Who Invited Sarah?

Happy Wednesday everyone! This is part two of my thoughts on The Bible Project series Image of God.

Picking up from last week, we discussed perfection and bliss. In the Christian narrative, Genesis shows a state of bliss that we disrupted. Still, God promises to restore it in heaven. In Hebrew thought, perfection means completeness, yet Genesis is just the beginning. The story progresses as God connects with us through Jesus, Thee image of God, emphasizing our partnership with Him.

Expanding on this, Tim and Jon discussed how God has ultimately chosen not to live without humans. Kind of a cool thought, that we rebelled against God and he still worked so hard to bring us back into intimate connection with him through Jesus. God wants to share his creations and love with us.

Westminster confession of faith and shorter catechism: A statement of faith of the Anglican Church of England after the reformation in the Catholic Church. A 33 chapter theological statement.

What is the chief purpose of humans? Why did God create us?

The answer in the catechism is that man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Has this created a culture where the purpose of Humans is to be bystanders? Is the purpose of humans in the bible just to worship and praise God?

I have mixed feelings about this. I believe that Genesis highlights a greater purpose God has for us, and Psalm 8 shows that humans are more than just bystanders. However, I also think our purpose includes spreading the Gospel, which involves praise and worship. But, I understand Tim and Jon’s perspective; it’s not a compelling singular purpose for everyone.

Yet you have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with your glory and majesty!

Psalm 8:5

According to the beginning of our origin story and literally on page 1 of the bible, we are invited to grow the “garden” with God and expand upon what He has already started in the image of Him. So then we come to what Tim and Jon suggest as a revision to the Westminster confession:

“The chief end of man is to represent or image God and to gratefully praise and honor God for giving us this responsibility, generosity and potential to take this world somewhere and to depend on Him for wisdom and guidance.”

I do agree that we are striving as humans to be the best representation of God that we can. Glorifying God and enjoying Him is a result of us fulfilling our calling to be a representation of God.

Okay, then they moved along to discussing the dangers of believing the bystander narrative. Tim and Jon discussed that with this view essentially the only time you are doing your divine purpose is when you are at church or reading your bible and praying etc. I believe that you can also glorify God in other ways besides those, but I understand the point they were making. A lot of what we give our time and energy in our day-to-day lives is not just these things 24/7. With their revised purpose statement our job, community, and activities fit into our divine purpose. We can represent God through these things. When you work, that is a sacred task. You don’t have to be at church to experience the divine. This brought up the conversation of the secular vs. sacred division. I am not super familiar with the intricacies of them. Here are their Oxford definitions.

sec·u·lar
/ˈsekyələr/
adjective
1. denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.

sa·cred
/ˈsākrəd/
adjective
1. connected with God or dedicated to a religious purpose and so  deserving veneration.

It seems useful to distinguish these two terms, but only to a degree. I find it interesting to consider the word “attitude” in the context of secularism. For me, if my goal is to honor and represent the image of the Lord, then everything I do—work, exercise, sleep, or spend time with friends—helps me achieve that purpose. Not sure if this makes sense, but to me it does. If my foundation is the Lord then everything I do I strive to do to glorify Him.

What does it mean to develop all of the parts of my life in a way that promotes Jesus’s teachings? I talked a little bit about this in one of my previous Wednesday posts, but I LOVE the idea of letting God shine through me. I want people to be able to look at my life and wonder why I am the way I am, why I am so blessed with an amazing community, why I have so much love in my heart, where my creativity comes from, and I want them to attribute it to God. I want to be so full of the Holy Spirit and God’s presence in everything I do that it is obvious that I am not just living for the sake of myself. Now this is hard to do, but I am truly trying to do this in everything I choose to do, even if it’s just in small ways sometimes and big ways in other times.

Now with this comes the realization that the Kingdom of God is not fully here and we cannot bring it about on our own. As flawed humans, knowing the right thing to do is not enough, and some will still not choose it. This brings us to the topic of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What do we learn about good in the Bible before we encounter the concept of the knowledge of good and evil being inaccessible to humans? Good is used to describe how God feels about his creation. To understand good, we must also recognize what is not good. The tree symbolizes God’s wisdom in knowing what is best. The story suggests that humans will face choices where they must rely on God’s understanding of good and bad instead of their own.

Interesting tidbit: Sacred trees in the presence of gods is a motif in ancient Babylonian literature. (I know nothing about this, but thought it was cool that they mentioned it)

The last podcast of this series was all about glorifying God. What is the biblical vision of how humans bring glory to God? Essentially they dove into a study of glory and what ways humans can glorify God.

The Hebrew word for glory is kavod.

Kavod: noun glory, heavy, honor

This word is used, a majority of the time, to describe someone’s honor or presence in the bible. Most often it is used to describe God.

And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of the glory (kavod) of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the mountain top.

Exodus 24:17

Then all the uses of kavod are connected in the book of Isaiah.

and one called out to another and said, ” Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is full of his glory (kavod).”

Isaiah 6:3

All creation reflects God’s kavod, meaning that everything around Him is for His glory. Additionally, since God grants kavod to humans, which can mean reputation, is it reasonable to think that the kavod given to us is part of the image of God that we are meant to represent?

Okay now here comes the verb for the word kavod.

Kaved: verb to speak or act in a way that brings kavod to someone.

As humans, our existence is meant to point to God. Biblical worship is setting aside moments of saying out loud how remarkable God is. I love how they used Psalms 71:8, basically saying that brings us full circle back to the image of God. We image God when we rule on God’s behalf in a way that brings honor to the creator and in doing this we glorify God.

My mouth is filled with Your praise And with Your glory all day long

Psalms 71:8

These last two weeks have been full of learning about things on a level that I feel at times I cannot comprehend. However, I love the challenge of interpreting and expanding my knowledge of things I have never thought about before. I have like 39 and counting more series to get through and they are all longer than this one. I hope to continue to feel inspired to learn more about the Bible and God as I listen.

Next week’s series is on Wisdom and is 7 episodes so I will consider splitting it if I need.

Happy Wednesday! I truly appreciate you taking the time to read this!