When God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... so God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
We have looked at the first and most important meaning the phrase 'in His image' bears - that He made us to be creatures whom He could address, persons, capable of interaction with Him. It is in our inner being, not in the outward man, that we bear His image. (See note 1 below)
But that is not the only meaning the phrase bears. There are three further implications which arise, first out of the text immediately, and then out of the context.
I - MALE AND FEMALE
In the same breath in which our author says God created man in His own image, he says He created him male and female. Gender reflects something essential to our understanding of God's nature. We do not understand God's nature until we perceive that those characteristics which distinguish male and female are all combined in Him. There is in God a woman's tenderness as well as a man's toughness, a woman's responsiveness as well as a man's initiative, a woman's intuition as well as a man's logic, a woman's beauty as well as a man's ruggedness, a woman's sympathy as well as a man's drive. If we never come to terms with our sexuality we shall never come to a right appreciation of God either. Our sexuality is given us that we might set forth the glory of God by means of it!
Is this another 'separation' God makes? The theme of separation is a feature of this chapter: between light and darkness, between the waters above and the waters beneath, between sea and dry land ... and now between man and woman? Separation work is a key element in God's creation scheme. Upon it depends the establishment and maintenance of order - the provision of a 'place' for mankind in the scheme of things, so that it is a work of grace as well as a work of creation. The separation between the sexes should also be seen in this light. When the function of things separated is confused, chaos follows. The blurring of the essential 'given' differences between the sexes is as potentially disastrous as the breakdown of the separation between the waters in the flood - the fabric of sustainable life is unravelled.
II - WORKERS
Part of what it means also that we are made in the image of God is that we are made to be workers, for at the point where it is said that we were made in His image, we have been observing God at work - fully, creatively occupied, day after day. God's creation of man is described after 25 verses in which we have been presented with the spectacle of Him making and creating. He made this, He created that, He contemplated what He had done and pronounced it very good. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," said Jesus (John 5:17). God took pride in His work and found an evident satisfaction in it ... and He made man in His own image. We were made to work, to work creatively, and in that work to take pride and find fulfilment. As the Preacher said, "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil." (Eccl. 3:24)
One thing that impresses about man in contrast to all other living creatures is the ability he singularly possesses to make things: to fabricate houses and build ships and fashion yokes. The anthropologists tell us that one of the primary features that distinguishes man from the animals is that he is both a tool user and a tool maker. Mankind uniquely has the capacity to frame in imagination a vision of something that does not yet exist, and then give it form and substance.
This is a very simple affirmation, and yet it is a profound one. Man, says our author, is never so Godlike as when he sets his hand to a worthwhile thing so as to finish it, and having finished it, to contemplate it in the Godlike fashion and find it very good.
The implications of all this for our understanding of work are far-reaching.
It makes Government's responsibility to create work opportunities a priority, if it is to serve the community's interests in accord with God's will.
It means that we should not require humans to engage in work which can afford the worker no satisfaction in the doing of it.
It means that an unwillingness to work is a degeneration of our nature, a personality distortion.
If this prompts the retort, "But doesn't Genesis say that work is a curse God put on humanity after the fall?" the answer is "No." It is true that God put a curse on work; but work itself is not that curse, only the futility that attends upon it. Sin frustrates God's purpose for us, and it affects our work every bit as much as it fouls up our relationships and distorts our personalities.
III - DOMINION
The third implication of the phrase 'made in God's image' is that He fashioned us to have dominion. As we have already noted, man's dominion over the world of nature has had to be modified in the First Amendment God appended to the Constitution spelled out here, but it has not, even so, been wholly withdrawn. God has made us stewards of the good earth - of its order, of its beauty, of its wealth and its fruitfulness. He has called us into a managerial partnership with him in the running of His world. In all matters related to the control of our physical environment therefore, we have a responsibility to God.
The concerns that Conservationists have ought to be one that Christians fully share with them, and in which they support them. Indeed, if we were the Christians we ought to be, then we should be found in the vanguard of those who express that concern. It is our business to understand and observe nature's laws. It is required of us that we should show a proper respect for them.
The creation of dust bowls through the gross abuse of virgin land just to make a fast buck, the destruction of the ozone layer simply to satisfy our childish insistence on the convenience of aerosol sprays and a motor car to make our lonely way to work, our destruction of the rain forests so vital to the production of oxygen in the atmosphere, our denigration of whole species simply to satisfy the avarice of empty-headed socialites who want furs and ivory tooth picks and bath oil ... all these things are as much sin in us as theft, murder and adultery.
