✟ The Tri-Point Times ✟ January/February 2022

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27

The Bible begins with these incredible words, “In the beginning God created …” And later in the first chapter of Genesis (as you can see above) the Holy Word says, “So God created man in his own image ... male and female he created them.” The five words that begin the entire Biblical account, and the fourteen words later in that account, record the origin of life, and just how precious life is to God. These are pretty simple words, words anyone can understand. And these words reveal an important and precious truth. If one removes these words out of the record of the origin of life then the remaining account from Genesis to Revelation reads in a much different way.

These words are so important because they reveal to us who the Creator of everything that there has ever been and ever will be, who He is, and what He has done. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for created is (barah) and this verb means to “create, shape, or form.” In the creation of all things, and especially of man, we see that God was intimately involved in the work of creation and that He sees it all as precious – because He created it and it is all His.

The Biblical record and account also makes it very clear that among all that God created, the man and the woman, this is humans, hold a particularly unique and special place in creation, and in the heart of God. For all the rest of “the heavens and earth” God spoke His Word and by the power of that Word all things were created. But for the creation of man, God “formed” or “shaped” that is God using His own hands, so to speak, to “form the man of dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7) Not only did God form the man from the dust, but then in a unique action God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). God breathed life, His gift of life, into the nostrils of the man He has formed. This sets man and woman apart from the beasts of field and fish and birds, and man is not an incidental or accidental product of some force of nature or process of evolution, chance and change. God is intimately involved in the creation of man and woman. And note, there is only man and woman (not 121 different genders … something for another article in the future).

If you doubt the personal connection that God has with every human being consider that the Psalmist writes, “It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.” (Psalm 100:3) Or, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.” (Psalm 139:13) Or the Lord tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you …” (Jeremiah 1:5) These words show how personal and how intimate the creation of man, and each of us, and all humans, is to God.

It then only follows then that man and woman, and people should love one another, if for no other reason than the fear of the Lord. We honor and we cherish human life because it is of God, and God honors and cherishes human life. When we hurt others, or when we kill or murder other humans by abortion or euthanasia, or hurt, kill or murder self in suicide we show that we do not fear or love that person or ourselves, but also that we don’t fear and love God. When we take the life of another, or our own life, regardless of how unwanted or sick or unproductive or bleak it may be, we take what is not ours to take and we tell God that His will is not going to be done … but our will is being done.

When we support human life and treat it with the dignity and respect it deserves as being given of God then we show our love for God, to Whom that life belongs; but we also show our love for that person, for their life. And we, certainly cannot forget that we not only belong to God by virtue of our creation, but we also need to always keep in mind that each person is precious to God by virtue of redemption as well.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This is redemption, God loving the whole world that He sends His own Son. Paul makes this abundantly clear in the book of Colossians, writing, “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Life is precious to God, and it need be precious to us for the sake of Jesus.

In Christ, Pas†or