Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Psalm 8

N: Invite Card

Welcome

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Announcements

Shanna party 4/10 at 5:30 in MH

Easter Schedule (invite cards available) - include dessert auction on Good Friday.

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Opening

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.