I'm watching Pawn Stars the other night and this guy brings in a spoon. So Rick says, "What do you got there?" And he said, "I got a spoon made by Paul Revere." So Rick looks at it and he says, "You know, it looks real, but I need to bring somebody in to authenticate it." Well, here's what he did. He took the spoon and he said, "The first thing I want to do is see if the metal and the design fits the period, see if it's colonial." So in fact, he goes through and he says, yes, it is. But then it just says on it, "Revere."
I didn't know this until the other night, but there was Paul Revere Senior and Paul Revere Junior. Both were silversmiths. If the spoon is from Paul Revere Junior, it's worth—I'll make a number up—it's worth $5,000. If it's by Paul Revere Senior, it's worth $500. So he goes through and he establishes—you know, what's the guy want to know that brought it in? What's it worth? He doesn't know if it's real. "It means a lot to me. My dad gave it to me when he died. How much can I get for it?" I always find that amusing. "How much?" So the guy goes, he says, "Paul Revere Junior, five grand."
You were created and valued and the assessment placed on you by the God who created the universe. You're not a knockoff.
The Billy the Kid Portrait
So just this morning, I was going through the news before I came over and—hang on, let me see if I can get this story. It was on USA Today. What is believed to be the only surviving authenticated portrait of Billy the Kid went up for auction in Denver yesterday. So this is like a picture. You see, it's all gnarly and everything. It's the only picture. If you know, don't say. But just guess in your mind, what would you pay for that? William Cook paid $2.3 million for it. That's a lot. But it's the only one.
So we assign that. Your value isn't in what you did or didn't do or whether you're a success or a failure. It's the value that God placed on you. And you have
The Balance Between Pride and Self-Deprecation
There are two poles you can go to here, because you can go and say, "Gosh, I'm really something special," to the sense of "I'm almost God." Well, that's not it. So some of you are here today saying, "Ah, shucks, I'm nothing." And He's saying, "No, I've created you. You have value. I love you."
And some of you are going, "I'm really something." And He's saying, "Wait a minute, you're created." See, there's that whole thing in the middle. You didn't do anything. You might even look at this whole list of achievements, and He's saying, "No, but apart from Me, you can't do anything. You shouldn't feel something special about yourself."
You were born at this time. You were born in this place. You were given that gift, that talent. Some of you are very handsome and some of you are very pretty. You didn't do much for that. It's a sperm and an egg, and then the die was cast. It'd be like me feeling bad that I'm short. I didn't pick it. If I had my pick, I would have picked—I don't know, six-four is kind of about right, it seems to me. Six-five. But it doesn't matter. I can't control my height. I can control my width, and I don't even do that.
What We Can't Control
So what difference does this possibly make? You can't control where you were born. You were born here; you weren't born in Calcutta. I think a lot about this stuff. The perfect example of this is Prince William. This cat did nothing. He has done absolutely not one thing. Nothing. He was born prince. He hasn't done a thing. Nothing. Right mom, right dad, right place, right time. If he's lying around going, "Man, I'm a prince," he didn't do anything. Why would you feel good about your princedom? All you didn't do was screw it up.
So it's like there's an athlete. I was watching a game the other day and they're identifying this guy and they're saying he's an overachiever. You can't be an overachiever. You were given a finite amount of talent; you can only possibly achieve to that level and rarely do that. "He gives 110%." I hate that. You can't. You can at the best give 100%, and you never even come close to it. That just drives me nuts when I hear these guys talk about this stuff.
Paris Hilton—she's done nothing. Zero. She's a Hilton, right? And that's not to beat her up. I'm not putting her down. I'm just going, look at it. Why would you walk around thinking, "I'm something special"?
God's Response to Our Self-Image
So if you're walking around going, "Oh, I'm a failure. I'm just awful. I don't have any value"—which is really you waiting for me to go, "Oh, no, you're good"—but even, we'll let you lay there for a second. God comes along and says, "No, I have value for you. I created you. You're made in My image. You have intrinsic value."
Or if you're walking around going, "I'm really something," it's not your success. Now, you want to be a good steward. Everything—your time, energy, effort, money—everything that you have, you've been given by God. When Rush Limbaugh says "talent on loan from God," though I don't think he understands all the implications of it, he's right.
