SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_00: I would be remiss if I didn't remind you, and some of you would say, Walt, you forgot it, that today is Sunday, the fifth of February, two thousand and seventeen, and today God is still on the throne.
SPEAKER_00: He was all last week, he is today, and he is on the throne in the week to come.
SPEAKER_00: He is good, he is faithful, he is trustworthy, he is deserving all of our praise.
SPEAKER_00: We may pray in faith, we may praise him for who he is.
SPEAKER_00: He rules, he reigns, and that's why we're here.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that's why you're here as well.
SPEAKER_00: We are continuing in our perusal, in our investigation, in our study, in our desire to sit under the teaching and the truth of God's word through the book of Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: So we're several weeks into a series that will take us roughly to Easter, the first three or four chapters in Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to have you turn, please, to Genesis chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: That is on my Bible, page one, page two actually, this morning, chapter 1, verses 26 and following.
SPEAKER_00: We've been looking at this section, and uh especially of the six days of creation, the last couple of weeks, and it is a wonderful and it is a simple story, and it is true.
SPEAKER_00: It does not mislead us.
SPEAKER_00: All that it says is from God.
SPEAKER_00: When God speaks, he does not mislead us.
SPEAKER_00: We find here things we would know in no other way.
SPEAKER_00: God reveals truth to us.
SPEAKER_00: And what we read is so simple and so clear that every child in our midst can understand it.
SPEAKER_00: And everyone in our midst can understand it and relate to it unless we make problems out of it.
SPEAKER_00: And the problems we tend to make out of it come from our culture, it comes from a spirit of rationalism, it comes from a spirit of secularism, it comes from a spirit of scientism.
SPEAKER_00: So rationalism, the idea that we understand truth primarily, or if not perhaps even only through what we can comprehend and the logic and human reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: If that's as far as it goes in understanding the world around us, we miss the most important things.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God.
SPEAKER_00: That we learn by revelation.
SPEAKER_00: Secularism, uh, basically the religious belief, and that's what it is, it's a belief system, it's a worldview, just as rationalism is a worldview.
SPEAKER_00: The belief system that religion gives no windows to other reality besides that which is around us.
SPEAKER_00: If we don't believe there are other windows to reality, then we will miss the central reality in the beginning, God and God created.
SPEAKER_00: And the section we're seeing today, God created man as the high point of creation and gave him that which is called the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: Scientism, something else of spirit of our age, have no problems with science, but the belief system that the only real way of understanding the world around us is through the scientific method, and any other approach is inherently flawed.
SPEAKER_00: That's a belief system, that's a religion.
SPEAKER_00: Faith and science have no conflict with one another.
SPEAKER_00: Scientism, rationalism, secularism, that's what we struggle with.
SPEAKER_00: And what we're trying to do in this series of these first few chapters is to listen to what God has to say.
SPEAKER_00: If we miss what God has to say to us through his word, we are destined to bumble and stumble around and miss the most important things that are.
SPEAKER_00: So we've been looking at the six days of creation and jumping in at verse 26 of chapter 1, page 2.
SPEAKER_00: Page 2.
SPEAKER_00: Um, we're jumping at verse 26 into the sixth day of creation.
SPEAKER_00: And specifically in the middle of that, after letting the earth in verse 24 bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, and the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and the things that creep on the ground according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.
SPEAKER_00: And then, verse 26, God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness.
SPEAKER_00: Let them, mankind, that I am making, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every living creature, creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
SPEAKER_00: So God created man, mankind, in his own image.
SPEAKER_00: In the image of God, he created him.
SPEAKER_00: Male and female, he created them.
SPEAKER_00: God blessed them, and God said, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heaven, over every living thing.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Behold, I give you every I give to you every plant, yielding seed that is in the face of the earth, and every tree with the seed in its fruit.
SPEAKER_00: You shall have them for food, and every beast of the earth, and every bird of the heavens, uh, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breadth of life in it, I have given every green plant for food, and it was so.
SPEAKER_00: Evening and morning, the sixth day.
SPEAKER_00: The high point of God's creation.
