Imago Dei

This morning, if you have been following along with us we have been in a series that we're calling faith over fear. Hopefully, that has been a series that has blessed you and ministered to you, a series that has encouraged you as we have been walking through this unique season in our history and the history of our nation and in our own lives. This morning, though, I want to just share with you what I believe is something that God has put on my heart. As I've been thinking about all that has transpired over roughly the past two weeks now in the aftermath, and following the murder of George Floyd, let me just say this as I begin too that I'm not here to cast judgment about people's hearts or motives. I don't believe that's my job. I believe that belongs to the Lord. 

What I can say is that I know that there are a whole lot of people hurting right now. What I can say is that this incident has stirred up all different kinds of emotions and feelings, responses, memories of past traumas, of past experiences, of wounds, and of hurts. There is in particular, I mean, all of that for our African American brothers and sisters in that community at large, who have lived these experiences of racism and historical oppression and the injustices connected to that. So I just want to acknowledge and say that there is very real felt pain being experienced in all of this. It's important that we acknowledge that. I think sometimes that's easy for us just to say, “Yeah, well, what about ____________” but it's good for us just to acknowledge that there are people right now who are hurting. 

There are people who are experiencing pain and wounding, and maybe for some of you watching this morning, maybe all of this just affects you personally, maybe it's personal for you because you've lived it, maybe it's personal because you have actually felt that sting of racism and oppression and different injustices that are connected to that. And so it feels personal to you. Maybe for others of you, it feels more personal to you because even though you don't have any first-hand experiences, you just have some loved ones, you have people you're really close to and you're feeling that for them. For others of you, it might not necessarily feel personal, but you just feel deep empathy for people who hurt. Maybe still for others of you don't really know what you feel or, or how to feel in all of it. 

I can tell you that for me as all this was happening and transpiring, it felt more personal to me. It felt like it all hit a little bit closer to home, not because of my own personal lived experiences, but simply because as many of you know, I come from a racially mixed family. I have African American siblings. I have African American nephews, who I love. I know some of the stories that they have shared of times when this has happened to them. When they have felt that when they have been wounded, hurt, or attacked simply because of the color of their skin. That breaks my heart and it breaks my heart for them. And it breaks my heart as I think about them. And so I was thinking about all this, and I thought, man, God, I want to talk about this. I want to share about this. I want to touch on this issue of race and racism. And I was convicted of this thought and the conviction was this, that this isn't something or a subject or an issue for me to speak about or to talk about, because it feels somehow in some way personal to me, but rather because it's personal to God.  

When it comes to the things that really matter, I want you to hear me, that what's of primary importance is not my, or your, subjective experience or feelings or thoughts about a matter. What is of primary importance is what does God think and feel about it? 

What's of primary importance is what does God say? It's not, what do I think? It's not what they think. It's not, what do they say? It's not, what is this book that I read, have to say about this issue? It's not, what did I learn from that Facebook meme? Right? Like, whatever it is, it's that, that God, what do you say? And will I trust what you have to say about it? Is the word of God sufficient for me and for us, and for all things that pertain to faith and practice as his word says?

I believe that for us as Christians, the answer to that has to be yes. And that for us to have the right understanding, for us to have the right perspective, then we need to begin with God and his Word. That's where I want to start this morning. I just want to pray for us as we get into this. I really want the Lord just to speak and to minister, because here's one of the things that I know for certain having preached for a number of years now is that anytime you speak about an issue that's sort of a hot issue or there's a lot of emotion connected, that we invariably hear and don't hear what we want to hear and not hear. Are you with me? 

I want to pray. I want to ask that God speaks and that all of us hear what God wants to say, because if we can grab hold of what God wants to say, then we can move in what God has for us. Amen. So let's just pray. And then we'll get into this 

Father, thank you for this morning. God, thank you for this time. God, thank you that you are here, that you are present, that you are with us. God, thank you for your Word that is true. God, thank you that your Word, oh Lord, is living and active. That your Word has the ability, God, to transform and change us. Father, I pray that as we open your Word, that as we share in your Word today, together, that God, you would speak. That you would minister in every heart, that you would open up every set of ears, Lord, to hear your voice, God. Father, to hear what it is that you have to say, and God that our hearts would be open to receive what is of you. So would you just come? God, would you just minister by your spirit? Every person watching, every person who will God, Lord would you speak? God, give us ears to hear from you today. In Jesus' name. 

