[SPEAKER_00]: You are listening to audio from Citizens Church located in Plano, Texas for more information about this ministry or to give to this ministry Please visit citizenschurch.com
[SPEAKER_01]: For those of you who might be new, my name is Mike M, and I serve as the theological training minister here at Citizen's Church, and if you're not new, that's still true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Last time I preached, I mentioned that I just got back from sabbatical, and for a good chunk of my sabbatical this summer, I was in Korea with my wife and my three-year-old daughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I got some advice before traveling that it's a good idea to take a photo of your
[SPEAKER_01]: That way, if you get separated, you can show a photo of what she looks like and what she's wearing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just, you know, a picture from school from portrait day or some other acute picture that you have on your lock screen, but so that you can find her very quickly and what the way she looks and what she's wearing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you show it to someone, they can quickly say, oh, yeah, I have seen that girl in that purple dress with those pig tails, let's go find her.
[SPEAKER_01]: So just follow that away for a second.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to refer back to that a little while later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Last week, we started a new sermon series titled, Made.
[SPEAKER_01]: And our state of hope for this series is to recover a biblical anthropology, in other words, to learn again what it means to be human from God's Word.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the coming weeks, we're going to be looking at a variety of topics, a lot of different facets of what it means to be human in this age, in this era.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are made for work.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we are made for rest, that we are made for worship, that we are made for others and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a foundational concept that precedes all of these others.
[SPEAKER_01]: One that is the bedrock and the ground of all other theological concepts of what it means to be human.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: All people are made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So today, we're going to do a quick survey on the doctrine of the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The theological term for this doctrine is Amago Day.
[SPEAKER_01]: Say with me, Amago Day.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, that's just Latin for image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we haven't really learned anything yet, but it sounds really officially in Latin.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you say immago day instead of image of God, it sounds like you already know what you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to take a look at the immago day through three lenses, three lenses that Jamin introduced last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, God's design sends distortion in Christ's redemption.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to trace how the immago day functions in each one of these spheres.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, for me, again, is that the reason why the Amagode is so crucial is that it answers what are sometimes called the four questions of worldview.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, the question of origin, identity, purpose, and destiny.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where did we come from?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who and what are we?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the meaning of life?
[SPEAKER_01]: And where is this all going?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to take a look at different ways to answer this question, depending on what you say, what you say we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: So first, let's take a look at the first one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The image of God in God's design.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you got your Bible, go ahead and grab it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're just in Genesis chapter one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this might come as a surprise to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: The image of God, if you've been in church any amount of time, it's a pretty important and basic doctrine.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this phrase, the image of God, only ever appears in Genesis in the Old Testament, and never again.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even in Genesis, it only appears in three places.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chapter one, chapter five, and chapter nine.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only four verses about the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, we're gonna look at all three passages and all four verses.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, Genesis, chapter one.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the first chapter of Genesis, God calls fourth light.
[SPEAKER_01]: and orders the realms of existence, the skies, the seas, and the earth, and then he fills them up with birds, and fish, and animals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he creates them in a particular way, it says that there's a sort of rhythm to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says that God created them according to their kinds.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lavish riot of color and diversity that is the animal world is repeatedly created according to their kinds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after each act of creation, God looks upon his creation with approval and pleasure, and it says, and God saw that it was good.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for his final act of creation, there is a pattern break.
[SPEAKER_01]: He does not create a humanity according to its kind or to their kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Genesis 1, 26 and 27.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then God said, let us make man in our image.
[SPEAKER_01]: after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, verse 27, so God created man in his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Humanity in Genesis stands apart from all creation because while there are many kinds of
[SPEAKER_01]: and may kinds of birds, and may kinds of beasts, according to Genesis 1, there are not many kinds of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only one kind of human, the kind that is made in the image and likeness of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no other kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the first thing we learned about the Amago Day is that it indicates a special creation that's different from all other living things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what else does it mean to be made in the image of God?
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's take a look again at Genesis 1, 26.27.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let us make man in our image after our likeness.
[SPEAKER_01]: The word image here is the Hebrew word, Selam.
[SPEAKER_01]: And other than in Genesis, where it always refers to the image of God, it's only ever used in that context, in every other place that it appears.
