The Doctrine of Man

INTRODUCTION

Well, tonight’s topic in our study of Biblical Doctrine are the doctrines of man and sin. Now, these two subjects are massive, so tonight we’re going to narrow our focus to just a few areas that I think are especially pertinent to us today.

In Psalm 8, David peers up into the heavens. He observes the moon and the stars, the majestic tapestry of God’s sovereign power, and his observation led to this pertinent question:

Psalm 8:4 “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”

Observing the natural world led David to contemplate how he fit into that world. He felt insignificant. He felt small. And even though his question ultimately was oriented around God’s care for mankind, his initial question is equally important—“What is man?” In other words, he’s asking the ultimate question any person can ask: “Who am I? Why do I exist? What’s my purpose here?”

These are the critical questions of life. They’re questions that everyone at one time or another wrestles through. And how you answer these questions is profoundly affected by the worldview you have, and it profoundly affects the decisions you make.

These are not idle curiosities. These are the questions of life and death. What we believe about what it means to be human addresses some of the most basic and fundamental issues of life:

- Our identity

- Our purpose in life

- Our makeup as a human being

- Our final destiny

- Our relationship to the world and to other people

In addition to that, the doctrine of man and its corollary, the doctrine of sin—because we can’t talk about man without talking about sin, since the two are so intertwined—these two doctrines are THE KEY doctrines that address a host of cultural and social issues we face today:

- Evolution

- Abortion

- Racism

- Marriage

- Euthanasia

- Torture

- Capital punishment

- Psychology and behavioral sciences

- Environmentalism

- Gender and sexuality

Each one of these issues in one way or another intersects with and is ultimately answered by the biblical doctrines of man and sin.

THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSGENDERISM

Now, of all the issues I just listed, perhaps the greatest cultural challenge to the biblical concept of man today is the issue of gender and sexuality. Yes, racism is a key issue in society. Yes, abortion continues to be an important issue and is continually in the headlines. Yes, environmentalism and its most recent expression through the debate over climate change is an ongoing hot topic.

But really, gender and sexuality and the challenge they bring to the basic concept of humanness and personhood, particularly as it’s expressed in through the ideology of transgenderism—this is, I believe, the most significant issue of our day, and I say that because it represents a monumental shift in the way we think about what it means to be human.

In fact, it’s such a shift that today gender and sexuality has become synonymous with the very idea of personal identity, so that the language that is being used against those who would question a person’s self-perceived gender identity is the language of denying that person’s very existence.

In other words, gender has become equated with identity, and identity with existence. So to challenge a person concerning gender is to challenge their very existence. “If I’m not the gender I think I am…I don’t exist!”

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSGRENDER IDEOLOGY

Now, as we hear that language, the natural question that follows is this: “How did we get to this point?” How can something seemingly unconscionable only 100 years ago become THE dominant cultural movement in the West today?

Carl Trueman, who is a professor of biblical studies at Grove City College, recently published a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self in which he traces how this shift has developed.

You go back to the time before the Enlightenment—to the premodern era—the self was understood objectively. People weren’t looking inside themselves to understand who they were. They were looking outside themselves. They were looking to God, to the Church, to the larger society around them. There was an objectiveness to human identity, and it was taken for granted that man’s identity was defined OUTSIDE of himself.

But the advent of modernism introduced a new perspective. Trueman starts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized the inner person and saw society and particularly the Christian religion as forcing individuals to conform to a particular ethical code, which meant that the individual was forced to be untrue to himself and thus inauthentic.

This idea was reinforced in the coming decades by the Romantics with their call to strip away the rules of society and return to nature.

Then, in the latter half of the 19th century, three figures came along who had a significant impact on the development of the self. The first was Friedrich Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche is most famous for his “God is dead” argument, but what he ended up doing was arguing that if you embrace the philosophy that “God is dead,” then you HAVE to also embrace the reality that there can’t be any objective meaning to one’s existence. In other words, in a universe where there is no God, man can’t find identity outside of himself. Instead, Nietzsche argued, he must create himself, like an artist. You could say that Nietzsche is the foundation for the contemporary philosophy that says, “Man must be who he wants to be,” or put more simply, “You do you.”

Now, alongside Nietzsche comes another figure: Karl Marx. Marx’s philosophy contended that the idea of God, moral ethics, sacred order—it’s all a means of oppressing and manipulating the poor and the suffering. The elites wanted to maintain the economic and social status quo, and they used religion and ethics to do that, at the expense of the poor.

The third figure to come along was Charles Darwin. And he was KEY in this development, because not only did he remove purpose altogether in his theory of evolution, but he also took the same concepts that Nietzsche and Marx were arguing philosophically and he gave them the credibility of hard science. Not only that, but he also put it in a way that the average person could understand.