So if I reach in my back pocket and I grab this, if I want to be absolutely technical—though this is tedious—I would say this is money that God owns but has transferred possession to me, but not ownership. Therefore, it's His, not mine, and I have a fiduciary relationship with Him to steward this well. That's hard to say, so I say it's my money. But you get it, right? So this is your life that God's given you.
God's Love for You
And I don't know how to say this, but these may be the exact words you need to hear today: God really loves you.
What It Means to Be Made in God's Image
So let me net it out here. What does it ultimately mean that we are to be mirrors or made in the image of God?
Number one, there's a morality to us. We live out God's law and ethics. That's what Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 12:13: "Heard all this information, fear God, keep His commandments." God has given us—and I believe this—it's this book, it's His word, and if I follow it, my life will be better.
I taught one Sunday on marriage, and I did in 45 minutes what I did in the middle there in like two minutes: "Wives, submit to your husbands; husbands, love your wives"—here's what the words mean, here's the context. So afterwards, this couple comes up, and they're old, and the lady said, "We've been married 60 years." I said, "Wow, that's cool. What's your secret?" And she said, "Well, you just taught it." And I wanted to say, "Come here, you old bat. I was trying to pay a little honor to you, trying to let you give a little tribute here," but yeah, she's right.
You know people who don't know Christ, who don't follow the Bible, reject it, but they use unknowingly—they use biblical principles in raising their kids, in their marriage, in their finances, and it works. Why? Because the principles work. So He's giving you this morality. He's giving you something like—there's like 613 or 623 commandments in the Old Testament. And He said, "If you follow these things, your life's going to be better." Not perfect. Doesn't mean your kids won't get sick. Doesn't mean your wife won't die. Because we live in a sinful world; we're sinful people; the people we come in contact with are sinful people, so we're going to deal with each other sinfully. The best of us still sin. But He said, "Follow this, and your life will be better."
Purpose and Creativity
Here's the second thing: that we have purpose in our life. Pre-fall we worked; post-fall we worked. We're creative. But now—now here you go—we have the capacity to do good or to do bad with it. So here you go: I can be creative like Leonardo da Vinci, or I can be creative like Bernie Madoff. I have purpose though. God has you here for a reason: to work, to cultivate, to preserve, to steward—steward time, energy, resources, the environment, the culture around us.
Relationship and Community
Here's the third thing: it's relational. We're here to be in community, like the triune
Our Place in God's Redemptive Story
God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—eternal, coming together in harmony. And most importantly, I think, we're here missionally. We're part of God's redemptive story. Page one and two, He creates. Page three, in a couple of verses, sin enters. The rest of it is redemption and restoration.
So even now as God's people, many of you in the room—I'm going to say most, I think—most of you know Christ as your Lord and Savior. That means that you understand creation, you understand the fall, God's redeeming, but now He's in the process of restoring. Even those of us who know Christ are not yet what we will be. We're born again and we're in this relationship, but this will be the key word for next week: everything is distorted.
The Impact of the Fall
God said, and we looked at it in Genesis 2:15-17, don't eat from the tree, and they do. What happens is that creation—that marvelous creation that we read about in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, that beautiful creation, man and woman, so innocent, so perfectly open—that at the end of chapter 2 it says the man and his wife were both naked and unashamed. They didn't have anything to hide from each other: physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally. But all of a sudden sin changes all of that.
If you're here next Sunday morning, I'll work you through Genesis chapter 3 and what the fall does.
Our Response
For us though, we look at something like this—at least I hope—we look at something like this and we say, "You know what, I need to respond." So we respond in three ways. We respond here for the next few minutes, we respond through communion, and we respond through worship. And if you're in the conference center, Justin's going to come over there and close your service. He'll first lead us in communion here.
But then the response is really all week long. It's you becoming a display case, missional living, meaning you're on a mission from God. You're communicating His story of creation, fall, redemption, restoration. You communicate to that world around you all week long.
Communion and Closing Prayer
Justin's going to come and call us to this time of communion. Let's pray together as he does.
Father, thank You for these amazing, awesome truths that You created us, that You made us in Your image, that there's something that's unique about us. God, I pray that as Your people, people would look at us and see You. Father, thank You for that awesome, amazing truth, and now as we come to communion, we come to that moment where we remember that moment of redemption. God, make that real to us. We ask it in Christ's name, amen.