SPEAKER_00: That's you and me.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of hard to imagine.
SPEAKER_00: It's hard for me to imagine when I look in the mirror.
SPEAKER_00: It's hard for me to imagine when I look at you.
SPEAKER_00: The high point, the crescendo of creation, and God looked at it.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is before sin came in to mar things.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be talking about that.
SPEAKER_00: But at its core, mankind, apart from all of the rest of the created realm that we know anything about, stands at the pinnacle.
SPEAKER_00: So we want to explore this morning this idea of the defining characteristic, the defining truth of man, which, according to this passage, especially the first two or three verses that we're going to be looking at more than the others, we'll we'll come back in chapter two and reach back to some of this.
SPEAKER_00: But I want us to look this morning at this defining characteristic quality, that defining reality of mankind.
SPEAKER_00: We are created in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: What in the world does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: The Imago Day.
SPEAKER_00: This has been something I know you don't know Latin, or if you do, you know more than I do.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but throughout the centuries, believers have wrestled with this.
SPEAKER_00: This is the definition, the most important way to understand who we are.
SPEAKER_00: So, what does it mean?
SPEAKER_00: The image of God in man.
SPEAKER_00: So, we're gonna take some time and try to unpack what this passage has to say about it.
SPEAKER_00: I got I got thinking as I was preparing this message, trying to focus on what I think is the most important thing that God is saying to us in these in these verses.
SPEAKER_00: And I think it is really the category of thought, the defining truth of the image of God in man.
SPEAKER_00: But I got thinking, okay, what's he really doing here?
SPEAKER_00: And I was taken back in my thinking to my childhood.
SPEAKER_00: You know, as you get older, you start fantasizing about the good old days, and uh in retrospect, they're better than they actually were.
SPEAKER_00: Um but and I've told you before, it's for some reason it sticks in my thinking, the experience multiple years as a little kid, sitting in the back seat of the car on a hot summer day as our family are on vacation and traveling to visit relatives.
SPEAKER_00: And I was sitting in the back seat, and my two older sisters had bony elbows, and we were squabbling, and there were so many things I learned in that, in retrospect.
SPEAKER_00: One of them was something that my mother very wisely did.
SPEAKER_00: This was the day before devices.
SPEAKER_00: You you didn't keep your kids quiet by handing them a Kindle fire or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: And so she came up with games for us to play, to occupy ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, crazy songs to sing.
SPEAKER_00: Rufus, Rastus, Johnson Brown, what you gonna do when the rent comes round?
SPEAKER_00: Jane says, please don't sing that, Walt.
SPEAKER_00: But I remember the game Twenty Questions.
SPEAKER_00: Does anybody remember playing Twenty Questions as a kid?
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00: So I got thinking about this game of 20 questions.
SPEAKER_00: The way it works, well, at least the way it worked for us, for me, in the backseat of the car, uh, let's say I was the one who was thinking about something, and I would say, I'm thinking about something.
SPEAKER_00: And then everybody else has 20 questions to ask me to determine what it is I'm thinking about.
SPEAKER_00: It's astounding what you can, how, if you have, if you ask the right questions, if you have the right categories of thought, uh, how you can understand something around you.
SPEAKER_00: So let's say I was sitting there in the back seat, and I was thinking of the knob on the butterfly window on my dad's side in the front seat.
SPEAKER_00: Now, unfortunately, some of you are far too young to remember that cars used to have butterfly windows.
SPEAKER_00: They kind of went like this, little triangular window, and they had a knob to open and close them.
SPEAKER_00: And so let's say I'm sitting in the back seat and I'm thinking about the knob on the butterfly window.
SPEAKER_00: So my two obnoxious sisters, and I think my parents entered into it as well.
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't dare call them obnoxious.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you would start with questions.
SPEAKER_00: And I remember the kinds of questions we we asked, like, um, did we leave it at home?
SPEAKER_00: Now that's a pretty good question.
SPEAKER_00: That helps narrow things down.
SPEAKER_00: No, we didn't leave it at home.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that means it's here with us.
