Dear Friends,
One of the most profound and widely quoted verses of the Bible is the creation of Man in the image of God. So, this week Peter and I went exploring some of its implications. It is such a fruitful concept by which to understand humanity, not the least because in the New Testament we find Jesus is “the image of the invisible God”. But before we get there, we need to understand how we are as individuals, male and female, in the image of God as well as how humanity, as a whole, is in his image. There’s so much fruitful discussion to be had on this passage, we hope our conversation will stimulate yours.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Our subject today is the dominion of man because we've looked at the image of God, but there's so much more to explore because the sense of image is the sense of dominion. A way of capturing it, Peter, is Psalm 8, isn't it? Because Psalm 8 is in some ways a meditation, a biblical meditation on Genesis 1.
Peter Jensen: I believe it is. I will read it. Psalm 8
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Phillip: And the name of God is there in that word, LORD, isn't it? It's not our God, it's Yahweh. He is the one that is majestic in all the earth.
Peter: It's interesting that the Bible has given us the idea that there is one God and only one God as opposed to the way human beings have generally thought of many, many gods. But no, just one God. But then, astonishingly, it’s a mark of his grace that we are given his name because a name relates us to him. So, you could have monotheism, a belief in one God, in which God was distant. The great Creator who creates and then stands back, that's not the Bible. The Bible is the work in which God reveals his name.
Phillip: Deism and Islam leave you with that one God who is not known personally to you. The name of God is a fascinating thing. It means relationship, but not only does it mean relationship, it means I know more than what God is, I know who God is.
Peter: You mean because the meaning of his name reveals it?
Phillip: The fact that he has a name that he's given to me means that he is a who, not a what. He is not the force. He is personal and relational. So it's not just that God made man in his image. Yahweh made man in his image. The name may not be used in chapter 1 of Genesis, but Psalm 8 picks up the very concept of man being made in this kind of relation with God that is his name.
Peter: And what about this business that out of the mouths of babes and infants comes the praise of God in verse 2? Why does he go straight to the little ones, the praise of children and infants?
Phillip: Jesus quotes it in the New Testament, in the Gospels, when the children of Israel are praising him, and his opponents tell him to quieten the children. And he reminds his opponents of this psalm, of this phrase about the babies. I think it's one of those ideas which attacks the arrogance of humans and great ones. That is, moving outside the Bible, it's like our cultural story of the emperor’s new clothes when it's only the child who can say the emperor is naked. It's obvious to the child, but the sophistication of highly educated people makes that which is obvious, impossible to see. And so, God's magnificence in all creation is there for all to see, but the arrogance of proud humans is such that we do not see it, because we will not look at it.
Peter: Hence, I suppose, Jesus is saying, “unless you have the faith of a child”. It’s not become child-like in your thinking but child-like in your perception; not to be childish.
Phillip: Yes, there's that lovely verse, 1 Corinthians 1:21 that God in his wisdom chose not to be known by human wisdom. It's not that there's no wisdom. There's great wisdom. There's more wisdom than human wisdom. But God is not going to be beholden to human cleverness and so he makes himself known to the children and is concealed from the arrogance of human pride.
Peter: The Bible says we are made in the image of God, but we try to make God in our own image and, therefore, make him just one of us, leaving aside the grandeur of this God. We are mere humans.
Phillip: Which is why the Psalm then asks, “When I look at the heavens … what is man that you care for him?” because man is a puzzle in the vastness of the universe.
Peter: We would be hopelessly lost if it weren't for God revealing himself to us and telling us the truth about himself and about us, too. For we can only understand true humanity by listening to what God says about humanity and hence the image of God. But Phillip, has the image of God survived the fall and the introduction of sin into this world?
