2-1: The Doctrine of Man

Back into our We Believe series, where we are taking time this year to go through our church’s Statement of Beliefs, which is available on our website if you’d like to read it. We wanted to go through this Statement this year to reaffirm and remind us of the doctrines that Eastern Hills Baptist Church holds to. We are doing this in four parts, and each part has a number of studies. Part 1, which we covered in January, was on God & His Word. We considered the doctrines of the authority of the Scriptures, the Trinity, and each Person of the Triune Godhead: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Today, we start Part 2: Old & New. During the next four Sundays including today, we will consider the doctrines of man, salvation, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. So for today, we consider the doctrine of man, or mankind. Our starting passage today is Psalm 8. Let’s stand in honor of the Word of God as we read this psalm in its entirety:

Psalm 8 CSB

For the choir director: on the Gittith. A psalm of David. 1 Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth! You have covered the heavens with your majesty. 2 From the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you have established a stronghold on account of your adversaries in order to silence the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, 4 what is a human being that you remember him, a son of man that you look after him? 5 You made him little less than God and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: 7 all the sheep and oxen, as well as the animals in the wild, 8 the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea that pass through the currents of the seas. 9 Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth!

PRAYER, pray for the Oliver clan in the loss of Dianna, and pray for Albuquerque Deaf Baptist Church and her pastor Bobby Graff

In this psalm, David asks an incredibly important question that demands an answer, because when we approach the task of doing theology, or thinking about God, while we are thinking about who He is, we are also then thinking about who WE are, as well as how we relate to Him.

Psalm 8:3–4 CSB

3 When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, 4 what is a human being that you remember him, a son of man that you look after him?

Generally, humanity has an innate sense of our “specialness” in creation. We are radically different from everything else that lives. For me, that specialness—even before I was a follower of Jesus—was always something that sparked a sense of awe and wonder. “WHY are we so unique?” We look around at the world, and we can see humanity at its best: we have a tremendous capacity for goodness and charity, heroism and self-sacrifice. We invent and design and create incredibly beautiful things; we work and serve and bless each other with our hands, hearts, and minds. The human race was made in the image of God, and was designed to be good.

But not only does the theological task lead us to think about the question of our specialness, but it also leads us to think about questions that aren’t quite as fun. We look around at the world and we often see humanity at its worst. We have an seemingly bottomless capacity for evil and hatred, selfishness and exploitation. We invent and design and create incredibly destructive technologies and ideologies; we work and serve and bless ourselves through violence and abuse, lies and manipulations. The human race is radically fallen, and truly is that bad. So we ask the questions: “What’s wrong with us?” “How are we supposed to live?” “How can we be corrected?”

Both things are true: Humanity was truly made in the good image of God, and humanity is truly radically fallen, marring and defacing that good image of the One who designed us, rebelling against our purpose and design. All of these: the questions of the good and the questions of the bad are issues that the biblical doctrine of man addresses. Eastern Hills’ Statement of Belief says this about this doctrine:

EHBC’s Statement of Belief, Article 6: Man

Man is the special creation of God, in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. …By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. … 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 dignity and is worthy of respect and Christian love.

In our last series, Hot Topics, I briefly addressed both the image of God as the basis for essential human dignity and respect (in my message on abortion), as well as the fallenness of mankind (in my message on evil and suffering). I touched on these things in those two messages, but this morning, we need to unpack them a little more to address this doctrine. We’ll begin with the good:

1) All human beings bear the image of God.

Ultimately, the fact of that matter is this: We are what God says that we are. He is the Creator. We are the creature. And what God clearly says in His Word is that we are unique among all the creatures He has seen fit to make. What seems to make us unique is that we are made in His image, that we each bear what is called in Latin the imago Dei, the “Image of God.” This is first shown in Genesis chapter 1:

Genesis 1:26–28 CSB

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female. 28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”

There are a couple of things I’d like to point out from this passage.

First, throughout the creation narrative, we see a particular kind of formula for what God does. He commands things to come into being (which is just totally cool, in my opinion). Look at the narrative, and what do we see? We see God commanding, “let there be light (3),” “let there be an expanse (6),” “let the dry land appear (9),” “let there be lights in the expanse (14),” “let the waters swarm.. and let birds fly (20),” and “let the earth produce living creatures (24).” He speaks, and it happens. He commands, and it is done.

