Psalms 8:3–6“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,”
Shakespeare expresses a different view of man in Hamlet:
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how expressive and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
Hamlet goes well beyond David’s evaluation of man with phrases like “infinite in faculties” and “like a god.” David, on the other hand, goes straight to God with praise and wonder at the works of His hands, and he is led to wonder that God would even consider us. Hamlet just has another reason to be depressed.
In both cases, the question is, “What is man?” David wonders at the same thing that has plagued us since well before him and far after. Who am I? Why am I here? Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, unlike Hamlet, David has the answer. Rather than lifting man to godlike heights, David properly places man just “a little lower than the heavenly beings.” He does not put man down with the animals but has him “crowned with glory and honor.”
Even today, we are each dealing with this question of identity (some in very strange ways) and purpose. We look for our place in the cosmos and for meaning in our existence. The key to the answer is similar to anything else’s purpose. How do we determine something’s purpose? We look at who made it and for what use it was made. What is the maker’s purpose for us?
Therefore, the answer to all these questions about our purpose, meaning, and destiny starts at the beginning. Yes, the very beginning: Genesis. The creation of the universe holds the key to understanding who we are. There is more for us to know and understand than this article can convey, so in the rest of this series on humanity, we will fill in and complete the answers. But we start here with creation.
It is interesting that the Hebrew word for man— אָדָם (ʾā·ḏām)—is also the first man’s name: Adam. Context tells us whether it is intended as “man” or the name “Adam” in a particular passage. While, like other words, the term “man” is used for male humans, it is also used for a male or female person. Until very recently in human history, this use of male terms for male and female humans was not questioned. This was universally understood. The use of the masculine term for humans is not just an English norm; it is also true in almost every other language. The same is true of the pronoun “he.” “He” is used when a male person is intended or when the sex of the antecedent is of no concern. In these posts, I will seek to use more inclusive terms such as “humans” or “mankind,” but the old use of “man” or “he” will come in. This will be especially true of the use of “he,” as there is no third person singular non-gender pronoun to use for a person. The use of inclusive terms is not done for political correctness but for the sake of clarity.
Without going over the complete creation account, the Bible gives the answer to where everything comes from: a creator. The creator is identified in the very first verse: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”, Genesis 1:1. For the Israelites, there was no need for an introduction; they knew who God was: He is Yahweh, the one true God (see our post, Yahweh: The Name). The God of their forefathers created space, time, energy, the universe, and the earth. He then formed all of this as He desired to fit the needs of humans.
He starts on the first day making light and He saw “it was good.” Then on the third day, after God made the earth ready for life, God saw that “it was good.” Afterwards, on that same day, He added vegetation. Again, God saw that “it was good.”
On the fourth day, He put the sun, moon, and stars in place to be signs for the seasons, days, and years. The earth uses the sun for light during the day and the moon for light at night. Again, God saw, “It was good.”
On the fifth day, He then put fish in the sea and birds in the sky. “And God saw that it was good.”
The next day, the sixth day, God called for the earth to bring forth animals on the dry ground. He again stopped in the middle of the day and noted, “It was good.” Six times in just over five days God saw what he had made and “it was good.”
Then there was a change; something different was about to take place. Let’s quote it in full before we deal with it.
“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.’
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
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.”
Genesis 1:26–28
As an aside, the use of “us” and “our” for God in this passage catches our attention. As New Testament believers, we see the allusion to the Trinity. Even though the original readers and even Moses, the writer, would not have seen the Trinity here, yet I still believe it is hinted at here. The original readers and others up until the coming of Christ would have seen the plural as a way to speak of the full majesty of a singular God, the plurality of His majesty. The word used here is Elohim, which is the plural form of the Hebrew word for God. The plural is the commonly used form for the one true God of Israel (see our post, God). Both are true, He is fully majestic and Trinity, but we have the advantage of full revelation to see the latter while Moses and the Israelites did not.
There are a number of aspects of this text that jump out at us. So much so that we cannot cover them all in one post. We will attempt to look at the most critical points for our understanding of humanity. Foremost is the concept of man being made in the image and likeness of God. That will be the main focus of our next article, so for now, we start with the actual creation of man.
One of the first things we see is that God talks of making man. While God created everything, He spoke, and it was so. But with man, God does not speak man into existence; He makes him. Look ahead at Genesis 2:7: “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” God was actively and personally involved in the actual formation of man and in giving him life, “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground.” While made of the ground like animals so as to be connected to the earth, the similarities with animals end there. Man is specially made and given a soul unlike anything animals possess.
In the account of the creation in the first chapter, the creation of male and female is thought of as a single creative act. Chapter two gives us a more detailed account of the same event. There we see that the man, Adam, is created first, then the woman is made out of Adam. (We will have a future article on the nature of the male and female relationship.) The point to take away from this is while there are differences between men and women, what is being said here about what humans are and what they are to do applies to both males and females. There are differences in their roles but not in equality, dignity, purpose, responsibilities, or relationship with God.
God then gives tasks and responsibilities to Adam and Eve. They are to multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. They both are to have dominion over the earth and all animals, birds, and even all the fish. In chapter two, we learn that God put man in a garden specially made for him, and he was to work and keep it.
It is important to notice at the end of chapter 1 of Genesis after God had created Adam and Eve and had placed them in the garden, He evaluated all He had done on the six days of creation. It is an evaluation that involves the apex of His creative work, His creation of humans. He goes beyond the “it was good” of the previous assessments of creation to “it was VERY good.” This was before the Fall, before we and our sin distorted all that was created. Yes, I did say “we”; for, while Adam brought sin into the world (Rom 5:12-21), we have our own responsibility for the sin we have added to the world. It is a copout to simply blame Adam. Plainly, regardless of the evil and suffering we see in the world, this was not the intent God had for His creation. It was not His design, but we brought the evil into the world with our rejection of our God.
What we see here is we are not just another element of creation. I don’t want to get into the whole discussion of evolution; there are others, like Answers in Genesis, who have covered it so well. Yet, it is clear God was the one doing the creating, not blind chance mutations with a whole lot of time. It is also undeniably apparent that the most important aspect of God’s creation was the creation of man. We are the point of all this. We are not one of the animals nor are we an advanced animal. We were especially made for a distinct purpose. A purpose we will explore in this series. In our next article, this will come into greater focus as we see what it means when God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg