Episode 1. Made in His Image
So many people in this world have lost sight of who they truly are. They go looking for and identity in all different places, but there’s only one identity that’s our true identity. And there’s …
So many people in this world have lost sight of who they truly are. They go looking for and identity in all different places, but there’s only one identity that’s our true identity. And there’s only one identity that’ll give us the life God always planned for us.
There’s no doubt that in all the creatures that share this planet we call earth, people, human beings are by far the most special, the most valuable. Now you may have a pet dog or a pet cat or a pet budgie or a pet goldfish and that pet may be so incredibly special to you.
We happen to have a pet cat, her name’s Doggy, yeah I know it’s kind of weird, there’s a story behind it but anyway she’s incredibly special to us, she is after all our beloved cat. But as special as Doggy is she comes nowhere close to the value we place on our children, Simon, Michael and Melissa.
Let’s say our house was burning down and one of our kids, Melissa, was trapped inside as well as Doggy and I raced in to save them without a shadow of a doubt I would save Melissa first and to tell you the truth I’m not even sure that I’d go risking my life to save Doggy, I’m sorry Doggy, I hope she’s not listening, you get my point.
There’s something incredibly special about people especially the people we love. We value them way above any other living creature on this earth. Well as it turns out there’s a reason for that.
Right back in the beginning before time began there was nothing except God. I guess most of us would know how the Bible kicks off, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
And if we truncate that back to limit our view to before creation, just the first four words, this is what we get, we get:
In the beginning God.
And of course God goes on to create light and then the sky and the oceans and the dry land and the plants and the sun and the moon and the stars and the animals and the crowning achievement of His creation was of course you and me, humanity. Have a listen to how beautifully this is expressed; Moses recounts Gods heart, His intention in creating us so wonderfully. Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 and 27:
Then God said, ‘let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’. So God created human kind in His image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
Now up until now God created everything, that’s fine but when He creates humanity, literally the Hebrew word is “adam” or we would say, “adam” which means mankind, let us make “adam”. He creates them, He creates us in His image or another translation is that we were created in His likeness, we’re like God.
Now I’m not saying here that we are God or we become God. There are some cults and sects around who believe that but that’s not what God is saying here, not at all. He’s saying that you and I are created in His image.
Okay that’s the head knowledge, that’s the theology, the theory but what does that mean in practice? Well a bit later in the Book of Genesis, chapter 5 in fact, we see this very same language used again in a slightly different context and it helps explain what God was on about in creating us in His image. Let’s have a look, the first three verses of Genesis chapter 5:
This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created human kind he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them and then he blessed them and named them human kind when they were created. When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years he became the father of a son in his likeness according to his image and named him Seth.
And so here God’s linking His creation of us with human procreation. Adam had a son called Seth, in his likeness or in his image, exactly the same words used back in Genesis chapter 1 about you and me being created in Gods likeness, in Gods image. And by creating this link Gods saying, “look, you have to understand something, you are directly my descendants.”
Quite literally God created Adam in His own image as any child is created in his or hers father’s image and so you and I quite literally are descendants of God which is why we can call Him Father, something the Apostle Paul said quite explicitly much later and we’re going to have a look at that on the program later this week.
This is profound, this is why you and I are so special, we are made in the likeness, in the image of the living God as His direct descendants. I wonder wether you’ve ever actually thought about it like that. To tell you the truth I think we can kind of skim over the top of this, well you know Christians always call God Father, so what, it’s a religious thing, it’s what they carry on with.
Ah-ah. Not at all. In fact when Jesus first started running around and calling God ‘Father’, literally the word He used was ‘Abba’, how do we translate that? In today’s casual English language we translate that as the ‘Dad’. So Jesus is running around calling God Dad in a society where they saw God to be so holy they wouldn’t even utter His name on their lips, this was a heresy.
The religious leaders, they wanted to string Him up for that, in fact eventually they did, it was an outrageous concept. You know what? I think it’s still an outrageous concept. My identity, your identity actually begins with God, we are created in His likeness, God is our Dad.
Why am I rabbiting on about this today? Because today we’re kicking off a new series called, “Meet The New Me”. It’s all about our identity, who we are in this world. See so many people have lost their sense of identity, they have a misplaced sense of identity, they start chasing after all these false images that the world throws up and says, “you gotta be like this”.
Now in a couple of weeks on the program I’m going to be interviewing a couple of young women called Jo and Janelle. They edit an online magazine specifically for young women and they’re going to be chatting about the outcome of some of the research they’ve conducted amongst young women about the issues that really matter to them. Body image, sexuality, overcoming the hurts of the past, issues with parents and time and time again these symptoms find their root cause in a misplaced sense of identity.
We don’t have to be a young woman to have that problem, more and more as I sit with people I hear what’s going on in their lives, I hear their struggles, I find myself thinking, “ah man! If only you realised who you are. You’re a child of the living God. You’re made in His image, in His likeness just as much as Seth was made in Adam’s image.”
That image of God has been passed down through the generations from God to Adam and now right down through the generations to you and me here and now. Now the problem is that that image has been marred. Like a beautiful painting by an old master that’s been attacked with a can of black paint by a graffiti artist and so many of us have lost our sense of identity, we can’t even recognise the original identity that we have which is to be like God, to be like Jesus.
We’ve lost the powerful concept that we are direct descendants of God and can you see? When we lose that knowledge, when we lose that truth can you see how we get tossed around like a cork on a stormy ocean by all these other different senses of identity that people say we should have?
People say we should be beautiful, we should be rich, we should be wealthy, we should be successful, all this other stuff gets shoved down our throats and it’s like black graffiti, it mars and distorts and hides the truth, the original image and therein in this lost sense of identity lies the scourge of humanity and so over the next few weeks on the program we’re going to be spending some time understanding that and setting it right.
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