Something has gone profoundly wrong when the church regards conservationists as cranks, and dissociates herself from their endeavours.
It is a thing we have to work at; God will not be to us some genie out of an Aladdin's lamp who appears to the idle rubbing of a few wish-fulfilment dreams and does handy miracles to relieve us of our responsibility to fashion human life to the proper advantage of all, and His glory. "Man goes forth to his work and to his labour until the evening," as the psalmist said ... in a psalm that spells out every creature's appointed place in God's scheme of things. "If anyone will not work," as Paul said, "then neither let him eat."
Further implications are to be drawn from ch. 2. Its tone is quite different from the measured strophes of ch. 1, and the vantage point from which creation is viewed is quite different.
You cannot fail to observe many differences between the two chapters. Indeed so great are the differences that you wonder if our author has not forgotten what he has just written - or, as some have suggested, if ch. 2 was not written by someone else altogether.
In this chapter man is created before the vegetation, a reversal of the order in ch. 1. He is also created before the animals, again a reversal of the order in ch. 1. Man and woman are not created simultaneously as ch. 1 leads you to suppose. God is represented as fashioning a man, not by the mere utterance of His creative Word as you have it in ch. 1, but the way a man might fashion a statue in clay, and then with a magic puff, bring it to life.
Note also the changed use of language. Adam and Eve and Eden are all named in much the same way that John Bunyan named the characters in his 'Pilgrim's Progress' - Mr Worldly-Wiseman, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, and so on: Adam is simply the Hebrew word for 'man', as Eve is the word for 'life', and Adamah the word for 'ground' and Eden for 'delight'; the word 'Adam' is not used with the article (the man) until ch. 3:21; only then is it used as a proper noun.
This is literature of a different sort altogether from chapter 1. Life and the knowledge of good and evil are to be found - or forbidden - in trees in the garden; animals pass in orderly array before the man who inspects them rather like the Queen inspecting her troops; serpents talk and argue, and lose their legs; God Himself walks abroad in the cool of the evening; angels brandish flaming swords at garden gateways.
The geography of verses 10-14, too, is strange: Cush in the Bible is Ethiopia, south of Egypt, and its river is the Nile: here the Nile which is in Africa, and the Euphrates which is in Mesopotamia, are presumed to spring from the same source!
That there is a historical core to it all is not to be denied: there was a real Adam and a real Eve and a real Eden. But documentary this is not. The style of the chapter is in the style of creation stories as they have been told in every culture in the world since time immemorial; their language is the language of symbol. The two trees, and the guardian angels guarding the way to them with their flaming swords, where are they today? These are symbols. But how expressive the symbols are.
i. Man Before the Animals
That human life is created before vegetable and animal life makes the point that human life has priority over all other life and is superior to it.
ii. The Garden
That the environment God created for mankind was a garden means that God intended the setting of his life to be that of beauty and abundance, (pleasant to the sight and good for food), and full of animal, vegetable and mineral wealth (there is gold there; the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there). Beauty, abundance and wealth are man's proper environment.
iii. The Rivers
Our author would not have been in the least bit dismayed if we had pointed out to him that he got his river systems mixed up and his geography all wrong; he would have protested that it was not geography he was aiming to write.
He lived in a time - and this has been true of all societies through 58 of the 60 centuries or so of civilisation's history - when civilisations were agriculturally based, and depended absolutely on the river systems for survival. What our author was saying was that all life-support systems in the world are the provision of God and have their one source in Him.
iv. The Tilling of the Soil
And he reiterates the same point made in ch. 1, that God created mankind to find pleasure and fulfilment in work, here represented as the tilling of the soil.
v. The Two Trees
Life, and the Knowledge of Good and Evil, are represented by trees.
Whatever symbol is chosen for life must itself be a living thing: knowledge of the good too, like a tree, must be a living, growing thing. Both have a dynamic of their own ... are fruitful things, so trees are fitting symbols of them.
Why is the one freely available, and the other forbidden?
Because whilst one component of our life, the physical, can be nourished out of the earth and the world around us, the other, the moral, cannot. Life may be sustained out of the creation; knowledge of the good may not. Knowledge of the good we may have only as we have knowledge of God, for only God is good. "None is good save God alone," as Jesus said. (Luke 18:19) Knowledge of the good cannot be had out of the world, as life can.