SPEAKER_00: Um is it bigger than a bread box?
SPEAKER_00: Now that was something that we said as kids, bigger than a bread box.
SPEAKER_00: Does anybody here remember what a bread box is or how big it is?
SPEAKER_00: Uh when we went to Europe, we we spent 30 years with bread boxes.
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, bigger or smaller than a bread box.
SPEAKER_00: Uh a favorite question to try to characterize something is is it animal, mineral, or vegetable?
SPEAKER_00: And so we would go on.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what we had are categories of thinking to understand things around us.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you have the right categories, it helps you understand.
SPEAKER_00: But let's say I wasn't thinking about the knob on the butterfly window on my dad's side.
SPEAKER_00: Let's say I was thinking about the sunset.
SPEAKER_00: Is it animal, mineral, or vegetable?
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't apply.
SPEAKER_00: That's not the way of understanding a sunset.
SPEAKER_00: You've got to have the right categories, otherwise you misinterpret, misunderstand, and stay confused.
SPEAKER_00: Long story to say, in a in a simple way, I believe what God is doing in the early chapters of Genesis is giving us the right categories to understand reality around us.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't have to play 20 questions with God.
SPEAKER_00: He reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: We've spent a lot of time talking about in the beginning God.
SPEAKER_00: And now we find today at the crescendo, the high point of creation, we get a defining category.
SPEAKER_00: The right question that what does it mean to be man, mankind?
SPEAKER_00: Is it animal, mineral, or vegetable?
SPEAKER_00: Well, we participate in all of those.
SPEAKER_00: But we are more than just a collection of amino acids.
SPEAKER_00: Um there is something unique about mankind.
SPEAKER_00: The defining characteristic of mankind is what we read about here, and it is that we are created in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: We are created, designed, and destined to reflect something about who God is.
SPEAKER_00: Not everything.
SPEAKER_00: We are not the exact representation of God.
SPEAKER_00: But there's something about us that reveals God.
SPEAKER_00: The heavens declare the glory of God, but beyond that, there's something about man who is placed above the rest of creation that in a distinctive way reveals something about God.
SPEAKER_00: And we are specifically given dominion over major aspects of the created realm.
SPEAKER_00: And that too is part of the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: So we want to look at that.
SPEAKER_00: So as we uh walk through these first few verses, we may miss something because we began in verse 26 instead of reading the whole flow.
SPEAKER_00: We may miss that there is a change.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not a great musician, but I'm enough of a musician to know that sometimes in a piece of music there are devices, there are ways of emphasizing something.
SPEAKER_00: One of which is oftentimes a final verse or a final part of a piece of music will be raised a step.
SPEAKER_00: And it it somehow builds to a crescendo.
SPEAKER_00: Uh this morning, as the worship team was was playing, there was a certain point where the instruments fell away.
SPEAKER_00: And that change that that drew us in.
SPEAKER_00: Well, what we find here is there is a shift in what the author is saying, a literary change.
SPEAKER_00: There's a couple of aspects to it.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, um he has been saying, let there be lights, let the light and the darkness be separated, let this happen, let that happen, let that happen.
SPEAKER_00: And now, and it would be very clear to someone who is speaking Hebrew and hearing this, that there is a change from let that happen to let us make.
SPEAKER_00: First time that kind of phrase.
SPEAKER_00: And it's a different grammatical form.
SPEAKER_00: And it would be like raising the key up a step or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: Um, a heightened emphasis, a crescendo for the pinnacle of creation.
SPEAKER_00: Let us.
SPEAKER_00: Many things we could say about that.
SPEAKER_00: It's another expression, which, with the rest of scripture, we understand, points to the very nature of God.
SPEAKER_00: God is not alone.
SPEAKER_00: God is never alone, because God is a community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Let us, not just let it happen, but let us make man in our image.
SPEAKER_00: Um there's the the thought that we've seen uh evening and morning the first day.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Jane raised the question when we were picking apart the sermon last week, I think, uh, at over the meal.
SPEAKER_00: Well, do that, I know.