But did you notice verse 26? It’s different...it’s unique. God said, “Let us make man...” Not a command. Not spoken and done. We see that God fashioned both man and woman in particular ways when we look at the zoomed-in part of the sixth creative day in chapter 2:

Genesis 2:7 CSB

7 Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:21–22 CSB

21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. 22 Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man.

Human beings are unique among all creatures according to how God speaks of making us. We are not commanded into being like everything else in creation. We are lovingly, deliberately, personally crafted by the Lord to be… well… us. And that deliberation in our creation has meaning: that we are “crowned with glory and honor,” as David put it in Psalm 8. That glory and honor, that difference when compared with the rest of the creatures God made, is at least in part because of that special care that God took in creating humanity. All of humanity, every human person, still bears in his or her being the “fingerprints of God” if you will, and that personal touch of God cannot be obliterated.

Second, notice that three times in verses 26 and 27 of Genesis 1, the word image is used. This word is the Hebrew term tselem, which refers to the fact that we are made to bear the image of the Image-r, the Lord God who made us. We are meant to showcase God in some special way that only we can—when we look upon a person, any person, we see the echoes of something about God Himself. Commentators and theologians differ on exactly what this “image” refers to. I think it may be better to understand that it might mean more than just one aspect of who we are in our creation as a reflection of our Creator, maybe even reflecting special capacities that we possess that God Himself possesses. Aaron Armstrong suggests three over-arching categories of our bearing God’s image in his book Devotional Doctrine, which I am adapting somewhat this morning:

THESE SHOULD BE LETTERS....

Our nature. We have a capacity to create and communicate that is unlike all other creatures. We have the ability to be logical and rational, even about abstract concepts. We have the capacity to make moral judgments. These things are inherent to our nature.

Our actions. As we saw in Psalm 8:6-8, humanity has been given authority and responsibility over the rest of creation. This capacity for rule, the exercise of dominion over the earth, is a reflection of God’s rule and authority as well, since it is a bestowed authority. It also with it carries the picture of responsibility and oversight.

Our relationships. All human beings are designed to be in relationship as a reflection of God’s relational nature within the Trinity. God has always been relational, and our desire and need for relationship with one another and our ability to relate to Him is a part of our being made to reflect His image.

Each of these categories includes both men and women, and in fact, God’s creation of these two, and only these two, gender categories was intentional and a part of His intended design for humanity, as Adam and Eve were designed to complement each other in very specific ways… the two genders existed BEFORE the Fall. The Baptist Faith & Message 2000, from which our church Statement of Belief is patterned and largely taken from, says this about the creation of gender:

Baptist Faith & Message 2000, Article III: Man

“… The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation...”

Without getting too far off into the weeds here, we must affirm that God created humanity biologically as male and female, and gave that biological distinction as a message about our design, with BOTH genders bearing His image, with neither being better or worse than the other, but intentionally different from one another for very particular reasons. This is why later on, Paul could say of those in Christ:

Galatians 3:28 CSB

28 There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Paul here isn’t erasing distinctions. He’s saying that those distinctions don’t matter when it comes to how we relate to God through faith in Christ. He wasn’t saying that a Jew ceased being descended from the people of Israel or that suddenly a slave was no longer owned by their master at the time, just as he wasn’t saying that maleness and femaleness evaporate in Christ. Male and female are the reality of our design, a part of how we bear God’s image within God’s good creation. And because we all bear God’s image, all of humanity—people from every nation, tongue, and tribe—are to be valued as human beings and afforded dignity and respect. Therefore, racism has no place in the church. Sexism has no place in the church. Classism has no place in the church. Every other person is worthy of being shown Christian love because each person bears the image of God.

Unfortunately, because of the Fall each person bears that image in a marred, broken, twisted, distorted way. Which takes us to our next point:

2) (Nearly) All human beings are radically fallen.

I spoke of the Fall pretty clearly last week, but remember that humanity was deceived and fell into sin, taking all of creation with us. Genesis 3 tells us how it happened: that the serpent deceived Eve by getting her to believe that God was keeping something from us—that we could be gods ourselves, in charge of ourselves completely—and that rebelling against God’s plan and instruction wasn’t going to cause her to die. She listened and acted, and then Adam made the same decision, and sin and death entered the human line.