[SPEAKER_01]: It always refers to a statue or a little figurine.
[SPEAKER_01]: a physical model.
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, number 33, 52.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you show drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images, sell them, and demolish all their high places.
[SPEAKER_01]: These images can also be called idle.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a different word in Hebrew.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this gives us a clue.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the ancient world, images or idols were set up to communicate something about the God that they imaged.
[SPEAKER_01]: like an owl for wisdom or a bull for strength, a lion for courage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every pagan God had some special superpower, some attribute that they idol needed to reflect.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here, the Bible says that humanity itself is created to represent or reflect or image God.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the God that we represent is not one among many.
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have a gimmick or a power.
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't just have one main attribute.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the true and living God has many, many, many attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the ways that theologians explain what it means to bear the image of God is that to bear the image of God is to bear God's communicable attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: and not his in communicable attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me define those.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a fancy way of saying that we are kind of like God but that we're not exactly like God.
[SPEAKER_01]: God's communicable attributes are things like love and justice, patience, mercy, wisdom, truthfulness, and holiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of what it means to be made in the image of God and the likeness of God is that He has granted us some measure of these attributes that He alone has supremely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And conversely, we're not God because we don't share in his in-communicable attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: See, sure, the attributes that God alone has.
[SPEAKER_01]: So God alone is omnipotent, all powerful.
[SPEAKER_01]: God alone is omniscient, all knowing.
[SPEAKER_01]: God alone is omnipresent everywhere, all at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: And only God is independently self-existent, uncreated, sovereign, eternal, unchangeable.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's part of what it means to image God.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's a second reason for the word cellam here that is quite deliberate and subversive.
[SPEAKER_01]: The language here is chosen quite on purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the language of image and likeness was widely known and widely used in the ancient Mesopotamian world, but only ever of kings.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's a quote.
[SPEAKER_01]: from a letter to the Assyrian king, S. Arhadon, these are written, this is a letter from his priests.
[SPEAKER_01]: The father of my Lord, the king, is the very image of Bell.
[SPEAKER_01]: The king, the Lord of the lands is the image of Shamaish.
[SPEAKER_01]: O king of the inhabited world, you are the image of Marduk.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are three different gods that are being invoked here, and the king is exercising his authority and in each of these realms, and he represents whichever god is relevant to whatever power he's exercising.
[SPEAKER_01]: Likewise, in Egypt, the Pharaohs were called the image of Amun, the likeness of Ra.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to be made in the image of God is to reflect the glory of that God, and then to claim the authority and the power and the privilege of that God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason why the Pharaoh must be obeyed is because he alone is made in the image of Ra.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to disobey Pharaoh is to disobey Ra.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so here, the Bible deliberately turns that cultural language on its head.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's look at Genesis 127 again, and break it down line by line.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a three-line poem.
[SPEAKER_01]: So God created man, Adam, in his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this very first line of this three-line poem, the Bible says that all humanity, man here, does not mean male.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is talking about humanity, mankind.
[SPEAKER_01]: All humanity is made in the image of God, not just kings.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the image of God he created him.
[SPEAKER_01]: This reinforces that it's not just humanity as a total whole in general, but that every individual is made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Male and female he created them.
[SPEAKER_01]: This sentence is unparalleled in any ancient culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bible specifies that both men and women are made in the image of God corporately.
[SPEAKER_01]: The unity and diversity of animals is found in their being made according to their kind, but the unity and diversity of people is rooted in our being made in the very image of the living God.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this language is so simple, it's so familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've been in church, you've heard this before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so familiar.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the danger is that we can miss how profound how world-shaking this language was in the ancient world that all people,
[SPEAKER_01]: that every single person who has ever lived and whoever will live, whether male or female or young or old or rich or poor or weak or strong regards to talent or ability or ethnicity or even religion or morality, all people are made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you believe that?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the foundation of everything we're going to be talking about over the next few weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, what the Bible is doing here is subverting and repurposing cultural language that was only meant for elites and aiming at all people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because all people are made in the image of the living God, all people are intrinsically worthy of dignity and respect honor without regard for any ability or status or achievement.
[SPEAKER_01]: According to the Bible, human worth is received, not achieved, but there's more.
