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Picture God enjoying a creative day. He calls light out of darkness. Spreads the vast expanse of space. He uses words to gouge out a place for the seas and molds mounds of mountain, thousands of feet high, out of common dirt and stone. His fertile imagination calls lush vegetation into being. He hangs stars and moons on threads of nothing and sets them spinning in their places.

A word, and the seas teem with fish, and out of nowhere birds take to the air. He speaks again, and livestock and reptiles spring into being to roam and prowl the earth. Then, finally, God gets to the good part, the really good part: People. Like me. Like you.

Philosophers might suggest we take time out from making and spending money, time out from eating and sleeping and mating, time out to ask:

How did I get here? Who am I? What am I like? Where is life headed?

Well? Have you asked yourself any good questions lately?

Where did I come from?
From the fingertips of God.

Here, opinions differ radically. Most people who give thought to where we came from assume we gradually happened, and all by chance. If we take enough backward steps in time, we find ancestors quite unlike us. Further back, single cells got tired of being single and married into complexity. Further back still, life emerged from nonlife. In the beginning, if ever there had been a beginning, matter and force existed alone, spending long, lonely evenings together, waiting for things to happen.

Chance takes time. Years in the millions. The billions. And how can even that be enough for something to spring out of nothing of its own initiative, or caprice, or ... well, chance.

Christians assume that God created out of nothing. Had he not decided to create life out of nothing, life would not have happened, spontaneously or otherwise, no matter how many years or eons passed. Nothing would have happened.

On this point, the explanations you hear can be, frankly, embarrassing. But no one need blush at the Bible’s basic concept of creation. With God around, we can accept the idea that nothingness was overtaken by somethingness ... and all it took was a word. Or a short sentence. “Let there be light,” for instance. Or, “Let us make man.”

The mechanics — the technical “how” of creation — is not addressed in Scripture, of course. It is left to the poetic precision of word painting, and that imagery powerfully conveys the heart of our origin:

“In the beginning, God.”

Who am I?
The pinnacle of Creation.

Regardless of how you read the first couple chapters of Genesis (Beginnings), certain things stand out:

A personal, caring God was involved in each step of the creative process.

Creation did not require great effort. A word of two was sufficient to make things happen. Cosmic things. Again, the language is poetic, but poetry does not diminish the power of the idea it conveys, if anything, the opposite is true: It gives the idea greater power. For God to fashion nature is easy.

There was a purposeful progression to all this creative effort. Was anything left to chance and happenstance?

God was pleased what he made. He found joy in it.

Humankind was his crowning touch to creation. And if anything, God gives greater deliberation to the creative artistry that gave birth to people.

Hear the words of Creation’s Poet:

“God said,” and light was created.
“God said,” and there was sky.
“God said,” and seas and dry land appeared.
“God said,” and vegetation sprang out of the earth.
“God said,” and suns and moons lit the expanse of space.
“God said,” and fish flipped fins and birds flapped wings.
“God said,” and critters crawled the planet.

Then came people.

The rest of creation was the product of the Poet’s oratory. Animal life was uniquely handcrafted — the Artist resorts to sculpture. But people in particular ... he lingers over people. He took his time with the maleness and femaleness of it all.

Over all that was created, God placed the label “Good.” But when he finished with people, a superlative was in order, and he pronounced them, “Very good.” And he made man monarch over all that he created, King of the Earth.

Galaxies and fruit trees, fowl and flower, all sprang from the creative mind of God. Humankind was modeled after God himself, a creation fashioned in the Creator’s image. We are not part of the physical machinery. We are unique. We have more in common with God than we do with celery stalks, amoeba or chimps.

We were created with a body, a physical dimension. But slugs have slimy little bodies.

We were also created with a soul, charged with emotional and intellectual energy. We may look at gorillas or dolphins and wonder if we see in them faint reflections of our intelligence. Or even of emotion.

We were created with a spirit, fitted for eternal living and friendship with the Creator. Here, without qualification, we stand unique. Face-to-face with God.

