Sermon Transcript
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. And 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 heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
In 55 BC, Julius Caesar, on one of his military conquests, he was in modern-day Netherlands, and he came across a Germanic tribe that was fleeing as refugees from their traditionally home location because yet another tribe had pushed them out. And of the encounter between Rome and this refugee tribe, Caesar boasts in his self-authored work, Gallic Wars. Caesar boasts that his troops slaughtered the Germans, killing, he says, 430,000 of them. Caesar’s number is in dispute, but the modern archaeological digs have confirmed that at least 150,000 people died in the battle. I put the word battle in quotes because Because included among the dead, Caesar again brags that his troops killed women and children.
He writes in his Gallic Wars, we still have this today, he says, I sent the cavalry to come in from behind, and then as the German military heard screams and turned to look back, they saw that their wives and children were slain. So they threw down their weapons and ran headlong away from the camp. They fled to the point where the Meuse and the Rhine rivers flow together and saw there was no use in further flights. The large number there, a large number of them were slain. The rest fell into the river where they died, overwhelmed by anxiety, fatigue, and the strength of the current.
No one survived. Scholars, of course, agree Caesar’s tale is meant for propaganda. He’s trying to increase the nationalistic zeal of the Romans to say, we’re bigger, we’re stronger than everyone else. We take what we and we leave devastation in our wake. Like, go Rome!
And it’s true, when Roman citizens heard this account, pride would have welled within them. But likely when you heard that story, you did not cheer with excitement. Your admiration for Caesar did not increase. Instead, you were likely disgusted that a military leader would brag about killing tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of defenseless women and children. You probably believe that’s not something to brag about.
That’s something to be ashamed of. Like, that’s, that’s actually something you should stand trial for. You think it’s wrong, even if it’s part of a conquest. And if so, if the story of Caesar’s triumphant victory over women and children bothers you, and it should, of course, if it bothers you, it shows you how Christianized you are. Even if you aren’t a Christian, you are Christianized.
You have adopted Christian ideals about the value of human life. The world today is not the same as it was when Julius Caesar expanded the borders of And the reason it changed, the reason the globe is not the same, is because of Christianity. A growing number of historians track how the mercy, the compassion, the love, even for your enemies, originated with Christianity, or the responsibility that we feel for fellow humans, the sense of duty we have to stand up and speak for the voiceless, or the idea of using power to elevate the powerless. All of that came from Jesus. So for instance, a 4th century preacher, a church leader named Basil of Caesarea, he said in a sermon, the bread which you keep belongs to the hungry.
The coat which you preserve in your wardrobe to the naked. Those shoes which are rotting in your possession belong to the shoeless. The gold which you have hidden in the ground, that belongs to the needy. Wherefore, as often as you were able to help others and refused, so often did you do them wrong. And if you contrast Christian perspectives like Basil’s with other voices from the ancient world, they are wildly different.
Ancient people were cruel to one another. Aristotle said, some races of men are meant to be rulers, others, and other races of men are meant to be slaves. Some guys are meant to have a lot. Some guys are meant to have nothing just by how they were born. So you don’t need to give the people who have nothing anything.
You don’t have a responsibility to them because they were meant to have nothing. That’s Aristotle. Constitution of the Athenians said anyone could hit any slave for any reason, just smack them, hit them as hard as you want. They can be your punching bag for sport. That was the ancient world.
And into that world, Christian teaching like love your neighbor, pray for those who persecute you is markedly different. It even separates itself from Judaism.
Not that all Christians followed Christian teaching, and we know Unfortunately, there’s huge swaths of history where Christians were totally hypocritical. But the people who track the spread of the idea of human dignity, right, just one example, a book title, which is way too boring and academic, but Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity. Put it on your list, just kidding. But people who track the development of beliefs beliefs of human dignity find that beginning 3rd or 4th century when Christians started getting societal power and then progressing for the next millennia and a half, the concepts of the value of human life worked their way through cultures and into laws and eventually then all the way around the world to the extent that even today, even totally non-Christian military leaders cannot say, no one can say, no one can say today Slaughtering women and children in cold blood is part of the glory of the nation.
Military leaders used to say that. Caesar said it. He said it proudly in his— in the book he wrote himself. And today no one can say that. Today everyone has to frame war as self-defense, for example.