Amen. 

When we open up the Bible from the very beginning of its pages in Genesis 1:1, we learn that in the beginning, before there was anything else, there was God. That the first four words of the Bible are “In the beginning, God.” God is eternal, which is to say that God has no beginning and he has no end. God is simply always. What scripture goes on to tell us is that this all-originating, all-sustaining God creates and brings forth into existence, everything. He does so with his words, he just speaks and it happens. That's how powerful God is. So God says, “let there be ____”. And whatever he says next comes to be. Light darkness, earth, water, sky, all the plants and vegetation, and creatures to fill them. God speaks and they just are. 

But then God turns his attention to mankind. He turns his attention to creating mankind. Here's what it tells us in Genesis 1:26-27:

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created mankind in his own image,

    in the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

I want to point out here a few things. First, God created mankind. Which is to say then that we are the created and not the creator, which means then that who we are and what we are, our purpose and our identity and our value, is defined by God and not by us. 

Secondly, notice that we are created uniquely from the rest of all of God's creation. Unlike anything else. When you read Genesis 1, there is a rhythm in the Hebrew, and God's saying, let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be. 

Then you hit verse 26 and it turns hard. It takes this hard pivot and God says, “let us make.” It's meant to give great emphasis to what God is about to say. And God the father, God the son, let us, God the Holy Spirit. They say, let us make human beings. Let us make human beings in this Imago Dei—in the image of God. See, different from all of the rest of creation, you and I were made and designed with this capacity and destiny to image God, to magnify our maker, to, like a mirror, reflect him so that what he is like, his nature and his character and his ways, his love and his goodness and truth could be put on display through us. This uniqueness, then, also means that there is an inherent dignity and value and worth and purpose given to every man and woman and child, without exception, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of class or color or creed or socioeconomic status, because every person is then created as an image-bearer of God. For you and I, then, to look upon or treat any other person other than as an image-bearer of God with dignity, value, worth, and purpose is not simply an affront to that person. It is an affront to God himself. 

Thirdly, notice here that God doesn't create people-groups, God doesn't create races of people and then sort of assign one as the superior race of them all. God makes a person, God creates one race, one mankind, the human race that all of us share in so that all of us, regardless of our color or ethnicity or our geography, all of us then are an expression of that one image. All of us bearing together. We all make up that race. We together are God's tapestry. This beautiful mosaic of the image of God made up an array of colors and of people and looks and all kinds of things that we are this picture of Imago Dei, the image of God. 

What happens though is we've read about this in Genesis 3 is that when it comes to the human race, our first parents, Adam and Eve, they rebel, and they sin against God, and sin enters into our world and into our humanity. And it corrupts everything. Sin not only breaks our fellowship and our union, our relationship with God, but sin also breaks our union and our fellowship with one another and it causes division and it causes separation amongst us. No one is immune to it. 

The Bible says in Romans 3:23:

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

We all share in the corruptible nature of sin and its effect upon us. The Bible says the heart is deceptive, which is wicked above all things. So as image-bearers, then, sin leads us away from the glory of God so that our default satisfaction and joy is no longer in treasuring or knowing or trusting or reflecting God, but rather it is in ourselves in our own self-exaltation. So not only our hearts now naturally bend away from loving and honoring God and seeing him rightly, but also our hearts are naturally bent away from truly loving, honoring, and valuing one another and seeing each other right. The consequences of this very thing and this is every kind of evil against one another. It's all kinds of sin, right? Which is why the first act that we see in scripture following the fall, the very next chapter in Genesis 4 is one brother killing his own brother. And this has been the common story of mankind ever since. Because our hearts are wrongly bent by sin, away from God and away from one another. 

When it then comes to the things that divide us, when it comes to the things that turn us against one another, when it comes to things like hatred, when it comes to things like racism and all other isms for that matter, that the problem is not primarily an upbringing problem. It is not primarily a behavioral problem. It's not primarily a societal or systemic problem or a political problem. It is firstly, a sin 

problem. It's a heart problem. 

It is our sinful condition that causes us to see and treat certain people as other. It is because of sin that we fail to see and to honor the beautiful diversity of the Imago Dei, the image of God in all of mankind. And that the killing of George Floyd a couple of weeks ago was just really one more example in a historical and biblical sea of examples that tell the story of our broken and sinful condition and what man is capable of, the evil. 