SPEAKER_00: Um why is it, I mean, because I kept saying morning and evening the first day, where the text says evening and morning the first day.
SPEAKER_00: Kind of reverses it.
SPEAKER_00: Pretty simple.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a Westerner, we think of days beginning in the morning.
SPEAKER_00: In the Hebrew mind, the day began the night before.
SPEAKER_00: Sabbath begins the night before.
SPEAKER_00: So evening and morning is a complete day in that sense.
SPEAKER_00: But this was good, and this was good, and this was good, and this was good, and this is good, and this is very good.
SPEAKER_00: It's rising to a climax, a crescendo pinnacle.
SPEAKER_00: The earth and the seas are good, the light and the dark is good, but man in the image of God, given a mandate to steward and rule over creation, is very good.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So we need to be aware of these kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00: And what happens is at this point in the story, the emphasis is now on man and the story of man, what happens to man, the fall of man, what God does to redeem and save fallen man.
SPEAKER_00: From this point, virtually to the end of the book of Revelation, the that aspect of truth that is focused on, in the first place, is God, because the story does not revolve around us.
SPEAKER_00: The universe does not revolve around God.
SPEAKER_00: It's theocentric.
SPEAKER_00: God is at the center, but it's important for us to know who we are, what happened to us, and why we are in the shape that we're in.
SPEAKER_00: So now man's relationship with his creator and God's revelation of himself in light of that comes to the center stage.
SPEAKER_00: And this, the image of God in man, becomes the defining characteristic of what we must know.
SPEAKER_00: And if we fail to understand this, we're we're at a loss.
SPEAKER_00: I've used the picture of the topographical map.
SPEAKER_00: True north and a few fixed points.
SPEAKER_00: One of the fixed points, we have a compass, and that is always pointing us Godward.
SPEAKER_00: But one of the fixed points in the topography of reality is that we as human beings were created in the image of God and given an assignment and a mandate to rule and steward and shepherd God's, this aspect of God's creation.
SPEAKER_00: And that is very good.
SPEAKER_00: So we've already touched on it.
SPEAKER_00: Man is set above the rest of creation.
SPEAKER_00: This is the high point.
SPEAKER_00: Man is just not in nature and part of nature.
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
SPEAKER_00: We share a great deal with the animal world around us, and we are made of the same stuff, the amino acids and the carbon molecules and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: But we're not just in creation.
SPEAKER_00: Man as the image bearer of God stands above creation, and that is very good.
SPEAKER_00: Man is distinct from and placed over the animal world.
SPEAKER_00: So he says, Let us make man in our image after our likeness.
SPEAKER_00: Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the livestock.
SPEAKER_00: Not only are we in the image of God, but part of being in the image of God is being distinct from the rest of creation, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air.
SPEAKER_00: So God created man in his own image, and the image of God he created them, male and female, he created them.
SPEAKER_00: We'll come back to this in chapter two.
SPEAKER_00: And God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion.
SPEAKER_00: When he's talking about the image of God, we are set above the rest of creation, and we are to steward or care for the created world around us.
SPEAKER_00: Care for the environment, we must care for the natural resources, but that must never, never come at the cost of caring and valuing for valuing of mankind, because mankind is more than just that.
SPEAKER_00: Our care for the environment, and there is a whole correct theology, and frankly, in evangelical circles, we kind of take that for granted and we need to recognize this is a good earth.
SPEAKER_00: And our task is not to rape and ravage the good earth.
SPEAKER_00: Our task is to steward it.
SPEAKER_00: There is a solid evangelical theology of environmentalism that escapes most of us as evangelicals, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00: But our concern for the rest of creation and nature must never trump the dignity and value and importance of mankind.
SPEAKER_00: I may have mentioned this before, I get my stories mixed up.
SPEAKER_00: But the most vivid reminder of this was our experience when we were living in Germany and we were living in Candeln, and the main town was Lurach, and it was down the hill, down a winding road.
SPEAKER_00: And at a certain time of the year, that road was treacherous.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it was treacherous because of snow, sometimes it was treacherous because the frogs were migrating from one side of the road to the other.
