Genesis 1:26-27

It really makes you thirstier when you’re done.
All right, we’re glad to have you back as we continue the revulsion.
We’re picking up actually right where we left off yesterday at a really pivotal part of the text.
So Clint, you want to take us away?
Yeah, just a reminder.
Yesterday,
as we moved into day six of creation,
we pointed out that it’s the only day that is split into two acts.
So God has already created all of the animals,
and yet the day is not over.
God has seen that it was good.
That has been mentioned.
But in that normal formula where we’d see evening and morning,
whatever day,
now God instead continues.
So verse 26,
“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness,
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and the birds of the air,
and over the cattle,
and the wild animals,
and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image.
In the image of God, he created them.
Male and female,
he created them.” Why don’t we stop there,
Michael?
So this first verse, verse 26,
generates a lot of discussion.
There is a lot of stuff packed into this,
and you may or may not
realize how much as you read over
it.
So the first very interesting thing is that we get a plural word, “let us.”
And this is fairly discernible in Hebrew,
as in English.
It’s pretty clear when you’re
in the singular and when you’re in the plural.
And so this is a plural word.
The idea that
God speaks of himself in the plural.
And historically,
at least for Christians,
that has been a kind of nod in the direction
of the idea of the Trinity,
the Father, Son, and the Spirit.
We’ve looked back to verses like this,
and we’ve read into them
part of our understanding,
informed by verses like this,
of what it means that God is three and God is one.
In the Hebrew,
it may be more expansive.
It may be more the idea that
God is with perhaps the heavenly host,
something along those lines.
But clearly,
it is a fascinating piece in the text that there is a
reference to a multitude,
or at least a variety,
as God speaks ostensibly to himself,
but not in the singular.
Yeah, and this is a problem.
It may not seem so much like a problem to us as we do turn to the
Bible, but scholars point out here that this could go a few different ways.
If you’re looking at this from the original author’s perspective,
there could be this idea of maybe a heavenly
court.
We get that in some of the other Old Testament books,
this idea of God consulting with
this sort of larger group of heavenly beings.
We also have that idea that maybe this is just
an attempt of sort of displaying God’s contemplation.
There’s lots of ways that one could
tease this out, but the point here is
that there’s been a not so subtle shift, to be honest,
away from a kind of impersonal reflection.
Not completely impersonal, but the force of it is
third person to now a first-person proclamation.
This idea that this is now a work intrinsic to
God’s intention, intrinsic to God’s person,
and this is the beginning of pointing us towards
the fact that what’s happening now at the second part of this day is not only not like what came
before it in the beginning part,
but it’s actually substantially different from all of the other
days.
We’ve begun to see a turn now in this tone and shift,
and now we’re moving closer towards
what’s unique about this day.
The next fascinating thing is this phrase,
“In our image according to
our likeness,” and both Jews and Christians,
for the thousands of years that have come after these texts,
have pondered what it means that we are created in the image of God,
in the
likeness of God.
We understand or we’ve tended to say,
though there have been fringes,
we have tended to say
that that’s not a physical reading,
that our bodies don’t represent the physical description
of what God looks like or something like that.
So what does it mean,
the image of God?
What does it mean that we’re created in that likeness?
And some have said our capacity for moral choices,
the idea that we have ethics,
the idea that we have a spirit,
as opposed to maybe the
animal side of the creation in which we have the ability to reflect,
we have the ability to ponder,
to look and search for meaning.
But these little words,
our image and our likeness, have generated,
I couldn’t even guess how many pages and pages and hours of
discussion and thought and conversation.
And while there is generally consensus,
there’s really no period on what this
means.
We continue, I think, to live into and discover some of the depth of these words.
Right,
because this has been read in lots of different directions,
that there’s a sense that
this gives license to human action and human freedom and agency,
because if we’re creating God’s image,
then what does that enable humans to do?
Humans can create in a similar but more
limited way as God created everything in the most absolute and perfect way.
