WCOG, Genesis 1:26-27

All right, let's begin our Bible study for tonight. Last week, we spent our time, the balance of our time on the first two verses of the book of Genesis, got real far. And this week, we're going to take in quite a bit more of this first chapter and this creation account, this first creation account. I'm actually going to focus on Genesis 1.26 and 27, but I do want us to read the creation account leading up to its climax in the creation of man. Verse three says, And God said, let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day in the darkness, He called night and there was evening and there was morning the first day. God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters. God made the expanse and separated the waters

that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven and there was evening and there was morning the second day. God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear and it was so. God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together. He called seas and God saw that it was good. God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit which is their seed and each according to its kind on the earth and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds and trees bearing fruit in which there is their seed each according to its kind and God saw that it was good. There was evening, there was morning, the third day. God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the

heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. Let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth and it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the darkness and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. God said, let the waters swarm with living creatures and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. God created the great sea creatures. Every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm according to their kinds. Every winged bird according to its kind and God saw

that it was good and God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. There was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kind and it was so and God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and livestock according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind and God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, 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. I'll pause right there. I wanna take a particular note of verses 11, verse 20, 24 and 26. On the third day, God says, let the earth sprout vegetation. On the fifth day, he says, let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures. And then he says, on the sixth day, there are two sets of creations on the sixth day, let the earth bring forth living creatures. Okay, so this would be the image. All right, so one more time, let the earth sprout vegetation, let the water swarm with living creatures, let the earth bring forth living creatures and then let us make man in our image. I've tied all of these statements of God together and they each begin with let the. It's as if God is speaking to the earth to bring forth vegetation. And then he's speaking to the oceans to bring forth fish. And then he's speaking to the earth to bring forth living creatures.

But then he doesn't speak to the earth, he doesn't speak to the waters, he doesn't speak to the dry land. He says, let us make man in our image. So with every other thing that was created, all of the living creatures, the creation itself is called upon to assist as it were, to assist God in bringing forth something from the earth or from the sky or from the sea or from the dry land. But when he gets to man, he doesn't speak to the earth, he doesn't speak to the sea, he doesn't speak to the land, none of these things. He speaks within himself. Let us make man in our image. This speaks to the difference, the radical difference between man and everything else God made in the pagan epics that we went over last week as a background for the book of Genesis, these poems that demonstrate how the rest of the nation's understood creation. In almost every case, the pagan epics

of creation spoke of man as a kind of afterthought that was created. For instance, in one epic, mankind was created solely to do the work that the other gods didn't want to do. So for instance, again, the Babylonian epic says that man was created for the specific purpose of being a slave to the gods, to do the work that they didn't want to do. So humans are afterthoughts. In the Greek epic of creation, there was the myth of Prometheus. And the story of Prometheus is essentially quick thumbnail of it is two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus were assigned the task of creating the world. And they were given a certain amount of power and it was limited. Once they ran out of power in creating things, they would spend a little bit of power in everything they created. And once they were out of power, they couldn't create anything anymore. And so Epimetheus and Prometheus began to create everything. And Epimetheus, his name means

afterthought. Prometheus means beforethought or forethought. Epimetheus followed after his nature and he just wildly, lavishly spent all of his power on creating the beautiful mountains, creating the beautiful seas, creating the strength of the lion, the height of the giraffe and all of these spectacular creatures. And then Prometheus goes to create mankind, but he finds out that his brother had spent all of their power. So he was left with just this dumb looking animal that was completely defenseless. It was slower than the animals. It was, it wasn't covered in fur so it couldn't protect itself against the cold. It didn't have speed. It didn't have any way of defending itself. And so it was completely helpless. And so what Prometheus did was he violated the God's order, Zeus's order. And he went to the heavens and stole fire from the sun and gave it to this brute man and taught him how to make fire. And it was that which separated him from the

rest of the creatures. Prometheus ends up being punished for this particular act of theft. But the story is characteristic of the ancient world. Human beings are not really special, but the story of Genesis all roads lead to the creation of mankind. He's special, he's set apart. Now, I'd like to spend some time getting into let us make man in our image, the plurality, let us but I'd like to do that next week. I'm more focused upon the uniqueness of mankind and particularly his identity being connected to the image of God. Genesis roots human identity in God. There's been a shift in our culture over the last few centuries on the subject of human identity. In the past, people generally sought their identity in family. People tended to learn what their potential was, their limitations, what their temptations were, what their strengths and weaknesses were, their self-worth by learning who their ancestors were. That might sound a little bit backwards. What if my ancestors

were scoundrels and I want to be honorable? Do I have to be what my parents were? Can't I rise above my ancestry? The answer was in the ancient world, no, not really. And again, this can sound terribly oppressive. There were, of course, drawbacks. For example, it was very difficult to escape a bad family name. But if you take a step back a little bit, what you'll notice is that the old way of finding identity actually served as a safeguard, the young man a few thousand years ago would understand that he was living off of his father's good name and that his mission in life was to live up to the standard and pass a good name on to his own sons. Father also understood that his own legacy was bound up in the character of son. If his son or daughter turns out to be a scoundrel or lazy or lecherous, then the whole family is shamed. Ancient man didn't usually use money.