And that’s because of Christianity, because of the human dignity which Christianity teaches. We’re in a series called Good Creation. We’re studying how God made the world good, and we’re finding that really everything in our lives that we find significant can be traced back to how God made the world in creation, traced all the way back to God’s original design. And today we’re looking at when God made humans and the value that he bestowed in us, the inherent worth of all humans, of all humans, simply because of how God made us. In other words, in the creation account, we see why Christians believe that every person, regardless of race or color or gender or ability or inability, that every nation, tribe, and tongue, that, that all of us have equal worth and significance because As we just read, all of us were made in the image of God.
No other part of creation was made in God’s image. God’s image sets us apart from all else. So as we look at these couple of verses, we will see how the image of God gives us unshakable worth. We’ll see how the image of God gives worth to men and women. We’ll see how the image of God gives us ongoing worth.
Worth. And finally, we’ll see how the image of God in us needs to be redeemed in some sense, and how it’s redeemed. Unshakable worth, worth to men and women, ongoing worth, why and how God’s image in us needs to be redeemed. So first, the image of God gives us unshakable worth. All of us likely believe something along the lines of human life is precious.
Whether we are Christian or not, whether we’re spiritual or not. These days, equality among humans seems like a foregone conclusion. But if you start asking, why would all of us have equal dignity and worth? Why is that? How can we prove that we all have equal dignity and worth?
It’s hard to come up with a reason if we have abandoned the idea that our worth comes from how God made us, if we’re trying to find some other reason besides God for why we should treat everyone with equal dignity, it’s not easy. Just think about it. Nearly everyone says there’s something different about humans compared to the rest of creation, that humanity is in its own category from the flora and fauna on the planet. You know, archaeologists, psychologists, ethicists, they would all say There’s something special about humanity, right? Archaeologists might say it’s our ability to build civilizations, roads, economic systems, trade, commerce, advanced tools.
Humans do that on a scale no other creature does. Psychologists might say we’re special because we know that we are mortal. Humans uniquely from creation know that our days are numbered. Every animal knows to run from danger. But no animal knows one day a danger is coming that will be impossible to escape, that death will win in the end.
Only humans know that. So maybe that’s why we’re special. Or ethicists might say, you know, humans are unique because of our ability to know right from wrong. We have morality. Now you may push back on that and you’ve said, I have seen my dog feel shame when he’s on the couch and knows he shouldn’t be So yes, he knows right from wrong, and hey, that’s true, but your dog does not make moral evaluations of the world.
Your dog doesn’t watch the news and say, that’s messed up and shouldn’t be that way. That’s only humans. So maybe that’s why we’re special. But those types of abilities, those capacities, cannot be why every human has equal worth. Worth, dignity, and value.
If you argue for equal value across all humans because of what we can do, if ability is what makes us special from the rest of the creation, then what about the humans who don’t have those abilities? If the reason that all humans have value is because we can build civilizations, we know death will come for all of us, or because we can make moral judgments about the world, if capacity are why we have value, then what about humans who don’t have those capacities, have mental limitations, maybe a baby, maybe someone with dementia? Do those humans have the same value as everyone else? Or to say it another way, are the people who are exceedingly brilliant in those areas, do you think that they have more value than others who are not exceedingly brilliant? Do you see the problem?
If we want to make a case that the baby and the president and the person in a coma all have the same dignity and inherent worth, it cannot be because of our capacities because not all humans have the same capacities. And perhaps more problematic, if we eliminate the possibility that we are assigned an elevated value, compared to the rest of creation by a Creator, if all we are left with is a mindless type of evolution, if humans are only the current iteration of a long process of strong eating the weak, of survival of the fittest, which is what evolution would teach us, if that’s all that humans are, if that totally explains us, if strong eat the weak over 3 billion years, totally gives the account of what a human is, then what’s wrong with strong eating the weak continuing today? Why shouldn’t Caesar smash women and children to pieces? Why shouldn’t the rich eat the poor? Why wouldn’t the powerful eat the powerless?
You’re back to Aristotle. Some people are meant to rule, others are meant to be squashed. Big deal. If all there is is evolution, what’s wrong with that?
Evolution cannot prove oppression is wrong. It cannot make a case for human rights. Or to be more precise, evolution can’t make an unshakable case. It can make a case, but it’s pretty flimsy. You could argue that evolution rewards species who cooperate.
You may say something like cooperation among a species is better than infighting among a species in the evolutionary process. And therefore, cooperation among humans, valuing everyone equally, that would be the best evolutionary process. And there you go, right? That’s your basis for human rights and dignity from the standpoint of evolution. You could make that case.