Goodness has no final definition except that it is what corresponds to the nature of God. We cannot know the good except as we know God. The man was forbidden to seek knowledge of good and evil from any tree in the garden, not because it was some arbitrary test of obedience God set, but because good cannot be secured that way at all. Our good is wrapped up, not in any tree of the garden, but in God alone. (See Note 2 below)
The ultimate standards of good and evil are not for Adam or Eve to determine. They are for God the Creator and Lord of all life to determine. They have their ground, not in our wisdom or perception, and not in the creation either, but in God Himself ... in His very nature.
The Bible here affirms from a moral standpoint what it has already affirmed from a physical standpoint, that we are creatures, the very ground of whose being lies outside ourselves. We are not nouns, we are adjectives. Our life is not primal, it is derived. We are dependent - dependent on God for knowledge of the good.
vi. The Two Sexes
Finally, three affirmations are made about sex and marriage.
1. Companionship
Observe first that God intended companionship, not procreation, to be the first purpose of sex and marriage. (How fitting, though, that love, in its best expression, should turn out to be creative!)
It is simply not true - not according to the Bible anyway - that God's chief interest in bestowing sexuality upon us was to ensure the survival of the species. The reason here given is companionship: "The Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a companion matched to him.'"
First a search is made among the animals; none of them measures up (which says something to those animal lovers who rate their pets above humans!).
That Adam names them has a meaning too. In Eastern idiom, to know the name of a thing or of a person is to know their secret, to be fully aware of their essential nature. Mankind was intended to have that intimacy and familiarity with the animals. They should never have needed to be tamed; that is a consequence of the Fall.
So God plunges Adam into a deep sleep. We note again that God's creative activity is concealed from man's prying eyes - it is His secret.
The symbolism of the operation under anæsthetic is that the man and the woman are essentially one being. In marriage they do not unite so much as reunite. Both are necessary if either is to be complete.
True personality is something higher and greater than mere individuality. None of us may become a complete person alone. We were not created to be solitaries. Relationship is vital to our growth into full, true humanity. This is not to say that those who do not marry are rendered incurably deficient thereby. The affirmations being made here are affirmations about humanity's life, not just couples' lives. The world of men and the world of women must intermingle if humanity is to achieve wholeness. Jesus Himself was not rendered inadequate because He did not marry. But the segregation of women from men as you have it, say, in the Moslem world, is contrary to God's intention.
Our sexuality is for this world only, of course. Sexuality is a scaffolding within which the building of human personality is erected. The scaffolding will one day be taken away; then it will appear what we have all along been building within it.
As to the detail that woman was fashioned from a rib out of man's side, no commentary on that is so perceptive as that of the rabbis: "God did not make the woman out of the man's head to rule over him, nor from his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, from under his arm to be protected by him, and from next to his heart to be beloved by him."
ii. Acceptance
We must not miss the climax of the whole episode: Adam's reaction when this glorious creature is presented to him, "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The Hebrew idiom is not easy to render - "That's it!", "Right on!" might be colloquial equivalents. It suggests entire and delighted acceptance of the whole person of his mate. That is the basis of all satisfying, nourishing relationship - the attitude of entire acceptance of the whole person of your partner ... no reservations in the commitment, no retreat from each other, no area of rejection whatever, but only entire openness: "They were naked and unashamed." Nothing stood between them; they had no secrets from each other, and they knew no guilt.
They became one flesh, and the word 'flesh' in the Bible means our creaturely person-hood. They were to be as one person. That is why the marriage relationship takes precedence over prior family relationships. "Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife ('wife' in the singular, not 'wives' in the plural - no sanction is given here to polygamy).
They are to leave, to cleave and to weave!
Note 1:
'Image and likeness.' The notion of physical likeness is ruled out by
the N.T. use of such language describing Jesus as the image of God;
character-likeness is there clearly implied, as it surely is here in
Gen. 1. It presses the language too far to make it mean more than
that man is possessed of the personhood that belongs to God and which
enables God to 'address' him.
Note 2:
Dr. D. Kidner's comment ('Genesis' Tyndale Commentary, Tyndale Press,
p. 63) is particularly perceptive. It really matters little whether
the view is taken that the tree was a literal tree or that it is a
symbol of moral perception; either way the meaning of the passage is
the same: "As it stood, prohibited, it presented the alternative to
discipleship: to be self-made, wresting one's knowledge,
satisfactions and values from the created world in defiance of the
Creator."
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