Genesis 1.26,27: Men – intelligent monkeys or sophisticated machines?

What are human beings? Many people might consider them just advanced animals or like a super-computer. Sadly, when we consider ourselves just animals we can justify behaving like them. Or if we think of people as just machines we can simply turn them off and throw them away if they’re not working. But we are something more complex and wonderful than that. Genesis tells us that God created human beings as the pinnacle of His creation. He made men and women equal in status and dignity. They are the image of God – meaning they resemble in some way the divine. They are not the same as God but like a mirror they reflect God. Some of the ways we do that –
• Morality: a sense a right and wrong, holiness and evil
• Spirituality: a spiritual life enabling us to relate to God in prayer, praise and service
• Immortality: that we will not cease to exist but forever be praising God or punished by Him
• Mental Faculties: we can reason, think logically; communicate in abstract language. We can imagine and thus create. We have emotions
• Relationships: a profound need for community beyond the self-interest of animals
• Physically: not that God has a body but as He sees, hears speaks and feels, so do we.
• Rule: We act on God’s behalf to rule the world

All these characteristics are corrupted by the fall but we are still image bearers. With great joy we recognise that Jesus restores the image of God, that those who trust Jesus will be transformed into His likeness and when Jesus appears we shall be like him. We are more than a small cog in a massive machine. We mean something because God made us that way. We need to get back in contact with our maker and know what it really means to delight in Him.

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