If you think of Creator versus creation, you see an infinite gulf between God and us. We seem little different in significance than a fist full of silt, a head of cabbage, or a gadfly. He made us all. But if you take the Poet’s words at face value and accept that we, and we alone, are made in his image, the gulf shifts.

And so there are minerals, and vegetables, and animals ... and between these and us, a great gap. And we are on the God-side of the gap.

So far, though, this talk is rooted in creation. Our first parents. Ages ago. But with every life conceived since, God is aware. Involved. Caring. Sensitive, Watching. Planning.

Can we even calculate how much we matter to God?

“You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well.

“My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

“How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.”

God does not simply care about humankind. He care about individuals. People like me. Like you.

He cares about the rest of his creation, too. Again, the Poet speaks, putting across such profound ideas so delicately understated: He notices when something as commonplace as a bird dies and falls. And why does he bother to point that out? To tell us that we matter far, far more. He talks about evil people who would do violence to us and he reminds us that God is the superintendent of the gates of hell as well as heaven. He will not fail to practice justice, and he does not forget the injustice done on the face of the earth. He watches us, vigilently. He even knows when our hair is ruffled. So poetic, so poignant. And so he tells us, “Don’t be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”

So, as I say, there are minerals, and vegetables, and animals ... and between these and us, a great gap. And we are on the God-side of the gap.

What am I like?
The greatest creature imaginable ... and also the worst.

The greatest creature, because we were created on the God-side of the gap, separate from the rest of creation. We are made in the image of God. We have personality and will. We can communicate and make decisions. We live above mere instinct. We have moral sensitivities and conscience.

We are the greatest creatures imaginable. If we could see ourselves as we really are — or should I say, as we are capable of becoming? — we would be astounded.

Yet somehow, through a quirky twist of rebelliousness, we are also the worst creatures imaginable. And why? We have fallen in the image of Satan. This may sound too Sunday-schoolish for sophisticates. But consider our capacity for inhumanity. We can’t be too hard on the law of the jungle — strong beasts tearing the weak to shreds — when we realize that we, the Kings of Creation, do the same to one another.

The Poet speaks: It was a simple, silly sin that started our downward spiral. Imagine our original parents enjoying good life in God’s garden paradise. The rules are minimal. One fruit tree off-limits. The why behind the law is incidental. The point is, the original parents had all their needs met. They lived in comfort. They walked with God.

Then the man stumbled. He fell. The gates of Eden closed, the gates of suffering and death opened. All the years since are a blur of scientific breakthroughs and bloodshed, loving friendships and oppression, nobility and war. We are haunted and hunted by our own capacity for evil. Pride and rebellion, temptation and moral failure.

We are all susceptible. We all fall. If we could see ourselves as we really are — the depth to which we are capable of falling — we would be terrified. Fearful and ill. And what makes the prospect so hideous is the great contrast: What we have become. What we could have been.

But the Poet speaks through his own life, his own blood. He speaks to say, “Eden will be restored.” We can be remade in the image of Christ. We have the capacity to know God. Jesus has opened the way. In him we regain the majesty that we threw away through our rebellion against God. And he stirs within us to transform us into a perfect reflection of his character. He is pleased, in fact, to count us in as family.

“Both the one who makes us holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”

Through faith, we are family.

Here, then, is how we gauge how great we are in creation, how bad we are in our rebellion, how good we can be in Christ — the image of God, the image of Satan, the image of Christ:

What was required to restore God’s image in us? His Son.

What was God will to give to bring us back to himself? His Son.

And so I picture God enjoying a creative day. A special week. I do not doubt he found the work of creation exhilarating. But I choose to image that when he came to the work of making people, with all their potential, he visualized each individual who ever would be born, descendants of the first couple. People like me. Like you. And when his mind fell on each of us, I imagine his pulse quickened.

And he smiled and cried and smiled at our potential.


Genesis 1—2
Psalm 139:13-18
Matthew 10:29-31
Hebrews 2:11

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