[SPEAKER_01]: The result of being made like this, to be made in God's image, isn't just a sit back and relax like a king,
[SPEAKER_01]: Verse 28, God bless them.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the content of this blessing.
[SPEAKER_01]: God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subduate and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds, of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: This command here is not a chore of being handed out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a blessing.
[SPEAKER_01]: People are invited into the creation work of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: to bring water out of chaos, to bring flourishing out of emptiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: The royal prerogative of God is being shared with all of his image bearers, to rule and to reign.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not just for office holders, not just for royalty or nobility, for stay at home dads and stay at home moms, the unemployed, even little children, the sick, the elderly, every single person,
[SPEAKER_01]: No one is disqualified from this mandate that all people who are created in the image of God are created to exercise God's delegated authority over the cosmos, the entire universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not as oppressive lords, but as servant leaders, to serve the way that God loves and lavishes his generosity on his creation, to bless the way that God blesses,
[SPEAKER_01]: and to bring flourishing in order the way God has done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And God's pronouncement at the end of his work of creation is this, Genesis 131.
[SPEAKER_01]: And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not God buttering us up to give us a participation trophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the objective judgment of an omniscient God.
[SPEAKER_01]: who sees all and knows all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he sees the creation of humanity, it bumps the creation up from good to very good.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the first place we see the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second place is in Genesis chapter five, verse one and three.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the book of the generations of Adam of mankind.
[SPEAKER_01]: When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Male and female, he created them and he blessed them and named them man when they were created.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here we see again that man is made here in the likeness of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The word image and likeness are interchangeable.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't mean two different things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Verse 3, here's a new thing, when Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here again, it's recated that all men and all women are made in the likeness of God, but a new can't bit of information is here, that Adam fathered a son in his own likeness after his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: This gives us an angle that the image of God is like a family resemblance, that looking at Seth should be like looking at Adam.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is not the same as looking at Adam, but there's a spitting image, it's similar.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to be made in the image of God, means that we are to reflect and represent both who God is and what God does.
[SPEAKER_01]: That we pattern our lives after both the character of God and the activity of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are created to literally image God so that looking at us feels a little bit like looking at God because there's a family resemblance, a relational correlation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Outside of Genesis, the closest idea that captures this in the Bible is found in Exodus 19 where God's people are called to be royal priests.
[SPEAKER_01]: These two words have a directionality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Royal is the idea of subduing and having dominion.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a downward kingly action that we saw in Genesis 1.
[SPEAKER_01]: to reflect the blessings of God, the goodness of his rule and his reign and his ordering downwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the word priest is reflecting upwards to God, the glory and the praises and the prayers of all creation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Blessing goes down, glory goes up.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so so far, this is good.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing bad here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Really running children of the king, mirrors reflecting down, down with blessing, glory up great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, third and last reference.
[SPEAKER_01]: Genesis 9.6.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for God made man in his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this is a little bit, this is totally different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the vibe of this verse is like so different from the others.
[SPEAKER_01]: The others were celebratory and this is about murder and capital punishment.
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the last time the image of God is referenced in the Old Testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here we move into the second movement, sins distortion of the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's two things to point out from this passage.
[SPEAKER_01]: First one's obvious, something is going wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened to very good?
[SPEAKER_01]: For those of you who've been in church, you know, the answer is that something happened between Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter nine.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Genesis 3, the first two image bears, Adam and Eve, disobey God, instead of just being content to be the image of God, they desire to be God, to be like God himself, and their rebellion broke something deep inside our very human nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they were a belly and spread to their children, chapter four, and then to the entire world.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is God's appraisal of humanity in Genesis chapter six, just before He sends a worldwide flood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Genesis 65, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, this is not God trying to shame us or make us feel sorry for ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the objective judgment of an omniscient God.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to point out that we went from very good to wicked, but there are five aspects of wickedness that are highlighted in this judgment before the flood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wickedness is great as the intensity of our wickedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Next, it's every intention is wicked.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the totality of our wickedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Next, the wickedness is the thoughts of our heart, that's the internal nature of our wickedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, the wickedness comes from inside of our heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's sourced from inside.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not an external influence.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't say the devil made me do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want it to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: forth that it was only wickedness, only evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the exclusivity of our wickedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, continually, this is the constancy of our wickedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so God's judgment on mankind is that we went from very good to being intensely, totally, internally, exclusively, and constantly evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened?