But the problem with that is in the evolutionary record, you see both cooperation among a species and strong eat the weak. Some species fight each other for resources. Other species cooperate as tribes and help other members of the tribe. And some species do both. Some species cannibalize each other after cooperating, and those species have also done quite well.
So if all you have is evolution, you don’t have an unshakable foundation for human rights. Because why wouldn’t we be like termites, right? When one of us becomes disabled or dies, the rest of the colony dismembers us and consumes us as food. Why wouldn’t we do that? How can you say it’s wrong if all you have is evolution?
It’s hard to come up with a reason or an unshakable reason unless we were endowed with inherent value from a Creator. It’s why the framers of our Declaration of Independence linked human rights with what is bestowed on us by a Creator. You know, we— you learned in school, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Our founders had to say it that way. Because if our rights are contingent on something else, if it’s contingent on our capacities or the government giving it to us, then it’s not unalienable.
Those rights can be taken away, and our founders wanted to explain human worth and dignity in a way that it could never be jeopardized. Now, we all know, tragically, our founders did not consistently apply their belief that everyone is equal to everyone. Not even close. But when they were building an argument that humans had rights which cannot be taken away, when they’re trying to argue that, they knew logically the only way they could make that statement is if human value and worth comes from a Creator. And then after them, subsequent generations downstream had to work out more and more implications for what it means that everyone was created equal.
Now, often, if not always, those advances in human rights came with great struggle. We haven’t arrived at our current understanding without a whole lot of pushing and pulling and stress. And frankly, today we are still working out those implications. In other words, we have not totally arrived at treating everyone with equal dignity and worth. Just like every other generation before us, there are some ways we get it right and there are some ways that we fall short.
Like here in Silicon Valley, it’s tragic that all these tech companies who bend over backward with sensitivity training, but yet have totally failed at making their employees feel like they have unalienable worth, right? In fact, many days these are stories I hear— people who live here go to school or work in a place that makes them feel worthless, because the underlying tone to our culture here is that your worth comes from your ability to complete certain profitable tasks, right? For instance, one friend of mine shared with me that he was flat out told by his supervisor that he was only as good worth. He was only as good as his last win, his last successful execution of a deliverable for the company. So succeed for the company and he had worth, at least until the next assignment.
And then if he failed, he didn’t only fail at the task, he was a failure. He had no worth. He was seen only as what he could produce. There’s nothing more to him than the tasks that he could complete from the eyes of his supervisor. Now, you may not have been told that explicitly, but largely Silicon Valley celebrates you for what you can do.
Rarely are people celebrated for just who they are. Do you feel that? Do you feel others assign you just as much worth whether you’ve performed adequately or not? Do you feel just as cherished after you’ve made a terrible blunder?
I bet not. See, we still struggle to apply this, don’t we? Even with all our diversity training, we haven’t worked it all out yet. We don’t really believe worth is inherent. To being human and all of us are equal.
But Scripture is clear, our worth, value, unalienable, unshakable, comes from simply being made in the image of God. All right, second, the image of God gives worth to men and women equally. Equality of men and women should already be implied from what we’ve already said, but it’s worth being explicit. Verse 27, in the image of God he created man Again, male and female he created them. So in the very beginning, men and women are given equal worth, value, dignity.
And you have to step back and marvel that a text from at least thousands and thousands of years ago makes such a claim, because humanity in general does not have a great track record of treating men and women equally. It seems every culture, one way or another, has gotten this wrong. We, uh, we sometimes we talk about this at Easter but it’s just an example of men and women equality through the ages. When Jesus rises from the dead, he appears first to women. He tells women to go tell the men that he’s alive.
And critics of Christianity at the time used the fact that the first reports of Jesus’ resurrection being made by women were evidence that it couldn’t have happened. Happened. The 2nd century philosopher Celsus, who was a huge critic of Christianity, and he wrote a whole treatise trying to disprove Christianity. One of the reasons he discredited Christianity was he said, direct quote— this is Celsus, not a Christian who said this— Celsus said, how could anyone expect rational men to listen to the testimony of a hysterical female?
How could anyone expect rational men to listen to the testimony of a hysterical female? That was his argument. Resurrection couldn’t have happened because women told us about it. That was the culture at large in the 1st and 2nd century regarding women. And for most of human history, most cultures, whether it is explicitly said or not, have treated men as more valuable, right?