Phillip: It's not a phrase that is used much of us in the Scriptures, in the New Testament, for example, but it's still there. So, in James 3:9 we mustn't use the tongue to attack that which is created in God's likeness and image. So, the writer sees being rude about our neighbour as attacking someone who is in the image of God. So, it is there, though it's not a frequent teaching of the New Testament because there's something much greater than you and me in the New Testament who is in the image of God. We've got to be restored into the image of God. Yes, we have the image of God and the likeness of God, but it's been tarnished. It's like a broken mirror; a shattered image of what we were like. But I think you've got to come to Jesus to sort that out. But the non-Christian has the sense of our uniqueness. Although in their rejection of God, they get confused about what humans are. We're the greatest, but we are really nothing. The non-Christian, the atheistic thinker, has that puzzle as to what humans are. Phillip Adams, is a local Australian atheist broadcaster, and publisher.
Peter: I see his work from time to time and I met him once and enjoyed his company very much.
Phillip: Yes, he was the child of a Baptist pastor and has been antagonistic towards God and Christianity for most of his life now, sadly. The title of his book tells you everything in one sense, it's Adams versus God. In it, he writes,
My main point is to communicate to people how inadequate religion is as a description or explanation of the cosmos. There were, at last celestial census, 1,000 million, million, million suns out there, give or take a few zeros, and that is just the universe we can dimly perceive with our senses and instruments.
That's Psalm 8, isn't it? I look to the heavens and what can we be? He goes on,
Unless we're extremely agile and lucky, humans will be a brief-lived life form on an attractive planet on one of those millions and millions of suns.
What is man that you're mindful of him? Well, Phillip Adams says we're a brief-lived life form on an attractive planet.
Peter: But he also is asking exactly the question that the Bible is asking here. What on earth are we? The identity of human beings. It's so important in our treatment of others because we may come across someone less capable than we are perhaps or as disadvantaged in some way or from a different ethnicity, and we look down upon them. But that is so unbiblical, so much against God and what God has revealed to us. We must view every human being from the very first moment to the very last, and from wherever they come, as equally precious. That's the teaching of the Bible.
Phillip: And we are no different to the animals in Phillip Adam's answer. We're a brief-lived life form. Well, I could say that about a cockroach. I can say that of a cat. I can say that of the cat that ate the cockroach. He says we are nothing. Therefore, while you're right, we mustn't look down on people of another ethnicity or nation, there's no rationale in why we shouldn't shoot them or blow them up or squash them like cockroaches. We're just a brief-lived life form.
Peter: I don't think for a moment Phillip Adams would do that.
Phillip: No. He would argue against it, in a sense. But it’s the logic of his position. It’s like that American humorist, H.L. Mencken, like all of them, funny, but he has a three-point summary.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride.
Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
It's a wonderful image, isn't it? But we are just a sick fly taking a ride. I know what I do with flies.
Peter: I'd rather have Psalm 8.
Phillip: It is a little better, isn't it?
Peter: It sees the truth, asking what are we in the light of the totality of the cosmos? It sees the same truth, but it comes, by God's word, to a different conclusion, and one that we instinctively know is right. That is, all human beings deserve the name of being image-bearers of God. All are equally precious, and humanity matters. We instinctively know that without being proud or anything like that. And yet, that's why we need the Bible, that's why we need Psalm 8. What is man?... You have made him a little lower than the angels and have crowned him with glory and honour. That's who we are.
Phillip: Some other unbelievers see the crowning. While Phillip Adams and H.L. Mencken see the nothingness, the smallness of man in the universe, the ancient Greek Protagoras, wrote
Man is the measure of all things, the things that are and the things that are not.
We are the ultimate criterion upon which everything can be evaluated. That's almost the exact opposite. Like the Psalm, what is man? We seem to be nothing. What is man? We seem to be everything. It's a way of thinking about man.
Peter: It doesn't get us anywhere. My mind goes to the 19th century English poet, Algernon Swinburne, “No matter how much, how charged the gate is,” he's thinking here of judgment. He is going to stride through it because he is who he is. He's not going to be frightened of the judgment yet to come. Picking up on one of the great hymns of the time, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of good will,” he writes:
Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things.
A little bit different from Mencken’s “We are flies on a wheel spinning around.” But it is understandable for two reasons. One: that we instinctively think that something like that is the truth in the way we treat each other, or should treat each other, and the way we understand the significance of human life instinctively, I believe. But secondly: it is the truth because, in a sense, man is the master of things. It gives honour to man that God alone can give. “What is man? That you are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him. You have made him a little lower than the angels. And crowned him with glory and honour.”