[SPEAKER_01]: Something has changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the question is, yes, okay, something is deeply broken in us, and if you are honest with yourself, you know that there's something wrong with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one has lied to you more than you.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one has broken more promises to you than yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one has let you down more than you, you know that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if that's true, then have we lost the image of God?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, Genesis 9, 6, whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall His blood be shed for God made man in His own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a pronouncement to two murderers about murderers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even fallen people, even murderers who are only evil continually are still made.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the image and after the likeness of God, and still have value and worth and dignity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in this verse describing the penalty of the most heinous crime, God is telling us how much he values every person who's made in his image.
[SPEAKER_01]: I invite, imagine I invite someone to come over to my house and they walk around my house and they see I have dozens and dozens of pictures of my little girl and they methodically go
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I'm like, hey, stop, don't do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're like, why are you getting upset?
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't harmed your daughter at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are just photos.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a big deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you can understand why I would be upset.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way you treat the image tells me what you think about the person in the image.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just a picture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus uses this very idea in Matthew 25 when he talks about the people he will commend because I was hungry and you gave me food I was thirsty and you gave me drink.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a stranger and you welcomed me I was naked and you clothe me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was sick and I was in prison and you visited me and there's others He said you never visited me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You never fed me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You never clothe me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You never saw me and they said when when Lord when did we ever see you do those things?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says truly I say to you Whatever you did to the least of these you did to me
[SPEAKER_01]: The way you treat my image is the way you treat me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know how you feel about me by the way you treat people.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are still made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if that image is distorted.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what does it mean that the image is distorted but not lost?
[SPEAKER_01]: How can that be?
[SPEAKER_01]: And how did that happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: To look at that, I think the easiest place to go for me anyway is Roman's one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It explains exactly how this happened and I wanna re-contextualize a very familiar passage.
[SPEAKER_01]: in light of Genesis 1, let's read carefully.
[SPEAKER_01]: Paul is speaking about people who don't have the Bible and who are living in sin.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Romans chapter 1 verse 18 through 20.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who buy their unrighteousness suppressed the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the people who say Lord Lord, when do we do those things?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why, verse 19?
[SPEAKER_01]: For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since a creation of the world in the things that have been made.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they are without excuse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Usually this is applied to the created world and how there's order and all these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But primarily what Paul, I think Paul is getting here is that everywhere you go, if there are people, the image of God exists.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you're around the image of God, what you learn is that every human culture, values, patience, and kindness, and integrity, and honesty, and courage, and loyalty, fairness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to read your Bible to know these things because God's image is everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: God's communicable attributes are fully on display, everywhere people are.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it says in Romans 2 that the law is written on the hearts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, even when someone is the opposite, and they're cruel and impatient to me, and don't reveal these attributes, well, then I learn to value kindness and patience even more and long for and crave it.
[SPEAKER_01]: God's character has been understood, both positively and negatively, ever since the creation of the world, because that's when his image was placed in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one has an excuse, so that won't happen, verse 22.
[SPEAKER_01]: Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the moral God for images resembling moral man and birds and animals and creepy things.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the distortion here.
[SPEAKER_01]: We exchanged the glory of God for alternative images.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what Paul's saying here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And instead of imaging God's heavenly glory, we are all inclined instead to reflect earthly things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead of reflecting God's image, it's like taking, we had photos of God and we cut his face out and replaced it with a picture of a stack of cash or prestige or influence or beauty or comfort or any other thing that we want instead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tim Keller put this way, what is the thing that you've been waiting for so that you can finally, so that life will finally be worth living?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is that thing that you're waiting for?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can finally start your life?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what is that thing that if you lost it,
[SPEAKER_01]: would make it so that life would feel like it's not worth living.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever that thing is, that's your God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And all of us have replaced and destroyed the image of God with whatever these replacement images are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Climbing to be wise, we became fools and exchanged the glory of God for images, resembling mortal man and birds and animals creeping things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We like Adam and Eve are tempted to swap our boring, communicable attributes of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control for God's in communicable attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like going back to my daughter photo story, I took pictures of her imagine for some crazy reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't like the way she looks.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think she's a glier something.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just an example in real life.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think she's a cutest that I will fight you for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's just say for the sake of this illustration, I'm a crazy person, and I don't think she's cute.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I begin to exchange her image for other ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I either photoshop her face for something else, or I use AI to change her into some cartoon character, or celebrity's face that I prefer, that I wish she was looked like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm bored of her face, I think I can fix it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I go through, and I methodically change every single picture that exists of her to something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so far, so creepy, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But yes, worse, and then I come to you and I say, hey, please help me find my girl and I show you a picture and it's a picture of Ferrari.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, sorry, can you help me find my daughter?