There’s a sense in which
though that this question of image is also difficult because,
and I don’t want to go too far in the weeds,
but Christians have interacted with different philosophies,
you know,
whether that be Plato,
or whether that be Aristotle.
And there’s different images of when you think about image
from the Platonic sense,
there’s a very specific definition of what that image might be,
what a perfect sort of existential thing out in the universe would be,
as opposed to a more Aristotelian,
sort of on the ground kind of thing.
And I won’t dive into that very deeply,
just other than to say
that when you talk about the richness here,
Clint, like you mentioned,
what we need to recognize is
what’s at stake in this question of image isn’t just a question of sort of understanding what it
means.
It’s an understanding of who we’re intended to be.
What does it look like to bear the original
image as God intended it?
We know that that’s going to change in very short order, but yet,
even though sin does come into the world,
we know that from its very conception there was something
of God’s perfect intention built into the reality of humanity.
And so therefore,
sort of teasing that out is essential to our understanding of what it means to be redeemed,
what it means to be those
who live on the other side of sin as God works that out in God’s plan.
So there’s a lot here
that you might not initially think of.
Yeah, and this is, again,
this has been important to
Christians.
There’s this Latin phrase imagio dei,
which literally means the image of God.
And what we have claimed in our faith is that each person,
even on the other side of being tainted by sin,
even after the fall that we’ll talk about at some point in the near future,
bears within them by the
very nature of being created by God,
the image of God that somewhere buried deep within us,
sometimes under a lot of not very positive stuff,
is that image of God.
And when we reach out to
others, when we look to others who may be poor,
who may be broken,
who may be struggling,
who may be sick,
Christians have always strived to see in them the image of the one who made them.
This is, you know, if you want beautiful renditions of this,
you can read some of the works of mother Teresa
who said things like,
“When I bathe the poor,
I’m holding the hand of Christ.” This idea that in each person,
that image remains, though covered up by sin and shame and guilt and whatever else,
but it is something that remains true.
And that has been important in our Christian faith,
and particularly in our mission and ministry.
The third thing here that has generated a lot of conversation,
let them have dominion over the creation,
the fish and the birds and the cattle
and all the animals and everything.
So the word dominion is very interesting because it applies authority.
It applies almost a kind of a picture of subduing,
of struggling against, of controlling.
And this has become, in some contexts,
a problematic word as we have politically
put against ourselves the idea of caring for the creation.
The idea that we should care for
the creation or we should subdue and dominate the creation.
And those ideas have not always
worked well together, though I think you’ll see,
even in the next creation story,
that early on in Scripture,
they seem to be held together.
But this has been a,
for some this has been a problematic word,
the idea of dominance,
the idea of subduing the creation.
In the early context, that’s clearly what it felt like,
right?
You had to work the land.
You had to
protect yourself from wild animals.
You had to create a field and herds and flocks and care for them.
But this has,
not everyone has found this the most helpful word.
And I don’t know the
nuances of the Hebrew real well,
but it’s a fairly good equivalent.
I mean, this is the lens through
which this story is told,
but we’ve wondered if it continues to be helpful.
Yeah, so I won’t burden
you all with this.
I had a class in seminary that was completely devoted to this word.
There was an entire class and it was all about getting into the original meaning of this word,
which, you know, as you do when you go into academics,
you discover that there’s far less agreed upon than any person would particularly like.
So this word is important.
And I think it’s complicated by the fact
that it’s put in the context that it is, because
you could sort of gloss over it if it wasn’t set
in a section that’s fundamentally about the fact that humanity is set apart,
that God is doing
something new and is giving a certain particular kind of responsibility and also a certain kind of
privilege to these ones who are made in the image.
So it does sort of complexify the reality that
this thing that God makes humanity,
that this has been given this particular task.
That said,
we have to be very careful when we read this as a permission slip as opposed to a giving of
responsibility, because there’s nowhere in really the entire scriptural text that makes it seem that
humanity is given gross license to do whatever it wants in creation.
And fundamentally,
we are always image bearers of the perfect one who created all things and called it good.
