God, Who Made Everything

Humans are a reflection of God.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Human beings were made in the image of God, and as His image-bearers we were made to work, to rule, and to serve as God’s stewards—to be surpassingly God-centered.

We are made in the image of God.

Because human beings are created living beings, it is not surprising that we have many attributes in common with other creatures.

But Genesis insists that human beings alone are made in the image of God.

What does it mean to be “made in the image of God”? It means mainly that we reflect God.

We reflect God by communicating with Him. God is a talking God. He speaks to human beings, and they speak back to Him.

We reflect God’s creativity. Ours’ is not like God’s. We work with our hands and where does this creative urge come from? By and large creativity is not characteristic of elephants, black widow spiders, or rocks. It is unique in us as we reflect the image of God.

We reflect God when we work. Human beings enjoy a capacity to work. God gives to the man and to the woman certain responsibilities to work in this world. It begins in the garden. Work is teased out throughout all of Scripture as something intrinsically honorable.

We reflect God in many ways, yet there are many unbridgeable differences between God and us. We have already seen that He alone is self-existent. We are not; as like everything else in the creation, we are dependent creatures.

One Philosopher labeled the way we operate as “Self-referential incoherence.” It is defined as the way we naturally compare ourselves to ourselves. We have no external standard by which anything should be judged; we cannot find an anchor for our being anywhere. So we drown ourselves in temporary pleasures or pursuit of money or self promotion, but we have no anchoring that locates us and gives us a meaning beyond ourselves.

Humans: Male & Female

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Male and female hold many things in common, but how they are unique and different is clearly exposed. This is a contrast to the picture of marriage than some others offer. It is different than the Near Eastern harem with the most powerful monarch possessing the most women, while each woman is often treated as nothing more than property.

God’s concept is the woman is one with him. She is different, transparently for a start. She is not identical, but is his sexual and emotional counterpart. In marriage the two become “one flesh”— here there is a vision of marriage that ultimately becomes a model of other relationships unpacked in later chapters in the Bible.

The Man and His Wife Were Innocent

Genesis 2:25 “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

Adam and Eve had nothing to hide, no inappropriate thoughts or actions, and therefore nothing to be ashamed of. Are there not some moments in the day or week that you are glad no one can know what you are thinking or feeling? We want all kinds of things to stay hidden: hurt, bitterness, lust, arrogance, and hate, just to name a few.

If we always loved God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and always loved others as ourselves, then we would have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. That is the reality of where Adam and Eve were in the beginning, in the garden before they sinned.

Genesis 1 and 2 constitute the necessary background to Genesis 3. Without understanding how good everything was, we cannot fully grasp what happens in the next chapter, which depicts what is sometimes called “the fall,” and was the onset of massive rebellion.

This doctrine of creation actually surfaces again in the Bible, in passages written after the coming of Jesus. The biblical vision of the future looks back to the old creation, which tragically succumbed to rebellion, hatred, idolatry, and sin.

What is finally needed is for God to do a new creative act, to begin again, creating people over again, a new existence.

God created and has a desire and a plan to recreate us
and restore fallen men and women to the place where they started in the garden, a place where man and woman had  A perfect relationship with God the creator. Ask Him to restore you and to enable you to reflect Him.