In His own Image

The search for identity is a key driver in our society, yet the truth is greater than most could ever imagine

“Blessed be Your Glorious Name, and may it be exalted above all blessings and praise.  You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you” (Nehemiah 9:5b-6).

To repent and confess their sins before the Lord in the present, Israel looked back to the beginning of Creation, and continued through the history of Israel up until their situation where Ezra read the Book of the Law of Moses which the Lord had commanded Israel (Nehemiah 8:1). We speak today of One New Man, but here Israel demonstrated the unity that comes from hearts that are thirsty for the Word of God.  “…all the people assembled as one man…”It wasn’t all the people and lower animals that gathered as one man; it wasn’t a mixture. No-one said to the lower animals, ‘let us gather as one man’. We are not to mix species, neither are we to mix the Creator with the created.

Ancient Israel was not hankering after the past in the attitude the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua/Jesus, warned of in Luke 9:62 –“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”Rather Israel was acknowledging, affirming, and learning from the past, in order to gain a right perspective on the present, and to focus with a declaration of intention of faith for the future.

Looking back in the Book of Beginnings, Genesis, the Bible is quite specific that God made Man.  Man did not evolve from out of a slime pit.  God purposely made Man in His image.  God said, “Let us make Man (humanity) in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Then it says that God “created Man (humanity) in His own image.” The Bible goes on to expand on that by stating, “male and female He created them.” This single verse in Scripture is repeated twice over, “God created humanity in His own image”, adding emphasis through repetition, highlighting the importance of what God was doing. An emphasis that states clearly that man is different from the beasts of the field.

Mixture madness!

The Politically Correct, I suggest, will eventually want to put animals on a par with humans.  That animals be given human rights has been mooted from time to time in the past.  Already, children in infant schools are being taught that humans are the same as animals.  This teaching is transported around the world through the vehicle of evolution, a theory deceptively taught as scientific fact. We will discover what is happening, and why it is happening in today’s world, by going back to the Book of Beginnings, the Book of Genesis.  It is there that we discover the stark reality that there is nothing new under the sun – “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

There is meticulous order to Creation with the suggestion of hierarchy. First in creation is inert matter, containing the building blocks of everything. Moving on to the third day of Creation we have organic matter, with vegetation emerging from the lifeless ground; grasses producing seeds of their species, and fruit-bearing trees containing the seeds of their own species Genesis 1:11-12).

Scripture repeats that vegetation needs to be self-propagating, each to its own species. Man’s lack of Biblical integrity, has to some degree, led him to move away from that natural process so that seedless grapes, for instance, are produced and harvested. In God’s order, grapes need to produce grapes which contain the seeds for growing new grape vines, ensuring the preservation of the species line. This speaks of the laws prohibiting crossbreeding of animals and hybridization of crops (Leviticus 19:19). We have legalised LGBT relationships that are effectively seedless unions. As they cannot multiply and fill the earth with God’s image, aren’t these unions destructive to God’s image on earth? Could this be Satan’s purpose in sowing these seeds of destruction once again in our day?

Man overruling God!

The abandoning of the death penalty is anti-God. Every person that murders a human being will answer for it with his/her life, because man was made in the image of God (Leviticus 24:17). Murder is not just killing a person, it is destroying the image of God in a human being (Genesis 9:6). To argue that capital punishment is not a deterrent and therefore should be abolished, is to argue from a wrong premise.

As we enter the year 2018, fifty-one years ago the abortion act was passed. Apart from the many murders that occur almost daily on our streets, almost nine-million lives have been taken in abortion. One day, God is going to require that the nations answer for what they have done in replacing God’s Law with man’s law (Exodus 20:13). Abolishing capital punishment opened the doors to all kinds of evil, including taking the life of the innocent. It led, for instance, to the beginning of the mass atrocity against the unborn in modern times.

The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964. Capital Punishment for murder was abolished in 1965 in Great Britain, and in 1973 in Northern Ireland. Because the world has rejected the God of Creation and His revealed will, the world has debased the image of God in humanity, so that man, in man’s eyes, is no more than an animal.  Rejecting the revelation of God and filling the void with belief systems including Evolution has fed the human race with racial hatred and claims that some peoples are less than human.  Such belief systems have and will continue to lead to the most inhuman atrocities.

Although unused, the death penalty remained a legally defined punishment for certain offences such as treason until it was completely abolished in 1998. In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rightsbecame binding on the United Kingdom, prohibiting the restoration of the death penalty for as long as the UK is a party to the Convention.

What is man?

Understanding the image of God as set out for us in Genesis Chapter 1 will help us to understand what it is for Man to be created in His image. Man is unique in God’s creation.  Man is the pinnacle of creation, the crowning glory of all that God made. Man is a creature, and although physically he is similar in make-up to the higher animals as far as the basic internal organs go, Man is set apart from the creatures; he is created in God’s image to have fellowship with God. In Jewish thought, God is presented as all-powerful (Elohim), Independent, Intelligent, Thoughtful, Orderly, Purposeful and Creative. A missing element in the Jewish concept of God is Relationship. That is, Relationship within the Godhead. Judaism has no concept of God being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blame the Greeks!

Jewish and Christian thought has focussed on God’s image in humanity being in the main, human rationality. This has been because of the influence of Greek philosophy or Hellenism on both Judaism and Christianity.  The power of reason was everything, while the human body was deprecated to the point of being evil, particularly by the established Church. Mainstream Judaism never fell prey to those teachings of Platonism and Gnosticism that considered the human body as inherently evil. God’s image in humanity is much more than reason. 

When God breathed into Man’s nostrils, Man received more than we conceive of as physical life. Man became a living being – nephesh chayah.  Nepheshis properly translated as ‘being’, rather than ‘soul’ as in the KJV and as found in Greek thought. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16), and God’s Word is Spirit and Life (“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” – John 6:63). God’s breath into Man will include God’s Word. Nachmanides (also referred to by the acronym Ramban1194 –1270), considered one of the greatest Jewish scholars ever, argued that “when God breathed the breath of life into man, he transferred to him of his own divine essence… Man contains a divine spark, an element of the divine spirit.”  

And so …

Man is endowed with a spiritual nature of God-likeness.  Man has a conscious ability to know God. God Himself is set apart from creation, He is other than, from eternity to eternity; and with careful reading and investigation, we can see that He is so much more besides; there is no end to God! In all eternity, those that are with God in His Kingdom will be on an eternal voyage of neverending discovery.

How great is our God!  How great is our King!  He is the greatest God, the only God!  Praise His Holy Name!