So there’s an implicit, I think, kind of responsibility that comes to every Christian to maintain the goodness
of what God made.
So if you take dominion and for you,
that becomes a gateway to destruction.
You’ve misread the rest of the text.
You’re reading against the whole rest of the scripture.
If you read the text and you say that humanity has no place to bear out this responsibility,
I think then you are also cutting against the text.
There’s clearly intended here this idea
that humanity is to find ourselves stewards of what God made as under shepherds of the perfect
shepherds.
And we find ourselves in debates about that certainly in the socio-political realm.
But fundamentally, I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement that these two things have to
be held in tension as Christians reading this text.
Yeah, I think maybe fundamentally a word
like oversight is a good equivalent there or something like that.
But clearly, if you’re heading down the road throwing out garbage wherever you want and saying,
“It doesn’t matter.
I have dominion over the earth.” You’ve not understood the creation narrative and not understood our
role as stewards of the good gift that God has handed to our care and caretaking.
Fundamentally,
that’s what Adam is going to be, caretaker.
So the only thing we’ll finish with
here is verse 27.
Notice that in this first story,
the creation of man is abbreviated.
Like everything else,
God created humankind in his image.
In the image of God,
he created them, male and female, he created them.
So this is a condensed,
it’s often seen to be a condensed
version of what we’ll look at in the next story as an expanded story.
But here,
they’re created simply, again,
created at the will of God,
and male and female created essentially simultaneously
or at very least their creation is told as such so that they arrive in the story at the same time.
And that’s a little bit different when we get to the expanded story later.
Yeah, and this actually plays against the stories we’ve had thus far,
the days rather, that we’ve had thus far where
it says after their own likeness,
here we have male and female.
So not only do we have a shift
in the pronouns to the singular pronoun for God in our image,
we also have this idea that here we
have the male and the female.
And in a text that we’ve already pointed out all of the separation,
all of the orderliness that is
striking that here it’s named specifically.
Once again, there’s a
sort of order that’s envisioned of the way that God made not just the natural things,
but there’s an ordering within those natural things.
And there’s a beauty in that,
a kind of put togetherness by an eternal heavenly engineer of making things so that they fit together in the
last act of creation.
And these,
both genders are named specifically with that sort of ordering in mind.
Yeah, and so we will continue with that because God then has really his first interaction
with the humans as we finish this story.
We’ll do that on Monday,
probably get through this story,
and then we can move on to conversation about the second story.
But at this point,
men and women are on the scene and we are about to find out their role and their place in the creation.
So thanks for joining us.
Do you have anything else?
I was only going to just,
we’ll dig into this more.
We’re about to finish this chapter.
We’ll finish this early next week.
What’s striking to me,
Clint, is how little there is here in terms of actual blueprint,
right?
What we would want in a creation story,
we’re already wanting to some extent here.
Like we’re talking about God’s masterful creation.
We’re getting to sort of the apex of what God’s doing.
And wouldn’t we love to have that all spelled out in perfect detail about what were the slithering things on
the ground?
And what did those birds look like?
The simplicity of this text is already becoming,
in some ways, frustrating if you come with a certain set of questions.
I think what’s beautiful
if you slow down and you see where we’re at is that ultimately this account of creation is answering
different questions than what we might naturally bring to it.
We said this all the way back last week.
What we can learn as we study here is to reframe our own questions,
to begin asking the
question of the text.
And that is, who is the one doing this?
And what is the purpose that they are
bringing in this act?
And I think as we come to the study next week,
that’s going to be the
question that’s really getting answered here.
We’re going to see some of God’s intention and what God
wants out of this thing that God’s making.
So that’s all I had to say.
Yeah.
So we’ll get into
that more next week.
Hope you can join us.
Thanks for being here today.
Remember, we are not on tomorrow.
We hope that you all have a great weekend and we hope to see you back Monday.
Don’t miss the Mission Musings release that came out just this morning where we talk about the
question, what is your mission?
So if you haven’t seen that,
take a look.
That’s wherever you get this content.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
Have a good weekend.