SPEAKER_00: Who knew that frogs migrate?
SPEAKER_00: But during mating season, at least here, the breeding grounds were here and they were living here, so they would go across the road, especially at night.
SPEAKER_00: And as you went down there, and if you weren't careful, splat, splat, splat.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it would get slippery.
SPEAKER_00: So the Germans love them.
SPEAKER_00: The Green Party dominated Germany at that time.
SPEAKER_00: And so what they did is they put up frog fences along the side, that portion of the road, uh to keep you from splatting and splatting and splatting the frogs.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I honestly don't have a problem with that.
SPEAKER_00: However, what I have a problem with, at the end of the road in Lurach was our regional hospital.
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the road, they would without compunction sniff out the life of an unborn child.
SPEAKER_00: So we protect the frogs, but we abort fetuses.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I get at a certain level of thinking, if you just think horizontally, I get why that might even be justified if your view of reality is all messed up.
SPEAKER_00: But what I want to say is we are not just another animal, and we must not treat other people in that way.
SPEAKER_00: So there's all kinds of moral and ethical issues that grow out of this matter of man in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't have the time, I do have the inclination, but I don't have the time to deal with that further.
SPEAKER_00: So man is set above the rest of creation.
SPEAKER_00: Let's try to understand how the Imago Dei, the image of God, could be understood.
SPEAKER_00: Now, people far more brilliant than I am, scholars more dedicated to the Word of God, no doubt, than I am, more godly than I am, have spent lifetimes exploring this, and we can stand on their shoulders.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean?
SPEAKER_00: What is the scripture, what's it really saying, the Imago Day?
SPEAKER_00: Several things.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, we have here a capacity that God has created for the pinnacle of his creation to relate to him.
SPEAKER_00: Let them make them in our image.
SPEAKER_00: Let us make them in our image.
SPEAKER_00: And then God walked and talked with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day, had fellowship in a way that is quite different from his relationship to the hippopotamus.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not putting down the hippopotamus, that's elevating the uniqueness of God's relationship to mankind.
SPEAKER_00: In its core, mankind, unlike the rest of the created realm, unlike the rest of the animals, has the ability to know, relate, and love and serve God in a way that is different from the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if we don't look at revelation, then we equate mankind with just other animals.
SPEAKER_00: But there is, that's what this image and likeness points us to.
SPEAKER_00: The word image means a faithful representation.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a facsimile.
SPEAKER_00: It's not, it, or it is a facsimile, it's similar to, but it's not a precise, we are not a precise representation of God.
SPEAKER_00: But there is something about mankind that reveals some things about God in a way that is different from the rest of creation.
SPEAKER_00: We're not a photocopy, but we're not just something else.
SPEAKER_00: We're at the high point.
SPEAKER_00: And this capacity to relate personally to God is part of that.
SPEAKER_00: There is a similarity, a distinctive similarity to relate to Him and glorify Him.
SPEAKER_00: If we don't understand that the purpose for which your neighbor or the person sitting next to you at work or the person walking past you in the street, believer or unbeliever, part of the purpose and the reason for mankind's existence is to reflect and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: And man is given great dignity and worth because we are image bearers, all of us, even after sin comes into the world.
SPEAKER_00: We'll look at that in just a second.
SPEAKER_00: At its core, the defining characteristic of mankind, made in the image and likeness of God, destined for dominion over and assigned with responsibility.
SPEAKER_00: Another way of looking at it.
SPEAKER_00: We are theomorphic.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not trying to just give you fancy terms, but you're perhaps familiar with the word anthropomorphic, where you attribute human characteristics to your dog.
SPEAKER_00: There's something about some animals that do reflect something within us.
SPEAKER_00: But many philosophers say that what the Bible does is the Bible has us create a God in our own image.
SPEAKER_00: It's all anthropomorphic.
SPEAKER_00: That gets it all backwards.
SPEAKER_00: We are, God is not anthropomorphic like man.
SPEAKER_00: Man is in some ways like God.
SPEAKER_00: We are theomorphic.