[SPEAKER_01]: She's a world to me, it's a picture of a mansion beach from property.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, no, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's a picture of me for some reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the use of an image that doesn't image?
[SPEAKER_01]: God in His grace has maintained our value and our status as image bears, but we have rejected our calling to image what we bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's so many versions of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, if I always need to be reachable, then I see what we crave God's omnipresence.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I always need to be in the know, either by reading the news or listening to the gossip that I'm craving God's omniscience.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I get engaged when I'm not in control that I'm craving God's omnipotence, but the most common swap we make nowadays,
[SPEAKER_01]: is for one of God's stranger attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called a SAT.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you came here wondering about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But God's a SAT is his independence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The God is self-existent, undefineable.
[SPEAKER_01]: God alone can say, I am who I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: But our culture tells us that we can say that about ourselves, that we determine our own origin, our own identity, our own meaning, our own destiny, that we are the captains of our souls.
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to say no one can tell me who I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am who I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: I decide for myself, I create myself, I define myself, I am self-existent.
[SPEAKER_01]: We exchange the truth of God for your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have edited the image.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me ask you this.
[SPEAKER_01]: We really want to have you felt this.
[SPEAKER_01]: like in your heart, the confusion of wanting a higher life, wanting a noble life, wanting a change life, wanting a transformed life, but being, but feeling like you're stuck inside yourself, unable to rise out of your own habits and your own addictions and own weakness, your own cycles of insanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're felt stuck like that, what hope is there for images that don't image?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do with them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I said, those are the only places that the word image of God appears at all in the Old Testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the good news is that there are many, many, many more references to the image of God in the New Testament.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way it's used in New Testament is quite different.
[SPEAKER_01]: The literal good news is that the New Testament is filled with a new idea of the image of God in a different sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the New Testament, almost every time, almost every time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The image of God appears, it's not referring to people in general, but to one person in particular.
[SPEAKER_01]: Clashions 1, 15, 13, 19.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation for by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible with a thrones or demeans or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him and he is before all things.
[SPEAKER_01]: and in him all things hold together, and he is the head of the body, the church, he is the beginning, the first born from the dead, and in everything he might be pre-eminent.
[SPEAKER_01]: For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus Christ alone is the unblemished image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hebrews 1, 3, Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the disciples said to Jesus, show us the Father, it will be enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus alone could answer something that no human could ever say without it being blasphemy.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, whoever has seen me has already seen the Father.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now these two passages and collocians and Hebrews, if you know church, you probably knew I was gonna go here, their famous for saying Jesus is the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I want to point out to some of you who are very familiar with this,
[SPEAKER_01]: Because even you can learn something, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is what's after, what does Jesus do as the image of God?
[SPEAKER_01]: What comes after, it says that he's the image of God, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, the imaging God is not just imaging what God is like or how God is, but how God acts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Colossians 120, this is the verse after all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the pre-eminent for in him all the fullness of God who's pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things.
[SPEAKER_01]: whether on earth or in heaven making peace by the blood of his cross.
[SPEAKER_01]: He does not say, all you guys are failures, look at me, sucks to be you, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: What he does with his power, with his authority, with his kingly right, is he lays down his life to reconcile all of the rebel image bears who come to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was one, three.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says, he's the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it says, after making purification for sins, he did this through his death on the cross.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat down at the right hand of majesty on high.