Metal or paper currency was very rare. Your name was your currency. Your name was your credit. And even if you happened to have money, if you had a bad name, your money didn't really matter. People wouldn't deal with you. This meant that the entire family kept one another in check. You didn't, in the ancient world, have homeless people. You very rarely had people who were addicted to some kind of substance or alcohol roaming the streets, not having anywhere to stay. The kind of behavior that led to these conditions was pretty much beaten and shamed out of young men and women from the earliest age. And the social network and safety net was strong. Today, most of that safety net is gone and we're trying desperately to disconnect our sense of identity from our parents and our ancestors. For one thing, why should our parents decide who we are? Why can't we just create a new identity? Why can't we just follow our own

hearts and forget about what others think we should be? And all of that sounds pretty good and some of it's understandable, except that we can't seem to bear it. Anxiety is the number one emotion that younger people say they experience in the United States. Loneliness is the number two emotion that they experience. People are confused about pretty much everything. We have so radicalized the idea of creating our own identity. The idea that we are blank slates and invent or reinvent or reimagine ourselves that the human being is a kind of build a person, that we are life designers, that everything we once assumed to be automatic and even genetic is in fact nothing more than a social construct. We say that morality is a social construct. It's arbitrarily imposed upon children by society. Even gender is nothing more than a social construct imposed by powerful men upon children. A girl only chooses to be feminine because society told her what she was and

trained her in a thousand conscious and unconscious ways. Pink clothes, dolls, pots and pans, shy modesty before she was even five. These are not the result of biological predispositions, our culture says. These are not predispositions written into her DNA. These girl coded things feminized the child so deeply that when she grows up, she'll think they were natural and not social. All we have to do is get adults to stop thinking in terms of male, female spectrum and instead in terms of persons and the whole male, female dichotomy will just go away. It's a kind of experiment. I'd argue that this idea of distancing ourselves from the past, it was really quite natural and bound to happen after the theory of Darwinian evolution took hold in our society. Darwin's theory held that human beings are descended from chimpanzees and chimps are descended from primordial lizards, descended from a fish in the sea and that these fish were descended ultimately from a single-celled organism or

microbe that swam in a puddle of water, serendipitously measuring exactly the ideal pH levels and temperature needed for life to begin. If this is held to be true, what then is our identity? Be careful you don't go too far back. Be careful you don't trouble the silent primeval waters that lay in the deepest caverns of human memory for in them lies the unthinking, unknowing, stupid, brute animal, the beast that lurks in the shadows of our truest identity. Look sometime into the eyes of an unblinking reptile and try to find something human in those eyes. Have you ever locked eyes with such a creature? Look, if you will, for a thousand years and you'll still never see the nearest flash of human sympathy and recognition. Just cold, black, unfeeling eyes that are calculated to determine whether or not your face would taste good. The great psychologist, I'm not talking about Sigmund Freud, but his successor, Carl Jung. His theory was not that, like his

master taught, that everything had a sexual explanation. Jung said that what Sigmund Freud referred to as sexual pathologies and neuroses was actually human beings trying to forget their bestial origins. That in our deep, in our collective unconscious minds, we have a memory, a core memory, that we were once beasts. And so we have our whole mental and social apparatus is serving as a veil to help us forget that. We can forget about our paths and move towards a more divine future. I came across an article recently on what came to be called the Gombe-Chimpanzee War of 1974 to 1978. Never heard of such a thing, really. I had heard rumors about something like this, but I never really looked into it too much until the last couple of months. And I did some digging. It turns out that a biologist was spending some time with chimpanzees in a natural reserve in Africa, protected land. And she had this kind of bright idea or

this kind of sunny idea that human beings were wicked and evil and that chimpanzees are real predecessors, biologically, were much more innocent and enlightened and that we, as human beings, actually we fell. There was a kind of almost biblical fall from the chimp state into the human state. That was her working theory. And then she spent a lot of time in this chimpanzee reserve, the reserve was called Gombe, and she recorded a war between rival chimpanzee gangs and the gangs were founded by two twin brothers, twin brothers who had broken off from each other and they had developed their own gangs. She said, first blood was drawn by one gang on January 7th, 1974, when a party of six adult males consisting of, and she named them Humphrey, Figen, Jomio, Sherry, Everett and Rodolf ambushed the isolated member of the other gang named Godi when he was feeding on a tree. The gang males were accompanied by one female who charged back and

