Sermons

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In the Image of God
September 15, 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Second in a sermon series, "Back to the Beginning," on Genesis 1-11

Genesis 1:26-2:8

Last week, we started into the Bible at the very beginning, Genesis 1:1.
“In the beginning, GOD created the heavens and the earth,” the story of the creation of the world. We concluded by saying that Genesis claims that “life did not come about by accident.” God created it, distinctly and purposefully.

This morning, we continue in God’s Word with another “beginning:” The beginning of human beings.

The first thing a family does when a baby is born…is set about the timeless task of figuring out which parent (or which side of the family) … the newcomer looks like.

“He’s got his mom’s eyes” or “She’s got her dad’s dimple.” The first time the baby screams, the parents point at each other and say, “She gets that from YOUR side of the family!” But this doesn’t stop with babyhood. As kids get older, they develop more personality, their body changes…not only physical looks; but the way a child runs, or laughs, or even just moves their head…is often a subtle reminder of the parents they came from. Sometimes it’s not so subtle. I talked with a good friend a while back, one I’d grown up from childhood with. Chris was always a thin guy while we were playing sports, and his dad was always quite…stocky. A few years ago, Chris told me that in the last 10 years he had put on about 60 pounds. He said “Dan, I got out of the shower the other day, looked in the mirror, and said, “My God…I AM my dad!” We bear resemblance to our parents.

After five and a half days of creation, God is still not done. Even though already he had created the earth, the sky, the sea, plants and living creatures, and at each stage of creation said “This is good!,” still He is not done. “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” God says. Let’s make a human being.

This is what the whole creation narrative points to, what it builds to, the peak of creation. All of creation points to God’s wonder, His power, His creativity, but only ONE part bears his likeness…the human. Only one. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that God looks at all of His creation and does not “find himself in his work…,” until He creates a human. Until, in fact, He makes the human “male and female.” We’ll talk more about that next week, but this mere mention should be enough to at least give pause to any patronizing male chauvinist attitudes or any radical feminist philosophies…that the very image of God appears not in male OR female, but in male AND female. Only then is creation called “very good.”

No other part of creation expresses God like this, “images” him. There is something about the human…that says “Oh, that’s God’s son/daughter.” The trick is…what is that something? Obviously it’s not something physical, because God is invisible spirit and we are visible matter.

It may have something to do with this idea of “dominion,” that God gave the earth into the care of the human. Just as God is in charge of all of life, He has given the human a special responsibility to care for the rest of creation, and so humanity is “like” God in that way. Certainly that may be a part, and it is uniquely in the human role of responsibility to not dominate, but tend and keep creation.

Or perhaps humans bear the image of God in how they relate in community. Just as Christians say that God exists and always has existed as a Trinity, Father-Son and Holy Spirit…humans also have a deep-rooted need and capacity for community. Or, perhaps we are made uniquely, in God’s image…because we have the ability to actually HEAR God. Mankind is the only part of creation that God talks to here, in chapter one. All of these are intriguing possibilities, and indeed are some of the truth. But the characteristic I want to focus on for the moment…is the idea of Freedom.

God is an entirely free being. In the community of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is complete. He had no need to create humanity, he didn’t need us. There was not something lacking in Almighty God that he NEEDED human beings to complete. No, in absolute freedom He created human beings. Not out of coercion, but out of sheer choice, in freedom. It was not a choice without cost.

This book of Genesis, of all places, will show the human being as also a free being. That is HOW God created people to be. It is how people are most like God, I think. They will have a dominion, they will hear God, they will know what right relationship with God looks like…but they are FREE to be with God or not, to obey or not, to choose the good or not. Humans can hear and then they understand and think and evaluate and decide whether or not to do what God lays before him. The human is free to accept or reject even the very idea that he is the image of God. Strange though it may seem, we go to great lengths to avoid our identity as the image of God:

a) Sometimes, we try to make our own image for ourselves. That is, we decide who we want to be, what we will be like, and we undergo excruciating exercises to try to get there. We read the self-help books, we try on personality changes, we have cosmetic surgery, we have sex-change operations. It’s as simple as going to the supermarket, just pick what you want off of the shelf. Just pick out what you want to be, and you will be. Our culture is very good at encouraging this personal image-picking.

b) Sometimes we try to make ourselves God. We accept no limits, we choose only in our own interest and for our own power. Some of you read the ancient story of Dr. Faustus in school, either in poetry or play or novel. John Faustus was a brilliant man who became impatient with the limitations on him as he studied the depths of medicine or law or theology. He found himself always serving another…God, in fact, the God of mercy and grace…and Faustus chafed under that service. So he learned magic, he learned to circumvent the laws of physics, to avoid God, to manipulate morality all in the name of increasing his own power and pleasure. To achieve all this, he had to make a pact with the devil. He received 24 years of totally running his own show. He was god. But at the end of the 24 years…he was damned. You can do your own thing, ignore God, use people…you are free to choose that. But there is a huge price…in the middle, and at the end.

c) Sometimes we make God in our own image. If we want something, then God is the “God who helps-those-who-help-themselves.” Or God is the Prosperity God, because we want to be prosperous. Or God is the God of Justice, because we have been wronged. Or God is the God who turns his head the other way, if we really want something. When we are trapped into only looking at ourselves, or seeing the world the way we want, God begins to look remarkably like us, and to sound remarkably like us.

