One of the things that stirs up a sense of pride in a young child is when someone looks at them and says, “You look just like your mother!” or “You are the spitting image of your old man.” The Bible says that we were made in God’s image, minus the spitting part; that in some way when He counseled in Himself to create something different than the rest of Creation, “God created mankind in His own image.” Men and women are meant in some way to bear the very image of the One whose idea they were; to bear the image of God. Last week we saw two things that being made in the image of God means: that we have a unique design (a unique frame around us that draws out the beauty of what God has made in each one of us) and that we have value (how could God not take care of those He made in His own image? And how could we not do the same in caring for other human beings?). Today we will look at another aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image that we see in the third part of the blessing that God pronounces over the male and female He just made: God made us in His image so that we can subdue the earth that He made and so that we can rule over all other life that He made. God rules and reigns over all Creation and He wants to share that authority and responsibility with us in some way; that is exactly how the original readers would have read that verse. When we moderns tend to think of humanity being made in the image of God, we often think of ontological categories, categories of being; what are we like and what were were made to BE? But the Ancient Near Eastern cultures thought of the image of God more in terms of “What are we made to DO?” Join us this morning for our final sermon in Genesis 1.