With ONE very notable exception, since the Fall of mankind from our intended and designed state of goodness, every single human being has still borne the image of God because of our given nature as humans, but because we are broken, we bear the image in a broken fashion as well. I think that no passage makes this more clear than Romans 1:

Romans 1:18–31 CSB

18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles. 24 Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen. 26 For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error. 28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. 29 They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.

What this passage shows us is that every single aspect of us was impacted by the Fall. There is no part of humanity that isn’t damaged goods, warped and flawed by the reach of sin. Just for organization, I’m going to break this up into four parts:

a) Our physical bodies

Before the Fall, we were designed for life. We were designed to work, and the earth was designed to respond rightly to our work. With the coming of sin, however, both were ruined. We have to agonize in our work to provide for our frail bodies. We can get sick and die. Notice what God said to Adam after the Fall:

Genesis 3:17–19 CSB

17 And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.”

Returning to the ground, returning to dust were promised as a result of the Fall. This is what it means to have radically fallen bodies.

b) Our minds

Along with our physical bodies, our thinkers are broken. Even when it comes to theology, our thinking is suspect. We don’t think rightly about ourselves or about God. We don’t even think rightly about our ability to think rightly. Paul said that our “thinking became worthless.” And the brokenness of our thinkers has impacted us in a myriad of ways.

Romans 1:28–31 CSB

28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. 29 They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.

Instead of using our minds to focus on things of God, we use them to focus on all of these other destructive things. Instead of trusting what God says is true, we trust in our own conclusions. Instead of agreeing with God and what He thinks and says, we argue against Him or wrongly deduce that He isn’t even there. Our minds are not trustworthy, because they are corrupted, as Paul said. They are radically fallen.

c) Our hearts

Our thinkers are broken, and so are our hearts, or our “feelers.” We’ve reached a point in our culture and society where we’ve decided that what we feel is most true, but the Bible tells a different story about our hearts. It says that our “senseless hearts are darkened.” Our hearts lie to us:

Jeremiah 17:5 CSB

5 This is what the Lord says: Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind. He makes human flesh his strength, and his heart turns from the Lord.

Jeremiah 17:9 CSB

9 The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?

Our hearts are more deceitful than ANYTHING else. And sadly, we believe the lies that our hearts tell us. And since we think that our feelings are the part of us that are most true, believing these lies takes to all kinds of conclusions that we should never reach—that our desires are what are most important in life. So humanity buys the heart’s advice on just about everything else. Look at Romans 1:24-27 again (I’m not putting it back up). We get gender wrong because of the brokenness of our hearts. We get sexuality wrong because of the brokenness of our hearts. We get race and money and marriage and family and work and government and even food wrong because of our corrupted hearts.

James 4:1–3 CSB

1 What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? 2 You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Our hearts, just like our bodies and our minds, are radically fallen.

d) Our spirits

We aren’t just the physical aspect of ourselves. There’s something that’s decidedly intangible about who we are. We are eternal spiritual beings. It’s in this realm of our existence that I want to put our relational aspect. I believe that this is the aspect of our humanity that truly died the moment sin entered the picture.

We were designed to be in communion with God forever, but because of the Fall the radically fallen human spirit is separated from God, and is destined for that result for eternity if left on its own. We were also designed to be in relationship with others. Those relationships were broken at the Fall as well, as Adam and Eve suddenly felt naked and ashamed in each other’s presence and created ways to hide from each other.

Genesis 3:7–10 CSB

7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”

Because of the radically fallen nature of our spirits, we hide from God and we hide from each other.

There is no part of our bearing God’s image that hasn’t been radically altered, radically tainted, radically fallen because of sin. Our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and even our very spirits are all broken because of our sin. And none of us are exempt. Well, nearly none of us. There is One, and He is the only solution to the predicament of mankind’s sinful state.

Only Jesus was not and is not radically fallen. Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth as a man and lived a human life, but He wasn’t broken like we are. He wasn’t afraid of disease, sickness, or even death. He never had a single thought or feeling that was outside of perfect righteousness. And since His Spirit is God’s Spirit, He is spiritually perfect and complete.

1 Peter 3:18 CSB

18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit,

Jesus did die a cruel death that we deserve, taking our sin on Himself in our place, becoming broken on our behalf so that we could be restored, but He rose again and has ascended to heaven, and He will come again to restore the world to what it was meant to be. This takes us to our last point:

3) Only in Jesus can human fallenness be corrected.

