4. April 18, 2014 Genesis - Our Origin

The Book of Genesis chapter 1 describes God creating everything including man.

Genesis 1:26-27 "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." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."


Andre Rabe

Andre Rabe came and spoke to my home group a few years ago. He taught something I had never heard before. He said the creation of man consisted of two events. The first event is this: “in the image of God he created him.” Then “male and female he created them”.  This is the second event. God's original intent was to make man in his image, and nowhere in scripture is it recorded that God changed his mind. We are still made in his image. In the first event God made us spirit as He is spirit. He then made man male and female and gave man human flesh. Genesis goes on in greater detail on these two events in chapter two.

Genesis 2:5-8 "When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up--for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground-- then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed."


Genesis 2:15 "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."

These scriptures refer to the first event where God made man in his image. Let me give an example of what it means to be the “image and likeness” of God. When you look in the mirror you don’t see your self, you see an image of your self. When God looked at man, He saw himself. You don’t think so? Here is what Paul wrote about us looking at Christ.
 

2Corinthians 3:18 (Jewish Bible) So all of us, with faces unveiled, see as in a mirror the glory of the Lord; and we are being changed into his very image, from one degree of glory to the next, by ADONAI the Spirit.

What Paul said was as we look into a mirror we see Christ. God looks at us and He sees Himself. This is our ORIGINAL design. God has defined us as His image. There are no references to God changing his mind. We are still His image and likeness.

The next verses describe God making man into male and female after the man was placed in the garden now giving man flesh.

Genesis 2:18 "Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." …. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed."

This is where man became a flesh being like the animals and became male and female. This is the second event. In the first event man was made in God's image, a spirit being, in the second man was given human flesh. There is paradox again. Man is now flesh and spirit at the same time.

We are, in our true identity as defined by God Himself, His image and likeness. That is not our flesh-man, but rather the spirit-man.


Blessings,
Tom