So by the time you get to the end of the 19th century, we’ve moved from an understanding of the self as something objective and defined OUTSIDE the person, to seeing the OUTSIDE as dangerous and threatening the self. What the modern age brought was a new orientation where the individual was seen as the creator of meaning and identity.

Well, that brings us to one final figure in this movement toward the modern self—really, the one that took everything that came before him and brought it that final step into the shape we now see it today. That man is Sigmund Freud.

If Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin all moved man to understand himself in a psychologized way—to look inward to find meaning—Freud took this psychologized “self” and sexualized it. He argued that man is a sexual being and that from INFANCY this sex drive is at the very core of his identity.

Now, Freud represented the bleeding edge of behavioral sciences, and because he couched his ideas on humanness in scientific language, that gave him the same kind of authority and legitimacy that Charles Darwin gave to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Marx.

Trueman writes,

“Before Freud, sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species” (221).

Now, you might ask, “Hasn’t Freud’s theories been rejected by the scientific community?” And the answer is, “It doesn’t matter!” Listen to Trueman,

“It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materialistically discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary” (221).

And from there, all it took was the now sexualized psychologized self to then become politicized, and it happened through the most surprising marriage of two of these figures: Marx and Freud.

Remember, Marx believed that all of life was a power struggle between the poor and the privileged. If Marx’s philosophy was a race horse—the race horse of oppression—then the jockey was economics. And what the New Left has done is take that race horse, knock off the rider, and replace him with the jockey of the gender identity. Now, it’s not the poor who are the oppressed, it’s those who long for sexual freedom and self-identity.

Trueman writes this:

“Society now intuitively associates sexual freedom with political freedom because the notion that, in a very deep sense, we are defined by our sexual desires is something that has penetrated all levels of our culture…. Modesty and sexual codes do not need to be merely expanded or redefined; for humans to be truly liberated and truly human, they need to be abolished altogether. That was the gospel of the sexual revolution of the sixties, and this has become the gospel of the consumerist world of today. Sex as revolution or sex as commodity: both are predicated on the idea of sex as the answer to human ills, and both assume a kind of psychologized, sexualized self that has emerged over the law three hundred years” (264).

Now listen to what he says next, because this is KEY:

“And that raises a matter of great significance: when we start to think about sexual morality today, we need to understand that we are actually thinking about what it means to be HUMAN” (264).

In other words, the current issue of trangenderism and gender identity is no longer something that occurs at the level of sexual ethics. It goes WAY deeper to the very meaning of humanness.

“The acceptance of Freud’s basic insight, that sexual desire is constitutive of identity, and this from infancy onward, is therefore an anthropological, philosophical, and political watershed. To concede this point means that debates about the limits of acceptable sexual expression become almost pointless because any attempt to corral sexual behavior is then rendered an oppressive move designed to make the individual inauthentic” (264).

Or to put it another way: “By rejecting my gender identity, you are denying my existence.”

That is the spirit of the age. It is a hopeless philosophy, a deadly ideology that quenches the life out of everyone entrapped by it because they are seeking meaning in the wrong place.

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN

We need to orient our understanding of who we are around the only objective source that is trustworthy and true, and that is the Word of God, and the foundational passage of Scripture for understanding the doctrine of man is Genesis 1:26-28, so turn there with me.

Gen 1:26-28 26 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 and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And 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 heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Now, for the sake of our time tonight, I just want to bring out some specific elements of this text that help us lay a foundation for a theology of man.

1. Man is Directly Created by God

First, notice that man is directly created by God. There are no intervening steps. There are no instruments God uses. He creates man the same way he created everything else in those first six days—He spoke man into existence.

APPLICATION: Now, I don’t have to tell you that the implications of just that one fact are important for our understanding of man. Humans don’t exist in a vacuum. There’s an objective reality that defines who we are as human beings, and that reality is God. We have to understand our existence and our identity in relation to our Creator.

And likewise, the other implication is that there is an obligation that we have as God’s creatures to submit to him. He is the Creator. We are his creations.

Psalm 100:3 “Know that Yahweh, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his.”

He has the authority. He defines who we are. And he defines how we are to live. And so as we’ll see, at the core of man’s sin problem is a rebellion against that authority, where we reject the distinction between Creator and creature and we do not honor God as GOD (Rom. 1:21).

2. Man is Uniquely Created by God

Now, back to Genesis 1, notice also that man is not only directly created by God, he is also uniquely created by God. In fact, the entire chapter is shaped in order to highlight man as the very climax and pinnacle of God’s creative acts.