Girl babies are aborted or abandoned more often than boy babies throughout history, even today, where there have been pay gaps between men and women, which is better today, at least in this country, especially if you take education, experience, and performance into account. It’s better, but it’s still there. Men are still favored in that way. But then, at the same time, there are other indicators that seem to favor You may have noticed modern movies or entertainment, for example, if there’s a character playing the part of a buffoon in some story or a comedy has a person acting like he doesn’t have a clue, it’s more often the dad than the mom. It’s more often the son than the daughter.
A lot of times women are portrayed as smart and men are just lucky to have women around to fix everything. That they mess up. Right, which shows our moment in history, in some ways, not always, in an effort to value women, which is fantastic, have devalued men in the process, which is not fantastic. It’s rare, the point is it’s rare in a culture or in a fictional story or in an organization for men and women to be given equal value and worth. We seem to struggle to highly esteem both at the same time without devaluing either one.
We seem to struggle But here it is in creation. Man and woman equally celebrated, equally treasured, equally elevated because both of them are made in the image of God. So we’ve seen the image of God gives humans unshakable worth, gives men and women equal worth. Now thirdly, the image of God gives us ongoing worth. Because every person carries the image of God even today.
Don’t be tempted to believe that the fall of man, right, when humans sinned, that that somehow removed the image of God from us or somehow made us less valuable in God’s eyes. It is not as if the original humans had this immense worth and value because of the image of God God, and then subsequent generation, God’s image gets, you know, watered down, or we totally lose it because of sin. It’s not like, uh, one of my favorite fictional series, Lord of the Rings, right, where, where the line of kings can be traced back to when they descended from the people who lived over the sea, but now there’s very few of that kingly blood left, and the one guy who has that kingly blood is more special than everyone else. That’s not how the image of God works in humanity, although certainly something happened with the fall of man when we ran away from God, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But even after the fall, even after sin entered into the world, the Bible refers to fallen humans as having the image of God.
It’s Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. That was Genesis 9:6. God says the reason you guys can’t kill each other is because all of you are made in the image of God. All of you are precious. You each bear my image.
Similarly, James chapter 3, verse 9. James is telling us to watch what we say to others. He instructs us not to curse others with our mouths because those other people who we might curse, they are made in the image of God. In other words, the image of God is in every human. Every human since the beginning of humans needs to be treated with dignity and worth, not be cursed, not be killed, because they carry the very image of God.
It’s why you can find Christians all the way back to the 1st century. You can even, even when there’s other parts of Christianity that are getting it wrong, there’s Christians getting it right. You can find Christians on the front lines of caring for the poor, on the front lines of elevating women, on the front lines of standing against infanticide and abortion. And yes, abortion happened in the 1st century. It was very dangerous, but it still happened.
Christians said all those groups, all those people who may not be valued by society, the poor, the widow, the woman, the abandoned child, the child still in the womb, they all carry the image of God. His image has come down through the line of humans throughout all generations to today. We’ve got to treat all of them with dignity. In other words, people are a package deal. When we say here at Bridges, people matter, we mean all people.
We don’t care for the poor without also caring for the widow. We don’t care for the widow without also caring for the unborn. We can’t care about the unborn without also caring for the immigrant, and we can’t care for any of them without also, Yes, caring for the CEOs. Like, people are a package deal. The reason we care about any of them is because all of them are made in the image of God.
It’s why we as a church, we partner with Real Options Pregnancy Center. It’s why we participated in their Walk for Life yesterday. But it’s because Real Options really seems to care about both the mother and the baby. They demonstrate to mom she’s not alone, she has choices, we’re here to help. Mom needs to be honored, valued, cherished, someone to see her as a person, not to see her only as what decision they hope she makes, which would be reducing her to a task.
So Real Options gets the mom a coach. They help with diapers and cribs and bouncies if that’s what’s needed. They take care of mom. And at the same time, yes, like all Christians since the first century, they believe the baby, even the womb, is carrying the image of God and has inherent dignity and worth. Earth, same as the rest of us.
Needs to be protected, honored, cherished, same as the rest of us. Mom and baby both have the image of God and we take care of them both. That’s our position. As a church, we will not be pulled into some dichotomy of mom versus baby. It is not either/or.
We’re going to do all we possibly can to care for mom. We’re going to do all we possibly can to care for baby because they’re both made in image of God. The image of God continues in every human today, even those in the womb. Now finally, about what happened with the image of God at the fall when sin entered the world and what God did about it. You may remember a few weeks ago when we talked about Colossians 3:10.