forth around the melee. Despite Godi's attempt to flee, the attacker seized him, threw him on the ground and beat him until he stopped moving. Afterwards, the victorious chimpanzees celebrated boisterously, throwing and dragging branches with hoots and screams and then they retreated. And once the gang had left, Godi stood up again but died of his injury soon after. This was the first time, she said. Chimpanzees had been seen to deliberately attempt to kill a fellow male chimpanzee, but this was only the most innocent really of the discoveries that were to come. After the death of this one, the gang ambushed and maimed another from the other community. And in this attack, the female Gigi actually fought alongside the males. As with Godi, this victim was badly wounded and died soon thereafter. A third victim was the elderly chimpanzee named Goliath. Throughout the lead up to the war and its initial stage, Goliath had been relatively friendly with the gang members and their neighbors when

encounters occurred. But his kindness was no longer reciprocated when the gang patrol consisting of Figan, Fabin, Humphrey, one named Satan, and Jomio ambushed him. The researcher who observed this attack was shocked by the brutality and fury displayed by the gang with Fabin twisting Goliath's leg until he tore it off and then celebrated running around with it, holding it over his head. In her 1990 memoir, this researcher wrote, for several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific images sprang unbidden to my mind. One of the chimpanzees cupping his hand below another's chin to drink the blood that welled from the great wound on his face. Old road off, usually so kind, standing upright to hurl a four pound rock at Godi's prostrate body, Jomio tearing a strip of skin from another's thigh, Figan charging and hitting again and again the stricken quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. I followed

this rabbit hole into some really, really dark places and then found, came to find out, you don't want to be around chimpanzees. You don't want to grow up amongst the chimpanzees. And this is what modern science believes is at the root of your identity. That's too much for almost anybody to bear. Don't look to the past, make yourself. But we can't get away from identity rooted in the past. And it's really, really sad. The public school system teaches children to believe that they're descended from brood animals, but then is shocked when children act on those beliefs. In the late 90s, most of us in here remember Columbine. Kids were told in that school, with no certain scientific proof whatsoever, that human beings evolved from chimpanzees in the distant past, that human beings arrived at their current status as homo sapiens by way of natural selection. In natural selection, they said, is the mechanism by which biological characteristics and creatures not suited for the

environment are selected out of existence and those more suited, more adapted, and stronger in the environment are able to reproduce. In other words, only the strong survive in this world and the weak are supposed to be left behind that's the way things are supposed to be. That's what Columbine High students were taught. And then one day, a few teenagers acted on those beliefs and walked into the school and shot it up. And then all the educators and all the politicians who push this stuff stand back in fake horror and have the audacity and lack of self-awareness to point, they point their fingers at the parents, at rock music, at the matrix film, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But let's look at what we're teaching children from their earliest days in the public school system. You can't teach children that they're descended from monkeys and then expect them to act like gods and saints. Before they're even old enough to think, our world

strips children of their humanity and then expects them to be humane. In second period science class, the school teaches children that the survival of the fittest is the law of the universe and then for third period social studies class, the same people try to teach children that Hitler was bad because he believed his race was the fittest and that weaker people should be eliminated. No wonder kids show no enthusiasm for getting into the adult world. We make no sense. We tell them one thing in one class and then the opposite thing in the next. It's also little wonder that kids fall prey to drugs. They're given so little to live for, so little to look forward to in life. They have no future because they have no past that they wanna look into. But the whole attempt to design ourselves or even redesign ourselves doesn't seem to be working. We can't seem to get away from understanding ourselves by way of our family

or by some religious text. For one thing, at the very same time we're trying to set our identities free from the past, we have an emphasis on strong emphasis on racial identity, qualifying or disqualifying someone on the basis of their race or gender. And for another thing, one of the fastest growing industries in North America is the ancestry industry. Genealogy and ancestry websites, genealogy tests take in big money. In fact, it's an $8 billion a year industry in the United States alone. People want to know where they came from. The older you get, the more you feel you need to know. There's an old story of a shepherd who discovered an orphan baby on the banks of an ancient river. The shepherd raised the boy among the sheep. But when he went off to school, this boy did, or when he went into town among the boys of nobler families, he always ended up being the top dog everywhere he went. A shepherd's

orphan boy, standing there commanding and in charge of the sons of famous fathers. He acted like a king. And the other boys, no matter how proud, always found themselves in awe of his charisma. And when this boy became a man, men followed him absolutely without hesitation. And he ended up turning them into an army, and the army into a nation called the Meads. And one day everyone found out that they're leader. This shepherd's orphan was, in fact, the long lost and abandoned at birth grandson of the imperial Persian king named Cyrus. No amount of obscurity, no amount of indignity, no amount of misfortune could forever hide his royal identity. For royalty is not something you turn yourself into. Royalty is something you are or you aren't. This was the story of the man the ancient Israelites called the Anointed One, King Cyrus, Lord of the Meads and Persians. But this same story seems to have been a familiar one throughout the ancient world.