SPEAKER_00: God is not like us, we're a little bit like God.
SPEAKER_00: In a way that's distinct from the rest of creation.
SPEAKER_00: We are sufficiently like him that we can know him and relate to him.
SPEAKER_00: We can love him and have a relationship.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if we're not careful, we attribute uh human qualities to our pets.
SPEAKER_00: Now, frankly, there is a difference between a guppy and a dog.
SPEAKER_00: A guppy just kind of does its thing in the bowl.
SPEAKER_00: And we're dog people, we love dogs.
SPEAKER_00: But they're just dogs.
SPEAKER_00: We have an incredible, there's a special relationship there.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I don't want to put that down.
SPEAKER_00: It's just that's that's not kind of a parallel with how we relate to God.
SPEAKER_00: So we have to be careful, there's limits.
SPEAKER_00: We can anthropomorphize things around us where God theomorphizes I don't even know to say it, us.
SPEAKER_00: We're a little bit like him.
SPEAKER_00: And man's best friend is a little bit like us.
SPEAKER_00: Enough so our dogs wag their tail when even I walk in.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make them human.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that we praise and worship a God and are moved to adoration when we encounter God doesn't mean we're God.
SPEAKER_00: It means we're a little bit like him in significant ways.
SPEAKER_00: Uh the scriptures view this as an amazing privilege, a high calling.
SPEAKER_00: I won't take the time to turn to Psalm 8.
SPEAKER_00: But that's what that portion of Psalm 8 is all about.
SPEAKER_00: Oh God, when I consider man, you've made him just a little lower than the heavenly beings.
SPEAKER_00: What is man that you take interest in him?
SPEAKER_00: We're blown away.
SPEAKER_00: Oh man, man, oh man, is what the uh the psalmist says.
SPEAKER_00: Man! Amazing, a privilege, even in our fallen states.
SPEAKER_00: That's even more amazing.
SPEAKER_00: This idea of dominion over the works of his hand.
SPEAKER_00: Dominion for us, if we're not careful, has a negative feel to it because in a solemn, sinful, broken world, if someone has authority over someone else, it's likely to be abused.
SPEAKER_00: The principle of authority and dominion and rulership is good, not bad.
SPEAKER_00: It's sin that twists that.
SPEAKER_00: So the dominion we exercise over creation, we abuse and rape creation.
SPEAKER_00: And that's wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Much less other people to be abusive to other people.
SPEAKER_00: So dominion in a fallen world has a dark side to it, no question about it.
SPEAKER_00: But do not ever, do not ever cast aside the idea of rulership in a dominion, because that goes to the core of what we're what we were created for.
SPEAKER_00: We'll come back to this in chapter two because we'll see that Adam and Eve had an assignment in the garden to tend and care for the garden, to investigate the nature of the natural realm, give names to the different animals and so forth.
SPEAKER_00: But to rule over them, it's sin, not dominion, that gives ruling a bad name.
SPEAKER_00: So nurturing, not exploring, uh, the idea is responsibly caring for, functioning as a steward or a vice regent, seeking the best of, caring for, intending the good earth, caring for and respecting and helping all men, not only those of the household of faith.
SPEAKER_00: The whole, the basis for legitimate God-honoring social justice and social action goes to the identity of man as created in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: Some aspects of this, as evangelicals, we're comfortable with, and some we say, oh, that just sounds really liberal.
SPEAKER_00: We must not give away caring for the environment or showing justice and dignity to all men, to liberals.
SPEAKER_00: That's a partial gospel.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in the full gospel.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about fully receiving that which God has given to us to know and to be.
SPEAKER_00: All right, the reality is that sin has defaced, but it has not erased the image of God in man.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know what the world would have been like had it not been polluted by sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful thing to think about.
SPEAKER_00: We just don't have any revelation about it.
SPEAKER_00: What it would have been like if Adam hadn't sinned?
SPEAKER_00: If Eve hadn't given him the apple.
SPEAKER_00: But if that hadn't happened, what would this world be like?
SPEAKER_00: Well, we have some clear indications, and we saw it a couple of months back as we were looking at death and life and life after death and the new heaven and the new earth.
