Episode Details

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank you for a new day of life. Thank you for sustaining me through the night, and thank you for your patient forbearance with me, I deserve none of it. According to the greatness of your compassion, I ask this morning that as I read your word, you would speak to me and wash my heart anew. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Reading

Gen 1:24-31.

“And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And 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 creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

28. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29. And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

Meditation

There’s a very interesting part of our passage that has been much discussed over the years. Consider what we see in verse 26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And 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 creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Now if you collected all that has been written on this verse, you’d probably be able to fill entire rooms with the books. There are many opinions, but let’s consider the plain grammar for a moment: “Let us make man”. This phrase is a divine utterance written in the first person plural. Not “Let me make man”, but “Let us make man.”

Moses may not have understood this clearly, but in the fullness of scripture there can be no doubt: the Triune God of scripture made man in his own image, and God’s Triune nature introduces another important aspect of our creation in the image of God: that we are relational images of heavenly glory. But let me explain what I’m trying to open up here.

The first thing to affirm up front is the basic fact that God is triune. There is one God who exists in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now what this means is that God is not a singular being. He is not isolated, he is communal. There are three persons in the Trinity. In the Islamic belief system, God is a singular, distant personality. In scripture, however, he is revealed as being a God of love, and that love doesn’t depend on anything he has made, because perfect, infinite love has always existed between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are relational images of heavenly glory.

We find these things presented in our text as well. There is a communal “we” in the godhead, and then there is a relational, communal image affirmed in the makeup of the church (3:27). It was not good that man should be alone, therefore God made the woman and he s