First, notice that Moses, who is the author of this text, waits until the very end to describe how man was created. It’s like he’s setting mankind of as the Grand Finale of creation.

ILLUSTRATION: When I lived in Virginia, we’d travel into Washington, DC often, and I remember one year we went in on the 4th of July to watch the fireworks display on the National Mall. And to this day, I’ve never seen a grand finale like the one I saw that night. And that’s what man is in the progress of God’s creative work—he’s the grand finale that more than anything else God created displays his wisdom, his might, and his glory.

But notice also in the text the language that’s used. Here is the only place in the creation account where there is an inter-Trinitarian dialogue about what is to be created. In every other creative act, it’s simply stated, “Then God said,” or “Let there be.” But here in verse 26, God deliberates within himself: “Let US make man…”

In other words, there’s something DIFFERENT about man that sets him apart from the rest of creation. And that brings us to the topic of the image of God.

3. Man is Created by God to be His Image

Man is the only creature that is identified in Scripture as being made “in God’s image,” or perhaps better translated, “as God’s image.”

The word “image” can refer to a copy of something, but many times it speaks of something that’s established to representative something else. In the case of man, God has created man for the special role of representing God on the earth. Listen to how Eugene Merrill describes it:

“Just as images or statues represented deities and kings in the ancient Near East, so much so that they were virtually interchangeable, so man as the image of God was created to represent God Himself as the sovereign over all creation.”

Now, in addition to that, he’s also said to be made “according to God’s likeness”—or pattern. In other words, man is patterned after God. And the two ideas work together. Man is patterned after God—he is like God—which enables him to represent God as his image.

Note the extent of this fact about man. It’s not reserved for only certain people. Every human being is God’s image, regardless of gender, regardless of age, and regardless of ethnicity. To be human is to be God’s image.

Note also that genderis a part of this image. “The Christian worldview…affirms that gender and the biological structures of the body matter.” It is part of who are as God’s creatures, and it is part of what it means to be made as God’s image. I know that flies in the face of current cultural sentiments, but it’s our job to hold the line and defend the objectivity of gender.

So the image of God is a universal reality of humanity. It also confers value and dignityand worth. It’s because man is God’s image that capital punishment was first instituted in Scripture:

Gen 9:6 Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.

In other words, to assault another person and kill them is to assault the very representative of God. Or as one commentator put it, “To revile the royal image is as treasonable an act as to revile the king himself.”

It also explains our need to live in relationship with others. After all, we’re patterned after the likeness of a Trinitarian God who has existed for all eternity in relationship—so it stands to reason that as his image and patterned after his likeness, we would also function intentionally in relationship.

It also gives man a basic authority. We see in Genesis 1:26 that God determines to create man as his image, and then immediately says,

Gen. 1:26 “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Then, after he made man and woman, he commanded them,

Gen. 1:28 Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Do you hear that language? That’s royal language. There’s authority being given to man. He is to rule, to reign, to subdue, to have dominion. These are the actions of kings. And in a way, that’s exactly what God made us to be—kings and queens who rule on his behalf over his creation, having been patterned after him and given his authority to represent him.

There’s been lots of discussion down through the centuries as to what it means to be God’s image. Some have seen it functionally—it’s something man does. Others have said it’s fulfilled in relationship. Perhaps the predominant view is that it’s substantival—it’s something in the very makeup of man that makes him God’s image.

I think the best way to think about this is summed up by Wayne Grudem:

Every way in which man is like God is part of his being in the image and likeness of God.”

It’s seen in your physicality and your spirituality. It’s personhood. It’s intelligence and reason. It’s volition, emotion, relationship, and function. It’s all of it.

APPLICATION: I don’t think it’s going too far to say that every social and cultural issue we face today in one way or another intersects with the issue of man, and more specifically with the doctrine of the image of God.

Evolution says man is just a highly-developed animal. The image of God tells us he is utterly unique from the rest of the animal world and specifically set over that world to rule and to subdue it.

Racism says that a person’s ethnicity contributes to his or her relative worth, and that there are some ethnicities that are superior and greater in worth and dignity than others. The image of God tells us every person bears God’s image and thus carries the same worthy and is deserving of the same respect and dignity.

Abortion, which has been in the news recently because of the new legislation in Texas, argues that there’s nothing immoral or unethical about ending the life of the baby growing inside the mother’s womb. And often the argument we use to support the pro-life position is based on determining when life begins, and that’s certainly an important part of the issue. But there’s an assumption inherent in that argument: if life begins at conception, then that life is worth preserving. But why?

It’s because we know that human life has value, and if that life in the womb is human, then it must be protected, which is why the most critical debates being made are not so much medical and scientific in nature, but philosophical and theological.

