Gen. 1:24-31, Made in God’s Image (2)

What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

·       Another way Man is like God is that we are able to understand right and wrong.  Again, go back to the very beginning in the Garden of Eden.  God was able to provide Adam with an opportunity to obey or disobey.  It was simple then: do not eat of the tree in the midst of the Garden.  The Apostle Paul would tell us later that God placed His moral law in Humans; he referred to it as their “conscience” (Rom. 2:12-16).  Adam could understand accountability.  This is the way God “thinks” if you will, and He made man to be a “moral” creature.  Animals do not have this.  In the Bible, if a man/person/human acts in total disregard of morality that one is said to be like a “natural brute beast” (Jude 1:10; 2 Pt. 2:12).  The word “brute” means they lack or are contrary to reason.  The word “beast” refers to something that has life.  If you put the two together, you have an animal, your dog, the deer that eat in our back yard, etc.  They lack reason and they are not moral creatures.

·       Another thing we can say about God and Man is that both have an emotional element.  What do we mean by this?  God has the capacity to love, to rejoice, to sorrow, to be angry and so forth.  This in no way means that God is “flakey” or inconsistent, driven by emotions.  That is a problem that sin has brought upon Mankind but it is not fundamental to being an emotional person.  This is so important for us.  Again, your pet does not have this ability.  You feed your pet; thus your pet is tightly connected to you.  But your pet does not love you.  If that is your definition of love then you, again, are being like a brute beast.  Instincts are at work when the deer are mating in the Fall; it’s not love.  To be “in rut” is a physical thing, not emotional.  Instincts are at work when the grizzly is chasing the herd and the doe separates from “Bambi.”  It's not a moral failure on the part of the rest of the herd if they do not protect the weak ones.  The dog’s wagging tail is a physical response to some stimulus; the dog does not experience the deep joy a human can experience when he or she is at peace with God.

·       Here’s another thought, and it relates to all we have said: Man, like God, is spiritual.  Man is also physical, given a body with all it’s intricacies.  But that body is home to an “inner man.”  We are not talking simply about the “soul.”  The soul is that part of the inner man that connects the Man with the rest of creation.  Man is a living being.  But beyond that is the “spirit” of the Man, that which connects the Man with his Creator.  Man is a spiritual being. 

If you want to know what it is like for a Person, made in God’s image, to live from day to day, you must look at Gen. 2.  That’s the only place.  It involves Man from the time he was created until Gen. 3 when the Man disobeyed God.  From that point on it all changed, and definitely, not for the better!