Genesis 1:26

Genesis 1:26

It is not too much to say that redemption, with all its graces and all its glories, finds its explanation and its reason in creation. He who thought it worth while to create, foreseeing consequences, can be believed, if He says so, to have thought it worth while to rescue and to renew. Nay, there is in this redemption a sort of antecedent fitness, inasmuch as it exculpates the act of creation from the charge of short-sightedness or of mistake. "Let us make man in our image," created anew in Jesus Christ, "after the image of Him that created him."

Notice three respects in which the Divine image has been traced in the human.

I. "God is Spirit," was our Lord's saying to the Samaritan. Man is spirit also. This it is which makes him capable of intercourse and communion with God Himself. This it is which makes prayer possible, and thanksgiving possible, and worship possible in more than a form and name. Spirituality thus becomes the very differentia of humanity. The man who declares that the spiritual is not, or is not for him, may well fancy himself developed out of lower organisms by a process which leaves him still generically one of them; for he has parted altogether from the great strength and life of his race.

II. Spirituality is the first Divine likeness. We will make sympathy the second. Fellow-suffering is not necessarily sympathy. On the other hand, sympathy may be Where fellow-suffering is not. Love is sympathy, and God is love. Sympathy is an attribute of Deity. When God made man in His own likeness, He made him thereby capable of sympathy. Spirituality without sympathy might conceivably be a cold and spiritless grace; it might lift us above earth, but it would not brighten earth itself. III. The third feature is that which we call influence, the other two are conditions of it. Influence is by name and essence the gentle flowing in of one nature and one personality into another, which touches the spring of will and makes the volition of one the volition of the other. It is indeed a worse than heathenish negation of the power and activity of God, the source of all, if we debar Him alone from the exercise of that spiritual influence upon the understanding, the conscience, and the heart of mankind, which we find to be all but resistless in the hands of those who possess it by His leave. "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness."

C. J. Vaughan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xix., p. 369.

References: Genesis 1:26. Parker, vol. i., p. 164; C. Kingsley, Gospel of the Pentateuch,p. 18; Bishop Woodford, Sermons Preached in Various Churches,p. 33; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1491; E. M. Goulburn, Pursuit of Holiness,p. 102; J. Laidlaw, The Bible Doctrine of Man,p. 98; Smith, Donellan Lecture(1884-85), p. 173; H. Grey, A Parting Memorial,p. 286; A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer,p. 137; S. T. Williams, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 218. Genesis 1:26. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis,p. 9. Genesis 1:26; Genesis 1:27. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. x., p. 214.