SPEAKER_00: But what we do know, even before all of that future thing comes, mankind still exists in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have time to go into it in depth.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis chapter 5, after the fall, when the descendants of Adam and Eve were propagating after their kind.
SPEAKER_00: It specifically said, after their kind in the image of God, after the fall.
SPEAKER_00: Sin, excuse me, sin did not destroy, it affected and marred and defaced, but it did not destroy the defining characteristic of man.
SPEAKER_00: The image of God expressed among other things in properly ruling and stewarding and caring for God's creation.
SPEAKER_00: We also find, for example, in 1 Corinthians James chapter 3 is pretty clear, when we bite and destroy one another, James says, you're attacking other people who are in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: And this is in our sinful world.
SPEAKER_00: All I want to say is the image of God is not just pre-fall, it goes all the way through.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, Jesus is the only man who has fully reflected in his humanity fully God and fully man.
SPEAKER_00: Those kids did a phenomenal job.
SPEAKER_00: I hope they never forget the song that they sang.
SPEAKER_00: Fully God and fully man.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus is the only man who was fully reflecting the image of God, in which the image of God was not defaced.
SPEAKER_00: The glory of the gospel in the face of Jesus Christ, according to 2 Corinthians 4, we are being transformed into the image of Christ, who is the perfect reflection in humanity of the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: We could go on for hours, but there is a super supper and a super bowl, so we won't.
SPEAKER_00: Let me try to just quickly there's there's three main things that I want to share that to me become very clear by way of application.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, this understanding of the defining characteristic of man being in the image of God is a critical part of our worldview.
SPEAKER_00: It's a critical part of how we understand things.
SPEAKER_00: If you just see animal, mineral, and vegetable, then you are limited and ultimately foolish and it doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: There is more to us, and there's more to creation than that.
SPEAKER_00: We are so much more.
SPEAKER_00: And if we don't realize that, we come into all kinds of problems.
SPEAKER_00: One of the things in this connection, without this, we're going to misunderstand the facts of life.
SPEAKER_00: You want to teach, you're having problems teaching your kids the facts of life?
SPEAKER_00: This is the most important fact of life, my friends.
SPEAKER_00: That we're created in God's image.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Love that.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just mention something here.
SPEAKER_00: A fully Christian worldview underscores the importance of Christian education.
SPEAKER_00: A fully, true, robust Christian education.
SPEAKER_00: Let me try to be careful how I say this.
SPEAKER_00: A Christian education is not defined by having a time in which you learn Bible verses and have a chapel.
SPEAKER_00: I'm all for that, don't get me wrong.
SPEAKER_00: That does not make a Christian education.
SPEAKER_00: What makes a Christian education is where young people and adults begin to understand every area of life in its relationship to God.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a mathematician, you don't separate your mathematics from God because the complexity of math, which goes right past me, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the ability of man to think and understand that way is something that has to do with the character of who God is and who God has made man.
SPEAKER_00: If you've been studying early childhood development, for example, and you fail to bring that field of study into truth where in the beginning God and God created, and we are image-bearers of God, then you will study early child education with a flawed and unfortunately limited worldview.
SPEAKER_00: So, whatever field, if you're a plumber, then we plumb to the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: We bring everything together to the focus on who God is.
SPEAKER_00: And we think of Christian education, I believe, far too shallowly.
SPEAKER_00: We are not trying to socialize kids to get them act like Christians.
SPEAKER_00: If that's what our Christian education is doing, we're not helping, we're harming.
SPEAKER_00: But whether it's at the first and second grade or at the university level, if we can orient and correlate all truth and bring it in line with the reality of who God is and of reality, that is Christian education.
SPEAKER_00: And boy am I a believer in that.
SPEAKER_00: In part because of what we're seeing here today.
SPEAKER_00: We are created and destined for community as an outgrowth of this.
SPEAKER_00: Here's where I get that.
SPEAKER_00: Let us, God says, plural, speaking about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, let us make them in our image.
SPEAKER_00: Well, God is what has been called a divine community.
