Baptist Faith and Message Part 6
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Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
First lets deal with the obvious question of what it means that we are made in God’s image.
If God is Spirit, and “does not possess a body,” then what does it mean that we are made in His image.
We dealt with this question last week, but I will say it again.
The image of God is the inherent value of man that is engrained in all of us.
We value people inherently more than animals, and that is a good thing.
(Dr. Johnson next door neighbor- Pantheist- Bobcat Got one of His chickens- He Then told Dr. Johnson about it so that he could be on the look out becuase Dr. Johnson would allow his children to play in the yard. Later, Dr. Johnson then asked him why he would still allow the remainder of His chickens in the yard.)
There is something more inherently valuable about a human life.
We all know this.
If you saw a spider, crawling on your seat next to you, you would not flinch in smashing that baby with a hymnal, and I encourage that type of behavior. Kill all the spiders.
But we don’t treat humans that way.
Man in herently valuable, because God has made them with inherent value.
I think the image of God in man is evident in the value that human life has.
But even more so, I believe the image of God in man is our ability to have a relationhsip with God to be held accountable to God, and to be blessed by God in ways that other portions of Creation Does not possess.
The fact that human beings have a soul, is a testament to the image of God.
We possess a soul which God has given us and every human being and we have been granted immortality.
He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation.
Again back to Genesis 1:26-27
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
It is God who chooses and forms us how he intends us to be.
We went today to find out the gender of our baby. God chooses that. Not me. And he chose it to be a girl.
And we are thankful and blessed by that choice. The Unborn baby is blessed to be created by its Creator in that
Part of being His creation, is that we submit to his design of our bodies.
Rather than rebelling against that design, we ought to give thanks.
David says this.
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
David says this wonderfully made us, and God is to be honored for what he chooses us to be.
In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race.
Adam and Eve were created without sin.
But they sinned by their own free choice and decision.
They were tempted and they fell.
Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation.
So essentially this tells us the results of the curse.
We fell from our original innocence, and every one who iis born after Adam now possesses a sin nature and we grow up in an environment of sin.
We know this. We know this to be true of our own children.
This is known as the doctrine of orginal sin.
We are all members of Adam’s race by virtue of being born as human beings.
We are born with the proclivity to Sin.
David says this is in Psalm 51
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me.
Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being,
And in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom.
I want you to see something in David’s statement here.
He is not making an excuse for His sin.
He makes this clear by immediately following up what God expects of Him.
People make the argument that they are “born this way” as an excuse for sin.
I don’t believe that there is a gene in our bodies that causes us to be a specific type of sinner.
(There are those who claim they are born this way, when it comes to homosexuality Or even transgender.)
Thats problematic when look at Scripture.
For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,
and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
The language tells us what is natural and what is not.
Now, I do believe that we are all born with a sin nature, and we all have to fight against it rather than give in.
No one excuses a thief because he claims he was born with a proclivity towards stealing. No, that doesn’t work.
It does not work for any other sin either.
No one will ever be able to blame they way they were born nor the circumstances into which they were born for their own rebellion.
We are sinners by nature and by choice. Thats the problem with all humanity.
Only the grace of God can bring man into His holy fellowship and enable man to fulfill the creative purpose of God.
Why the difference? What happened to where we as Christians are different?
I want you to see something in Scripture. That we are all capable, in fact inclined to do the wrong thing. Not the right thing.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,
nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
We are all inclined toward.
I want you to see it is the grace of God that you are any different. It has nothing to do with you being any better than the next sinner, except that God saved you.
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.
Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
God’s grace is the difference in our lives. That is the truth and that is what our statement of faith says,
The sacredness of human personality is evident in that God created man in His own image, and in that Christ died for man; therefore, every person of every race possesses full dignity and is worthy of respect and Christian love.
Every human being, regardless of their age. Whether they be one day concieved, or 100 years old.
Whether they be white black red brown Gold. They are humans who deserve to be treated with as much dignity as the next person.
There is no room for us to decide when a person is worth that or not. God has spoken On this.
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
This speaks to the issue of abortion. This speaks to the issue of racism.
There is no room for any of that for the believer. Every human being is made in the image of God and ough to be treated as such.