But we are made in God’s image. The God who exists in utter freedom, who chooses the good…and gives us the freedom to choose as well. If we are made in God’s image, then we must continue to wrestle with this question: What is God like?

If we had only this one piece from Genesis, if this were all the creation story…it might be particularly hard to figure out what God was like. These verses from 1:26-31 are rather cosmic. They show the creation from God’s viewpoint. The conversation is in the heavens, it is God looking down at the world, and in a rather neutral and laboratory-like description, the man appears.

But there is another piece, just over here in chapter 2. One of the questions for Genesis in the last few centuries has been “Why two creation stories? Or are there?”

In verses 7-9, the writer of Genesis backs up a bit…or provides more details…or tries again, however you might want to look at it. But again the creation of man is described, and it sounds quite different. Now God is no longer far off. He is near. He gets his hands dirty and muddy. He touches, molds and shapes dust from the ground, and then, pressing face to flesh breathes life into the man. “And the man (adam, where we get Adam from) became a living being.”

Must we pick between the two? Does one supersede the other? Dietrick Bonhoeffer says “No.” Bonhoeffer (Creation and Fall) says it’s like looking at a mountain for many years, always noticing that it leans towards the right. One day you see a picture…but the mountain leans to the left! You think it is of a different mountain…until you realize that it is merely two different perspectives on the same thing, and BOTH are needed to perceive the real thing. The first account

“is written entirely from above, from God’s point of view. Here man is the final work of God’s self-glorification. The world is created for God, for his honor alone, and man is the most precious vessel, the mirror of the creator Himself….On the other hand, the second account is about the near world and the near Lord upon the earth, living together with Adam in Paradise.”

In the first, the story of God’s deed of creation, in the second the story of man with God. In the first, the strange and distant God, in the second, the near and intimate. Both are needed to see all of God.

In the rest of the Bible, we will see both views of God, but increasingly the God who comes near in Jesus. The FREE God, who chooses to come near, who in Jesus sets aside his own aspirations, his own ego, his own plan, his own safety for the sake of others. God freely chooses to give his grace, in Christ. Nothing was more important for Jesus on this earth than that you and I might know who we are…Beloved of God. Yet, amazingly we are free to choose…or not.

As I wrestled to try to get my arms around this idea that we are made in God’s image, there were three very practical things which struck me. If it is true that we are made in God’s image…

1) then you and I must be very careful about where we get our “self-image” from. “Self-image” is a watchword of our culture. We are constantly aware and reminded that it is a poor self-image that paralyzes us in life, or that we must diligently try to make sure our kids don’t struggle with. I totally agree with those things. But where will a healthy self-image come from? If we believe the Bible, we will not try to base our self-image on what people have said about us, nor what we feel like, nor on what has been done to you. You are not limited to being what you were raised to be or think. No, you are made in God’s image. The Almighty God of the Universe, Maker of Heaven and Earth, stars and sea, galaxies and plants and animals, the God who came near in the gracefulness of Jesus Christ has chosen only one thing to express his image…that is you. And until the foundation of who we are RESTS on knowing that God would DARE to create you in his image…it will rest on shaky ground.

2) If we are created in God’s image…then so is every other human being. We drove past the exit from Aurora to Denny last night, and there were a couple of folks who are often there. Smoking cigarette in one hand, and cardboard sign in the other talking about how they were from Carolina and out of work…you know the scene. Sometimes I am arrogant enough to have a feeling about these situations, and I would just about guarantee you that these folks were manipulative and dishonest. I am embarrassed at how quickly I turned very scornful of these people. If I dare to believe that I am created in God’s image…then I must also dare to believe that they are. And somehow, it seems that we will treat people with more gentleness, more prayer, more care…believing that they have not been made by accident, but in God’s image.

3) Living as a person made in God’s image…means living in the sometimes frightening realization that we are free. Free to choose the good, or the evil. Free to choose to follow Christ, or to deny Him. Free to choose day by day, decision by decision, to believe that a God who would put his own image in us…will also provide for us in his most faithful image: Jesus Christ. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,” Colossians says… “ for in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

Several times in my life, I have ended up at a complex of soccer fields to pick up one of our kids. Maybe I’m a little late, and I’m worried because I don’t immediately see them. It seems like there are 300 kids there, and half of them have purple uniforms. And I stand and look and look and look…and finally, something catches my eye, and my heart jumps up a little. I don’t know what it was…a certain run, or body movement, a wisp of hair, a voice with a certain tone to the shout. There she is! That one belongs to me.

That’s how it must surely be for God. Coming down, coming near, the heart of a parent searching and spotting His son or daughter. You. “Oh, yes, that’s mine. I couldn’t miss her. She’s created in my image.”