Episode Details

Prayer

O Lord my God, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Creation declares your glory, and it is a wonder to be alive to see it. And your steadfast love endures forever! I praise your great and mighty name. I thank you for sustaining me through the night. I thank you for your abiding patience and grace. I am sorry, Lord, for the ways I have misused what you have given, and especially in failing to redeem the time that you have given me. Please forgive me, Lord, and teach me to use all things you have given at all times to the honour and glory of your name. You have made me to be an earthly image of your glory, please remake and renew your glorious image in me, and in all the saints of God in your church. I commit this day to you, please keep me and deliver me from the evil one. I pray 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

The idea of being “spiritual” is a common idea for Christians. We talk about going deeper in the spiritual life, or we might say that someone is a very “spiritual person”. But what do we actually mean when we’re talking about spirituality? As we continue on in our studies of the image of God, we find that spirituality is not just some added extra in the Christian life. It’s not something that some people have and some people do not have. We are all both spiritual and physical beings. A spiritual nature is an innate part of what it means to be human, it’s part of what it means for us to be made in the image of God. So I want to invite you now to pause and reflect for yourself. Consider the fact that you too are a spiritual being, and consider now what that means for your life.

So far in our studies on man as the image of God, we have seen that the image is not part of who we are, it is who we are. We are made in the image of God, we are images of God, and every aspect of who we are finds it’s original in him. We’ve also seen that what this all means is that ultimately we are glory bearers. On day one God declared his intention to shine his glory and presence into the creation. On day six he showed us how he would do that – his glory would chiefly be displayed in the creation through us. We are glory bearers! Furthermore, as we multiply, so too does God’s glory, which by our multiplication is designed to expand out into the creation.

However, we have also seen that mankind has