10, Paul explains how we are renewed in the knowledge of the image of our Creator through our faith in Christ, Colossians 3:10. Paul makes a very similar point in Ephesians 4. The image of God is renewed. It is redeemed in some way through Christ. So, there is a sense in which the image of God needs to be redeemed because we have misused it.
And then Christ renews it. The reason why we’re saying this twice is because people often make the mistake that when we say the image of God needs to be redeemed, you might be tempted to think that that means that we’ve lost it, that it’s gone from us, or that God’s image in us was diminished somehow, right? But that’s not true, as we’ve already said this morning, Genesis 9 or James 3. We still have the full image of God. It is not If God’s image in us were diminished, it would mean we have less value, less inherent worth than humans did at the beginning, and that’s not the case.
Humans have maintained our privileged place among creation. The question is not how valuable we are in God’s eyes or how esteemed we should treat one another. We’re highly valued, highly esteemed. The image of God remains in us, but that actually makes our betrayal far worse. Universe, if we didn’t carry such a weight of importance, it wouldn’t matter so much when we misrepresented God’s image.
It’s the fact that God made us the pinnacle of creation that is so devastating when we turn away from him. One comparison you could think about is if you identify with a certain group, you know, if there’s some group that you feel proud to be associated with them, whoever they are. You know, for me, I’ve said a thousand times, you know I’m an Ohio State fan, right? I’ll sing their praises as often as I am able. You probably identify with a different group for some reason.
Um, maybe you have loyalty, uh, to a company, right? You’re an Apple fanboy. Um, or maybe it’s not to a team or a company, maybe it’s a nationalistic loyalty, some group where you feel feel like I am them and they are me.
How do you react when you see someone from your tribe, the tribe you’re proud to be part of? How do you react when you see one of them behaving like an idiot? Like a few times, only a few, I’ve seen Ohio State fans rioting, destroying property. They’re wearing Buckeye jerseys and they’re smashing windows, right? Or one time the coach got caught lying.
It makes me sick, right? I think we’re better than that. You guys are giving us a bad name. You’re misusing our image. That’s not what we stand for.
You have taken the goodness of the school and the team and what it should represent and have associated with something that it should not be associated with. Associated with. They still have the image. I mean, they’re wearing the gear. Everybody who sees them on TV has no doubt, oh, that’s Ohio State fans who are rioting.
They have the image, but they’re misappropriating the image. And it’s similar to us when we entangle ourselves in sin. We are made in the image of God. We are made to reflect his holiness and goodness and worth and dignity to the We are made to be in a relationship with him. But then we associate his image with what isn’t holy or good or worthy or dignified.
So it, in some sense, needs to be redeemed. And God, in his grace, responds by sending Christ to renew it.
Which is unlike my default reaction, right? When I see someone from my tribe defaming the honorable scarlet and gray. Those are the team colors, by the way, and they are the best colors. I want to say something like, give me that jersey! You don’t deserve to wear those colors!
But God is not like that. God’s heart is not to kick us out. God’s heart is to win us back. So he sees— he sends Jesus, who was not made in God’s image, image, but who was and is and will always be the image of the invisible God. Colossians 1:15.
Jesus is the exact imprint of God’s nature. Hebrews 1:3. God sends him who has no sin to take on our sin, to wear it. All the ways that we’ve misused his image, all the ways we’ve mischaracterized God to the world by how we act, the wrong picture of him that we displayed, Jesus wears it. He takes it on the cross in our place so that we would not carry the blame for misusing his image, so that his image in us is renewed.
Right? And when you see him who has never misused the image of God, when you see him taking heat and judgment on behalf of those who have have misrepresented God to the world. It renews in you the sense of what God’s image is. It lifts the fog. You’re renewed in the knowledge and the image of the Creator.
Colossians 3:10 compels you to follow, frees you from the guilt of your wrongdoing. And if you’ve never put your trust in him, tell him today. Say, Lord, thank you for my privileged place in creation. Thank you for the unique worth you’ve given me. I’m sorry I’ve misused it.
I’m sorry I’ve associated your image with what is not good or honorable or holy. Forgive me, Lord. Thank you for Jesus who is willing to wear the mess that I’ve made that I might be free.
Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for Jesus. Jesus, thank you for the image of God coming to us, ways that he renews us, Lord. The shame and blame and guilt that we carry is released through his work on our behalf.
We pray that we would treat others with the dignity that you do, Lord, that you’re willing to die for them to elevate them. May we have your compassion and mercy as we look out on every human in this world. We pray those things in his name. Amen.