Almost every nation had a legendary ruler in their lore who followed a similar path to the throne. This was the story of Perseus, the story of Oedipus, ruler of the Greeks. This was the story of Romulus, founder of Rome. This was the same story of Hatshepsut, Pharaoh of Egypt, King Tut of Egypt. It was the story of Confucius, the founder of Chinese religion, Sargon of Acadia, Genghis Khan of the Mount Mongols, Muhammad, founder of Islam, Alfred the Great, King of the Saxons, Louis the 14th, the French Sun King, Maktuzuma, King of Tanatch-Taklan, Malcolm X, founder of the American Civil Rights Movement, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. They all have the same kind of story. I go through this very partial list simply to demonstrate what's at the heart of the Genesis creation story. There's nothing we want to know more than where we came from. Imagine a time for a moment when there was no Bible. There was just

mankind standing in a world surrounded by beasts and nature. How do we account for the utter strangeness of our own existence? We have legs, as animals have legs. We have hands, like primates have hands. We have eyes, just as beasts have eyes. But what fellowship does man have with beast? How like a king mankind is among the beasts. Even the most frightful creatures instinctually fear man. And most beasts practically bow to man when he comes along. He's not as strong as the beast, not as fast, not as big, but still watch the giant intelligence we call the elephant, lower his tusks to the ground at the command of a mere child. Watch a man tame a lion. Watch the orca playfully swim around divers respectfully and seek pats on the head from him, just after he's devoured or just before devouring teams of seals. We are relatively small and short-lived, but in the eyes of the beasts, our heads are crowned with stars.

We are a Cyrus among the boys. We all know it. In a novel written by William Peter Blatty, one of the characters in the novel perfectly explains what's at stake in the battle between the theories of mankind and mankind's true origins. In this novel, a minister performs an exorcism, and while praying for the victim and commanding the demon, the demon hideously twists the victim and compels her to say the most awful demonic things to those who love her. This is based on a true story. The onlookers begin to actually hate and despise this demon-possessed victim, and they turn in absolute disgust from her. Once the exorcism is over, one of the onlookers asks the minister why the demon targeted this girl. And the minister replied, The demon is a liar. He lies in order to confuse us. He tries to make us despair. You are mistaken that the demon targeted the girl because he wanted her soul only. The real target was us,

and anyone who watched the girl say and do such hideous things. The demon used her to make us lose our faith in despair. He wants us to reject our humanity and see ourselves as just vile beasts, to think that underneath the nice appearances, once you take away a few things from us, that we're really just sophisticated animals unworthy of the love of God. So I say again, with the greatest reverence and the profoundest conviction, the devil's a liar. You are made in the image of God. You are not descended from beasts. 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, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and 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. Isn't this a far superior explanation to take into account our experiences here in this world? And God said, Behold, Adam, I have given you every plant yielding seed that's on the face of all the earth, every tree with seed and fruit, every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens, everything that has the breath of life. I have given every green plant for food, and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day. I'm reminded of what the psalmist said. 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're mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

And yet, and yet, you have made him just a little lower than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor, and you have given him dominion over the works of your own hands, Lord, and you have put all things under his feet, sheep and oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the heaven, fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. And then later on the psalmist says, Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You formed my inward parts, you knitted me together when I was in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately, woven in the depths of the earth. You saw your eyes saw my unformed substance, in your book were written every one of them, the days

that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, oh God, how vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and you're still with me, fearfully, wonderfully made. That's your past. And it's also indicative of your future in Christ, the glory that shall be revealed in you. Praise God, I can't think of any more damning of a lie to believe. What was it, according to scripture, that convinced us to disobey God? It was a beast, was it not? A serpent, a serpent. This was a prophecy of all the times to come. That there would be that beast word pull, to try to get us to forget that we were made in the holy image of God, and that God gave us dominion, that God gave us rule, and that we were made in his image. Let the church remember this. Let the

church teach this. Let the church put this, instill this in our children. You are descended not from the beasts. You are descended from God himself. He formed you out of the clay of the earth, but he didn't just leave you in that state. For he bent down from heaven and blew his own breath into your mouth, and he gave you a soul, and that soul's gonna go back to him someday. That's your identity. Amen. Why don't we stand together? Stand and give God thanks. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Heavenly Father.