Since it was humanity that broke the perfection of God’s creation, and since humanity was made radically fallen in the process, then humanity is not only unwilling, but is actually incapable of fixing the mess we’ve made of things. Instead, we needed God to step in and bring the correction necessary to right the wrongs we’ve manufactured by our sinfulness. And that’s what God has done in Christ. The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 says it this way:

Baptist Faith & Message 2000, Article III: Man

“…Only the grace of God can bring man into His holy fellowship and enable man to fulfill the creative purpose of God.”

He’s made a way for us to be made right with Him, even though we aren’t completely perfect. Since we can never be good enough to be good enough, Jesus was good enough for all of us:

1 Corinthians 15:21–22 CSB

21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. 22 For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.

All who are in Adam (all of humanity) die. All who are in Christ (those who trust in Christ by faith) will be made alive. And when I say “alive,” I mean alive in the way we were originally meant to be alive. That’s what we have to look forward to. But for now, we haven’t arrived at the end of that process. We’re still on a journey from being justified (or declared to be right with God through faith in Jesus), to being glorified (being made completely whole again, in perfect fellowship with God and each other). The time in between is called sanctification: God is working in the lives of believers through the presence of His Spirit in us to make us more like Jesus day by day. Let’s quickly consider the same four aspects of His work in our lives:

a) Restoration of our bodies

This is one aspect of our process toward glorification that we kind of have to wait for until we stand before the Lord, either until we’ve gone on to be with Him through death, or because He’s returned as He promised to set everything right, including us. When we belong to Christ, we have a new address, so to speak. We belong in the Kingdom of God, and we look forward to that kingdom’s complete fulfillment on earth:

Philippians 3:20–21 CSB

20 Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21 He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself.

We will have completely new bodies that are as they were always meant to be, glorified bodies like Jesus Himself had following His resurrection. But for now, we can choose to use our bodies, as frail as they are, for God’s glory and work as He sees fit:

Ephesians 2:10 CSB

10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

b) Restoration of our minds

Once we are in Christ, our minds are in the process of being renewed—we can begin to think differently about ourselves and about God. No longer must we be opposed to the things of God in our thinking. Our minds are being reworked as we come to the Scriptures in the power of His Spirit to seek to know and do the will of God.

Romans 12:2 CSB

2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

In Jesus, our minds are being made to be more like the mind of Christ as we submit to His work. And not only that, but once we have surrendered to Christ as Lord and received His Holy Spirit, we have the added blessing of His teaching us to understand and apply His Word to our lives… He changes our thinkers to begin to think rightly about who God is.

c) Restoration of our hearts

There will come a time when our hearts will no longer lead us astray, no longer lie to us, but will be made new and clean in Christ. But in the meantime, because of the Spirit’s presence in our hearts, our desires begin to take on a new aspect: we begin to bear good spiritual fruit.

Galatians 5:22–24 CSB

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. 24 Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

This is the fruit of the heart led by the Spirit of God.

d) Restoration of our spirits

Finally, instead of being separated from God, in Christ we are brought into a new relationship of adoption by the Spirit living within us. Through faith in what Jesus has done, we go from being spiritual enemies of God to being His sons and daughters—His very children.

Romans 8:14–16 CSB

14 For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!” 16 The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children,

And not only that, but because of Jesus those of us who belong to Him are given a new way of relating to each other. A family relationship of mutual love and care based on the love and care the Christ has shown to us. Those who are in Christ are brothers and sisters, and should see each other that way. We belong to one another.

Closing

Mankind: bearing the image of God, but in a broken way. The Son of God: completely God, but submitting to death on the cross for us so that we could be made right with God through faith in His work. It’s incredible to think about how much God loves us that He would rescue us from the punishment that we deserve because of our sin. Do you belong to Jesus? Have you surrendered your life to Him as Savior and Lord?

Church membership

Other prayer needs

Giving during offering

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Choir potluck on 4/8

Sharing about Israel tonight in sanctuary

Bible reading: Psalm 89 today. 90 tomorrow. Then Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah. When we’re done with those, we will have read half of the chapters in the Bible! Then we’ll start with James on Easter.

Instructions for guests

Benediction

Philippians 2:5–11 CSB

5 Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, 6 who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. 7 Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death— even to death on a cross. 9 For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow— in heaven and on earth and under the earth— 11 and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

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