[SPEAKER_01]: What Jesus does is he subdues and he rules and he reigns the world as Adam failed to do, not by force or coercion or by the sword, but by washing of feet and sacrificing of himself, by his life and death and resurrection, making purification to reconcile rebel images.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are so many of these New Testament references to Christ, I'm not gonna get time to go through them all, but what I do wanna point out is how so many of them
[SPEAKER_01]: promises, let me just read a couple, do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self in his practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his creator.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ephesians 4, 23, be renewed in the spirit of your minds and put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, Romans 829, for those who before knew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the first born among many brothers, Second Corinthians 3, 18, and we all with unveil face beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.
[SPEAKER_01]: from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who's a spirit.
[SPEAKER_01]: The imitation of broken images, that Jesus extends, is to come and be renewed and restored and conformed and transformed to Christ who is the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stop trying to decide who you are and let God speak over you with his truth and his grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is so important because I said in the beginning there are these four questions that are asked by a worldview origin, identity, purpose, and destiny.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's one way to answer it.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is our origin?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you are a product of blind chance.
[SPEAKER_01]: You came from nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just random molecules colliding.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your identity?
[SPEAKER_01]: You are a very specialized bacteria.
[SPEAKER_01]: or your biological machine piloted by a bag of fluid that thinks it's alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your purpose and meaning to propagate your DNA until the heat death of the universe and everything is deleted?
[SPEAKER_01]: And what is your destiny?
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You came from nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll go to nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no point to anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other answer to the Bible gives us what is our origin?
[SPEAKER_01]: We are created in the image of God, not just some generic abstract God, but God who is a loving father, a faithful husband, a generous, gentle kind, sacrificing king, a serving priest, a truth-telling prophet, a shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there is a God who knows you and has known you since before you were born, since
[SPEAKER_01]: That is your origin.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your identity?
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not just random.
[SPEAKER_01]: God sees you, God numbers the hairs on your head.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knows every single person.
[SPEAKER_01]: He watches over every single person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are made in his image, in his likeness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Regardless of whether you were aware of that or deny that or running away from that or running towards that or struggling in that, that's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what is the meaning and the purpose of your life?
[SPEAKER_01]: That is not found in the first image of God that Adam had, but in the second image of God, which Christ bears.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we talked about this last year, but the purpose of life is found in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The meaning of life is this, that we would look like Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we would think like Jesus, that we would love like Jesus, that we would feel like Jesus, and that we would act like Jesus, that we would love to Lord our God, with all of our mind, and all of our heart, and all our soul, and all of our strength, that we would love our neighbor as our self, that we would look like Jesus, that is the purpose of your life, whether you know it or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what is the destiny?
[SPEAKER_01]: The destiny of those who are being conformed in the image of Christ is to be resurrected and reunited.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not to fly away and play Harps and Bugs Bunny heaven, but that you will stand on a renewed heaven and a renewed earth in a physical body.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you do meaningful work, not toil or labor?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the concept of the image of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I want to close with one last quote, because this is one of my favorite things I've ever read, Jayman showed this to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna have to include it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this is Christopher Walken.
[SPEAKER_01]: In light of these different options, how are we to position the biblical account of the image of God?
[SPEAKER_01]: One important point to notice is the image of God in the English and Genesis 1 is not extensively defined.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hence the acres of forest fell to provide the books in which it's meaning is debated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only time the Bible fills the term with positive and explicit content is in relation to Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever else being the image of God might mean, and whatever differences there might be between the image of God and creation, the image of God and redemption is clear for New Testament believers, being the image of God is about being like Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's just the basic estimation what I just said.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is my favorite sentence I've almost ever read outside the Bible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Christ is the only normal human being to have ever lived in His character.
[SPEAKER_01]: defines perfect humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, I want you to be able to breathe a sigh of relief.
[SPEAKER_01]: What it means to be made in the image of God and to need a restoration of the image of God is that Christ is the only normal human being to have ever lived and is character defines perfect humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're not feeling normal today, welcome to Citizens Church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dear God, we blow lie on you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Lord, we desire to see you.
[SPEAKER_01]: God, that we would know that we are who you say, that we are, that we don't determine reality you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet you love us and you call us sons and daughters and you make us in your image and you invite us or into your beautiful work to dance with your creation.
[SPEAKER_01]: God, I just pray that you would help us to know who we are in light of you and more deeply, that we would know who we are in light of Christ in our need and in your beauty.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, open the eyes of our hearts today in Jesus' name.