At the heart of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ is that God comes to reconcile and restore mankind, not only to himself but also to one another. That's the heart of God. We get this great picture at the end of the Bible and in Revelation 7, where we're given this glimpse into heaven. What it tells us is that there we see people from every tribe, it says, from every tongue, with every language, from every nation, and place. Everybody's there, all the people together as one, one family glorifying and praising God together. That's the work of the gospel. Issues like racism aren't primarily a social issue. They are primarily a gospel issue. It's a gospel issue because sin is the problem. Jesus is our solution. It's a gospel issue because mankind can't fix his own heart. We can't make ourselves better with better teaching or training or laws or policies or systems. Those things might help some, but they can't fix us. Because what's first broken and in needing of healing and restoration is that which is within us. 

It's our heart. And only the transformative work of the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform hearts and make us new. The gospel is paramount, not just for us and our own hearts, but really for the condition of the whole world. Because, listen to me here as I say this, it's that you don't get the kingdom of God in the culture apart from the King. You don't get the kingdom of God apart from the King ruling and reigning within his creation. His creation, within mankind, right? You don't get the kingdom without the king, it doesn't work that way. You get the King and the King ushers in His kingdom. And He brings forth that work in us and then through us, 

Listen to how the apostle Paul speaks about this reconciling work of the cross of Christ in Ephesians 2:14-16:

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Do you see the movement here? It starts with the vision, hostility, separation between us as people separated by racial and ethnic, even legal, and political lines. But through Jesus, it says the barriers and walls that have divided us have been destroyed through the reconciling work of Christ’s blood shed on the cross. God makes us one in him. It says that his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, one new mankind. That word new in the Greek is this word kainos. It means of a new kind, unprecedented or unheard of. It's not so much like the newest version of a car. It's like the first car. This is God in Christ Jesus creating a new mankind, a new people, the people of God. 

Now let me just say really quick something what this means and doesn't mean. This doesn't mean that as people of God, we magically become colorblind and we don't see diversity or all those things. What it means is that we, as the church, we, as the people of God, have been empowered to celebrate our diversity, because we are able to see one another rightly through the lens of Christ as each, as image-bearers of God, as family, as one people bought by the blood of Jesus. When we do not do this, when we see one another as other, when we treat one another as other,  then we are out of step with and out of line with the truth of the gospel and the blood that Jesus shed to reconcile us to Him and each other. 

This very thing happens in the book of Galatians. The apostle Paul speaks about it in 2:11-14, he talks about Peter. 

11 When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. 13 The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

So Peter and these others are separating themselves out. They're treating a particular group of people as other. And look what Paul says in verse 14

14 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

Reconciliation, harmony, oneness is at the heart of the gospel. Jesus died for it. According to 2 Corinthians 5:18, 

18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

God not only reconciles us to himself through Christ, but He also gives us the church, his ministry of reconciliation to be carried on. God is making his appeal through us, that we are his ambassadors. God has given us that ministry, that work, to do so it's on us. 

We, church, are meant to be the prophetic voice, calling out to the culture, calling out to our world. We are meant to be a gospel-proclaiming reconciliation, ministering people who in all things look to and point others towards Christ because He is the answer for sin and brokenness and all things that divide us, including racism. Christ is the answer. It is in him and through him that true transformation happens in us and through us. Where true peace is ultimately found for us and amongst us. Like we read in Ephesians 2, he himself is our peace. Jesus doesn't just give us a peace, He is our peace. And the kind of peace that Christ brings to us and offers us and himself, it's not the kind of peace where we simply sort of lay down our differences, or we put down the things that divide us and stop fighting with one another. It is the kind of peace that makes us one another. 

This is the kind of peace that brings forth the Imago Dei, and an ability by God's spirit to see that and to walk in that, the image of God in every person. Our world, our nation, our cities, our neighborhoods, they're hurting, they're broken. They're divided in so many ways because of sin and the effects of sin. And God's answer, what God says, is the hope in that is Christ in you. That's what Colossians 1 tells us. The hope for the nations, the hope for change, the hope for transformation is Christ in you, church, the hope of glory. That's the invitation of God to us as people. To allow that gospel to be so rooted in us to receive that gospel, and to proclaim that gospel. For that gospel to transform us, and for that gospel through us to transform our world.