Phillip: I’d prefer Psalm 8. God holds the two things in tension for us. We are but nothing in the vastness of the cosmos. And yet, we're the masters of all things.
Peter: We depend upon God for our standing, and God, of course, is utterly reliable.
Phillip: You say that poem was written in terms of going through the judgement. Well, one of my favourite political quotes is from Gough Whitlam.
Peter: But we do like Gough Whitlam. He was a character.
Phillip: The one time I met him; he was quite rude to me. He was asked how he would meet his maker. He was a man who professed to me that he was an atheist, and so how would he meet his maker? And he replied, “You can be sure of one thing, I shall treat him as an equal.” He was breathtakingly blasphemous.
Here is your problem, the problem of the person who looks at the world without Psalm 8. “What is man that you're mindful of him?” How do we fit? Because we don't fit. Which comes into the New Testament in the Epistle of Hebrews 2:5-9, this Psalm is quoted.
Now, it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we're speaking. It's testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honour, putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honour, because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
Peter: The image of God has been so defaced. We live as travesties of who we should be. Tell me what we can make of that.
Phillip: Jesus, God the Son, became the man Jesus, fully human, fully one of us. But in his death, God made him who knew no sin to become sin. For he died our death in our place, as our representative. In so doing, he who became like us, little lower than the angels, and was crowned with the glory and honour of God by his resurrection, by his overcoming sin, and Satan, and death. By his resurrection, he is raised up and ascended to sit at the right hand of God, where God's plan for humanity always was. The one that we look to as the true man is Jesus. The risen Jesus is the one for whom the world was made in the first place. That's what's picked up in Colossians, isn't it?
Peter: But that's Jesus. I'm not Jesus.
Phillip: No, but he, we're told in Colossians 1:15-16,
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.
Now, that passage is about how God was pleased to dwell in him fully so that he would reconcile all things through His death. That's also what Hebrews 2 is saying, that the one for whom the world was created, the one who was the image of God from the very beginning, was God the Son, become man in Jesus, risen from the dead to the position that we were created for in the first place.
Peter: What's it got to do with me?
Phillip: It is only in Christ that we become the image of God that we were created to be. For once we turn from Adam to the last Adam, from the man of dust to the man from heaven, once we turn to Jesus, then we are given new birth into the resurrection of the dead, into Jesus, and are raised up to be like him, on the last day.
Philippians 3:20-21 speaks about this,
But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself.
Paul says to the Thessalonians, we must not grieve about those who have gone before who have died, like those who have no hope. We believe Jesus was raised from the dead. We believe we too will be raised with him. My resurrection can't be independent of Jesus. My resurrection is in him. But that then makes me into the man that God has created me to be in the first place.
Peter: It sounds as though he's our only hope.
Phillip: You could certainly say that he is our hope and our expectation. But that change can be happening now, can't it?
Peter: 2 Corinthians 3:18 tells us that change is going on in the present.
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
And the change that is being wrought in us is that we're becoming more like Jesus. Or Romans 8:28, “All things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” The good there is not; it's going to be all smooth and you'll get a taxi every time you whistle, but rather, even in the midst of things that go wrong, you are being changed to be like Jesus. But there's another aspect of this that you may like to comment on. What about Colossians 3:9-12, where it talks about church?
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self, with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience
Is there a corporate element to this?
Phillip: From Genesis 1 there is. We've been talking today about what is man that you're mindful of, but it's been capital M, man, throughout, because we're talking about the generic use of the word ‘man’. It includes male and female, but it includes all of humanity in one sense. Being in the image of God we are to multiply and fill the earth. We reproduce as one humanity. Here is the new humanity. You can make it, it's true, individual. You personally must be born again, but when you're born again into the body of Christ you're born again into the church, into the fellowship of God's people. You can't have God as your father without having me as your brother.
Peter: And the renewal of the image is Christ's people working together, speaking the truth in love to one another.
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