Continuing my series on Genesis 1 I am going to cheat just a little bit. This is something I had written for a silent retreat back many years ago now. Someday it will go into that book I have mentioned before. But this is a slightly different form and it certainly continues my thoughts on Genesis 1 and moves us towards another larger theme I will begin to address as we compare and contrast Genesis 1 with chapters 2-3.
The Image of God
Genesis 1 presents humanity as the pinnacle of creation. We are the last things created and everything else was created for us. But we are more than just the last (or first) among equals. We are significantly different than the rest of creation, we were created in his image. (The plural, “let us make man,” is a possible reference to the angelic host or perhaps even to the Trinity.) But what does that mean? For millennia many people better than I have struggled to understand what exactly it means to be made “in the image of God.” One example of a concise answer can be found in the Episcopal Church’s catechism.
Human Nature:
Q. What does it mean to be created in the image of God?
A. It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.
There are many ways that we could look at this and indeed, the “freedom to make choices” is a fundamental truth that lives in tension with God’s sovereign call and ultimately results in the tragic events of Gen. 3. But here I would like simply to note two things that stand out within this passage and should challenge us in our lives.
1) Just as God is the pre-eminent ruler of everything that exists, so he has appointed us to be rulers over this creation.
Gen. 1.28 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 air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
When God blesses humanity, the only difference between the blessing that they receive and that of the other animals is the command that they “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” over its creatures. In the same way in which God has dominion and rules over all of the cosmos (even that which is unseen by us) we, humanity, are to be like God in that we will rule over the earth and its occupants. Note that there is already an understanding within Genesis that this will not be an easy task. The term “to subdue” connotes physical struggle and effort that would be required of humanity to work the soil even before the fateful events of Genesis 3.
The notion that humanity is ruler of all has not been very popular of late. As the western world has become more egalitarian and as our understanding of the magnitude of this cosmos has increased there has been a trend to view ourselves as merely one small specie among many. We are no greater or lesser than the dolphins, we have simply evolved along a different path which has allowed us to be more destructive of our surrounding environment. Genesis, neither Chapter One nor Two, agrees with this view.
[Comic after the jump.]
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