Divine Imagers & Deeply Flawed

Welcome Statement

Good Morning Church! I want to thank you all for bearing with me last week as I set the groundwork and foundation for this series, to make it clear what I am trying to go for with this series, and I know, some of it can still feel a bit hazy. What I am wanting us to get more comfortable with is that mystery of God, when we don’t have the answers, but we do have those foundational truths to rely on, that we can use as a fountain of wisdom through discernment, where we might find ourselves all disagreeing and wrestling not only by ourselves, but with eachother as we try to come to conclusions with how to deal with issues in the modern context. The first week is always the hardest, I will warn you all there are harder “topics”, but I think breaking the ice itself is the hardest, trying to make clear what I want to really get across with this series, so it doesn’t seem like I’m trying to veer us off course as a church or something along that nature. With that aside, we reflected last week on this tension between God’s Sovereignty over our lives, how he instills faith in us, yet we still find ourselves as participators in his divine glory, that he calls us to participate in the great comission, he creates these plans for us, but calls US to be the people to speak his word. These two truths become intertwined and cannot be removed from one another, even if we look at one or the other typically by itself, they exist together. In the book, Adam continues on to discuss how humanity finds itself a flawed people, yet, somehow made in the image of God. He describes this tension as us being Divine Imagers & Deeply Flawed. We see this story play out really plainly in Genesis as God makes creation.

Divine Imagers Reading - Genesis 1:26-31

Genesis 1:26–31 NRSV

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 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.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

God Calls us to a Partnership in Creation

God clearly called us into a partnership with him in creation, we see that here, he made mankind in his likeness, it clearly says in the Image of God. Now people will argue if this image is distorted because of the fall, or our rejection, and I will address this, but right now, they have been blessed. We are given a commandment to be fruitful, multiple, to fill the earth and subdue it. This commandment we see as a reality today in a global context as Humanity as quite plainly, filled the earth, Abraham has become a blessing among the nations, and we find ourselves in a lot of ways beyond blessed with a lot of natural resources as we have “subdued” the earth. Now of course, this is not the original context of subdueing, but in a way, we find that we still in our nature, fulfilled this commandment, even if it is in a broken form of that original idea of Eden.

God called creation very Good, he found us pleasing, he wanted a partnership with us, a divine one. He wanted us to work with him, but then we find ourselves tempted for the first time.

New Testament Reading - Genesis 3:1-24

Genesis 3:1–24 NRSV

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Rejection of God’s Definition of Good & Evil

We find Adam and Eve tempted. Their hearts are turned to take this apple and eat it. By choosing to do this against God’s will, they have decided to do something against God’s definition of Good and Evil, and decide for themselves what is right and wrong, “what can possibly happen? We will become like God!”. Well wait a minute, that’s not quite right, they already had the image of God in them, They were skewing things around by accepting this idea from the snake, they were idolizing themselves in the process, and took knowledge for themselves. It wasn’t so much taking knowledge that was the issue, but the fact they denied God’s plan for them, that became the problem. We know the rest of the story. We found ourselves isolated from the tree of life, where we could find the intersection between heaven and earth, where God’s presence could be found with humanity. We would find God would be willing to dwell with man again, in a tabernacle, but this was still a limited presence. It wasn’t until Pentecost, after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we witness the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, where no more is God restricting himself to a place and is freely accessible to all who hear the Word, the Logos, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So What Are We?

So the question of, what is our nature, becomes apparant. We clearly easily can defy God’s will, but we have in us, the image of God, as it is said in the Psalm: Psalm 139:13-14

Psalm 139:13–14 NRSV

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

So we know God intentionally makes us in some sense, but people can be born out of deprave acts too. That is the difficult reality of our world. But that doesn’t make life any less inherently worthy, because each person is equally guilty of sin, but each person is equally loved by God. Why is the Bible throwing us a bender here with this? What is God trying to tell us? As we’ve spoken before about how God inscribes the law now on our hearts, He is too inscribing his definition of right and wrong on our hearts as we become new people. We are still broken even as we become new people as we have to become continually sanctified, that is the Wesleyan way, it is a lifetime journey of discipline and continuing to learn about what God desires from us, and resist temptations from the flesh. Galatians 5:17

Galatians 5:17 NRSV

For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.