SPEAKER_00: God is not alone.
SPEAKER_00: Before He created anything, He was not alone.
SPEAKER_00: He was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That is goes to the very essence of who God is.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to the very essence of who we are.
SPEAKER_00: It is not good to be alone.
SPEAKER_00: That's not just talking about marriage.
SPEAKER_00: That's talking about the very nature of what it is to be human, to be individualistic, to be isolated and separated, to be a rugged individualist is not to be fully human.
SPEAKER_00: Let me get that straight.
SPEAKER_00: To be a rugged individualist.
SPEAKER_00: As good as that is, and you folks, more than me, are the heirs of the pioneers who made it through the North Dakota winters and survived the sod houses and were hardworking and pulled themselves up and made it by with grit and determination, and that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00: But if that becomes isolationistic, if that becomes just rugged individualism, as though we don't need other people, then that is sub-Christian, my friends.
SPEAKER_00: It's not good to be alone.
SPEAKER_00: It's not good to be a loner.
SPEAKER_00: We were not made for that.
SPEAKER_00: We were made for community because God is community and we are created in his image.
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of implications, a zillion implications for the local church.
SPEAKER_00: What is the local church?
SPEAKER_00: It better not just be a group of individuals sitting in the same place studying the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: If that's what it is, forget it.
SPEAKER_00: Let's just not do that.
SPEAKER_00: The church is a community of faith who worships God together.
SPEAKER_00: Worship is not a solo experience.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just God is your co-pilot or even God is just your pilot.
SPEAKER_00: No, we are in this together, the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: If we are not connected to one another in deep, meaningful relationships or working at that, if we're just a bunch of individuals who happen to assign the same doctrinal statement, that does not make us a church.
SPEAKER_00: If we are individuals who are fundamentally separated from one another because I like this and I agree with that, and I like this over here, and we're this and this, we are not the church of Jesus Christ when we are divided like that.
SPEAKER_00: We are falling short, we're settling for far too little.
SPEAKER_00: The church is to be a conglomeration of imperfect people with limited perspectives who together find something that is greater than the sum of the parts, who are more human together than separately.
SPEAKER_00: More human together, more godly together than separately.
SPEAKER_00: We underplay and undervalue the nature of community.
SPEAKER_00: I served in a church one time in which together with the elders we tried to work on kind of a tagline for the church.
SPEAKER_00: And the term we came up with, and I love it, we defined our church as a family of friends who love God and love one another.
SPEAKER_00: A family of friends who love God and love one another.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that the Lord in his grace would enable us to grow in that faith evangelical free church.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, would that were more true for us?
SPEAKER_00: A family of friends.
SPEAKER_00: Different, but we love one another and we journey together Godward.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the church is all about.
SPEAKER_00: One last, and I don't have time to go into it.
SPEAKER_00: I've gotten the look from my wife.
SPEAKER_00: And you ought to be really glad she sits in front and every once in a while goes like this.
SPEAKER_00: I love you, dear.
SPEAKER_00: We only experience full and true humanity in relationship with Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we're always talking about faith and trust in a relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: Without that, we're we're just existing.
SPEAKER_00: With that, we have life and life abundant.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean more stuff.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that he it means that there is a quality of life that we only find in relationship to God and in relationship to one another.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're here this morning and you're on the outside looking in, I'd say, come on, come on down.
SPEAKER_00: What we need together is Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Trust Christ as your Savior.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot be fully human as you were intended to be without a relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to the core of who we are.
SPEAKER_00: I'm done.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, friends, would you stand for the benediction, please?
SPEAKER_00: Now, my friends, go into the world in peace.
SPEAKER_00: Have courage.
SPEAKER_00: Hold on to that which is good and honor all men.
SPEAKER_00: Strengthen the fainthearted.
SPEAKER_00: Support the weak.
SPEAKER_00: Help the suffering.
SPEAKER_00: Restore the wandering.
SPEAKER_00: Comfort the grieving.
SPEAKER_00: And share the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Love and serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us.
SPEAKER_00: God bless.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.