Transgenderism, like I said, perhaps the most significant challenge to the doctrine of man in our day—says that I must look inward to understand who I am, and that who I am is equal to what gender I am, and that its possible for me to be a gender on the inside that doesn’t match the gender of my body.

I can’t really think of a worldview that seems as foreign to my own as that worldview. On the surface, it appears that there absolutely no common ground between myself and a person with that understanding of what it means to be human. But you know what? That’s not true.

Regardless of any identification we might have, and any other designation, there are two things that are true about both of us. First, that we are both made in the image of God—we both bear full dignity and full moral responsibility. And second, that we are both sinners. That is the bridge that gives us common ground to talk about these things.

THE IMAGE OF GOD AFTER THE FALL

Which brings us to the issue of sin. Now, we’re not going to deal with the doctrine of sin in detail tonight. We’re going to wait until next Worship in the Round to talk about that doctrine.

But at the very least we need to deal with the obvious question of how our identity as sinners can even be compatible with our identity as God’s image bearers. I mean, one would think that once sin entered into human existence—and as we’ll learn next month, polluted every part of us, and every part of our human constitution, our body, soul, thinking, reasoning, desires, affections, heart—they’ve ALL been corrupted by sin—so how can we really be said to be patterned after God anymore, let alone represent him as his image?

And yet Scriptures makes it clear that the image of God does not go away after the fall. In Genesis 5:1-3, we see Adam passing on the image to his son Seth.

And then in Genesis 9:6, we find that even after the flood, God gave Noah and all who came after him the authority to execute any person who committed murder. And the basis for that authority was that man is God’s image.

You go all the way into the New Testament, to the book of James, and you see this same idea expressed. Speaking of the evil the human tongue can commit, he writes:

Jas 3:9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

There is no question that sin has grossly distorted and marred God’s image in human beings. We can’t operate in that capacity to the degree God intended. We’re marred by iniquity. We are but a tainted and distorted image of the one we’re supposed to represent.

APPLICATION: But it is still there. And that does a couple things. For one, it gives us common ground with the most unlikely people. It also reminds us that every human being has dignity and worthy. We love our enemies and pray for our persecutors because they are made in the image of God. They’re not somehow below us.

And what the gospel does is it offers a hope that God’s purpose for us—what he intended for mankind to be as his image but which has been marred by our sin—that purpose can be restored through the gospel.

THE RESTORATION OF THE IMAGE OF GOD

Turn with me to Colossians 1:15 and look at how Paul describes the Lord Jesus Christ:

Col 1:15 He is the image of the invisible God…

We find a similar statement made in 2 Corinthians 4:4:

2 Cor 4:4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

The connection is obvious. Jesus Christ is presented in the New Testament as THE image of God. And we find out in Hebrews 1:3 why that is:

Heb 1:3 He is the radiance of the glory of God, and the exact imprint of his nature.

Jesus is the perfect imprint or stamp of God. Or as one commentator put it,

With Christ, “the very nature and character of God have been perfectly revealed in him; in him the invisible has become visible” (Peter O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, 43).

According to John 1:18, Jesus is the one who has “made known” the Father because, according to Colossians 2:9, “all the fullness of the divine essence dwells bodily in him.”

So when we look at Christ, we see Jesus Christ as God. But we have to also see Jesus Christ as man. Remember Jesus’ favorite self designation during his earthly ministry was “the son of man.” Now, certainly this identified him as human. But it does more than that. It identified him as THE human. He is THE man—last Adam—who came to reverse what the first Adam had cursed.

So he became a man like us. But he wasn’t just any man—he was the man par excellence. He was the embodiment of what God created all of us to be. One writer put is this way:

In Christ man sees what manhood was meant to be. In the Old Testament all men are the image of God; in the New, where Christ is the one true image, men are the image of God in so far as they are like Christ. The image is fully realized only through obedience to Christ; this is how man, the image of God, who is already man, already the image of God, can become fully man, fully the image of God” (Clines, 103).

What hope do we have as tarnished, spoiled images of the perfect God we’re supposed to represent? It’s found in becoming like Jesus Christ.

Rom 8:28-29 28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.

Christ is both fully man and fully God. And that fulfills ALL of God’s intentions for mankind. As man, he represents God on the earth. Yet at the same time, amazingly, he IS God on the earth.

And just as God created the first Adam to rule and to reign and to have dominion, the last Adam, Jesus Christ, is coming to sit on his throne and rule over an everlasting dominion. And as Paul promises us in 2 Timothy 2:11-12, “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.”

That’s the great arc of the image of God brought home and completed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.