We have to understand what it means when we define the flesh. The flesh is not our bodies in all ways and purposes. It is an analogy to the bad and brokenness that dwells within us. Because cleary God talks about our bodies as temples in scripture, so there is something worthy about our bodies, even if the spirit is more important, the physical is inseparable, but this tension is more clearly laid out when we talk about the world itself. Another way we describe this is through another familiar scripture, Jesus’s Prayer to the Father to protect the Apostles

John 17:11-15

John 17:11–15 NRSV

And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.

There is this tension that we long for the heavenly kingdom, but still be present in the world we live in. Some people take this to literally mean we are to isolate ourselves from the world abroad, but that is not so, It is more that we are to be a shining beacon of light to the world, and not give into the passions that people give into. Some of the saints understood this to be more of an analogy directly to passions themselves, my favorite explanation I personally go by is by St Isaac the Syrian: “The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them the passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”

So there is this weird tension that it is directly about passions that are not tied to God, so they focus on the flesh, and on the world below, but the world is really just an analogy to help us understand this. I hope that gives some insight on what Christ is trying to say when he says the following in 1 John 2:15

1 John 2:15 NRSV

Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world;

By the love of the father is not in those who love the world, we mean the spirit is not indwelling in them. How can it, how can someone focused exclusively on worldly passions care about what is Heavenly?

The amazing thing is, despite our failure to fight these passions, over the centuries the lord found people that even in their own imperfection, they pleased him. They were divine imagers, in that they tried to manifest the work God called them to do, and represent his kingdom the best they could, not to let it get to their heads, but to turn it all back to God, as it was clearly God working through them. Noah, who had the only righteous family left on earth, who didn’t earn but simply found God’s Grace. Abraham, who was called by God to leave his Pagan families to be a blessing among the nations and create one of the largest families we all find ourselves grafted to, just like that VBS Song we like to sing, Jacob, who despite tricking his brother Esau out of a blessing, wrestled with God in the middle of the night, like we find ourselves doing, and even reconciled with Esau the next day, to start the nation of Israel, somehow this broken person Jacob, who Wrestled with God, would be the man that would start a nation we all are so familiar with in our scriptures, that is a testiment to God’s mercy and grace. These all lead up though to the perfect manifestation of God’s divine image, Jesus Christ, who was born of a virgin, served his fellow man, fulfilled the law, and died on a Cross, for the atonement of sins, so that you and I could have that broken relationship with our Father mended. We never lost our status of having the image of God in us, we simply did not have the spirit, we didn’t have the bridge to talk to God, we were made in his image all along, we never lost that, but with the spirit we now have the capacity to mend broken relationships on a global scale never seen before. Despite what the world says, even though we still find flaws in ourselves, we see violence in our world, we are capable as a people of breaking cycles of violence, of showing what it means to represent Christ in people’s lives, through little actions. It does us no good to worry about tomorrow, we have to trust God will eventually make all things right, but we have to truly believe he has indwelled himself in us, and truly believes and loves us, and has commissioned us for this. Let us Pray

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, We thank you for this reminder of where we started, that we once were lost, but now we are found. That even in our lost state, we were still your creation, you grieved, but you never once said, I am done with you forever, you continued to build covenants with your chosen people, who would bring forth the Messiah of all people everwhere. Help us to spread this Good News, and be that manifestation of Good News in peoples lives through our actions, prayers, and Kindness to others, even if it is simply hearing someone’s broken hearts. Let us Repent of the extremes we have witnessed, remember we are not perfect, we have to be better, and return to you, away from the passions of the world.

Amen.

Doxology / Benediction / Closing

May you Have a Blessed Sunday, and rest of your Week! Amen!