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Mark Talbot

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Herausgeber: Crossway
Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
Serie: Suffering and the Christian Life
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Since creation's fall, suffering has been part of earthly life. At times, it can feel overwhelming, even for believers who trust in the Lord. The Suffering and the Christian Life series provides help and hope from Scripture for those who are suffering. In volume 2 of this series, Mark Talbot explores Scripture's account of the origin, spread, and eventual end of suffering, giving Christians the perspective they need to get through life's difficult times. He encourages readers to see themselves within the Bible's storyline (creation, rebellion, redemption, and consummation), finding the courage to endure and taking comfort that God is at work for their good.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

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“This may just be the finest treatment of biblical-theological perspectives on the nature, significance, and purpose of suffering that I have ever read. The exegetical roots of Talbot’s work run deep, his theological reflections are profound, his grasp of wide-ranging secondary literature is extraordinary, and his pastoral passion is transparent. We pray that this book will challenge, comfort, and inspire many whose experiences have landed them in the swamp of confusion and despair, and that it will be a helpful resource for those whom God calls to walk—or swim—with those in this state.”

Daniel I. Block, Gunther H. Knoedler Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Wheaton College; author, The Triumph of Grace and For the Glory of God

“Suffering is the greatest mystery of life, and God’s people have struggled with it since the days of Job. There is much about it that we shall never be able to understand, but Christians can know that whatever happens to us, we are children of God, and he will not allow us to fall away from his loving care. That is where we must begin, and the Scriptures offer us a rich resource for establishing our faith on a firm foundation. Mark Talbot takes us where we need to be.”

Gerald Bray, Research Professor of Divinity, History, and Doctrine, Beeson Divinity School; author, God Is Love and God Has Spoken

“Mark Talbot operates like a calm, rational medic checking his patients. His careful, clear accounts of the Bible’s teaching of suffering, his case that human suffering arises from the race’s fallenness—its rebellion—looks forward to the redemption and consummation that await those who repent and put their faith in Christ. Mark shows himself sensitive to the Bible’s details, its modes and idioms, and to how we humans bear our suffering, cataloging the perplexity, frustration, and futility of human life, the litany of human sin and woe, that comes from our sin. The book forms an armory for the Christian and for his family and friends, outfitting us to endure our suffering through childbearing and motherhood, through the duty and drudgery of daily work, through lives cut short and old age, and through wealth and its loss. The careful reader will want more and more of Mark’s unique books.”

Paul Helm, former Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, King’s College London

“None of us make it through this life without seeking to make sense of its inherent suffering. To help us in this pursuit, Mark Talbot takes us to the central story that helps us make sense of the suffering in our individual stories, the story of creation impacted by the curse because of sin. With insight and analysis of the original goal, original order, and original goodness of creation, he helps us to see not only how the impact of the curse has disrupted that order and goodness, but also what God is doing through Christ to redeem, restore, and bring us into the life of goodness and glory he intends to share with us forever.”

Nancy Guthrie, author, Even Better than Eden

“Mark Talbot joins together what can be easy to separate when thinking about suffering: consistently insightful investigation of the Bible (especially Genesis 1–3), clear-headed reflection on the human condition, and a deep tenderness toward actual sufferers. The way in which he folds together the stories we tell about our own lives with Scripture’s story was especially gratifying to read. Mark also manages to write about difficult subjects without ever being difficult to understand—he carries the reader along beautifully. I learned a lot from this book, and I recommend it highly.”

Eric Ortlund, Lecturer in Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew, Oak Hill College; author, Suffering Wisely and Well

“We need to avoid two mistakes: seeing our lives as pointless or thinking we’ll win an Oscar for best director. Wheelchair-bound Mark Talbot shows with soaring spirit that we have important roles as supporting actors in a majestic drama of creation, rebellion, suffering, and redemption plotted out by God.”

Marvin Olasky, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute; author, The Tragedy of American Compassion and Lament for a Father

“With this volume, Mark Talbot continues what looks set to be a tour de force on Christianity and the suffering Christian. In his first book, he pressed the existential power and importance of individual narratives of pain and anguish. Here he steps back and sets those stories within the larger framework of the great narrative of God’s dealings with his people. If it is true that every story of human suffering has its unique pain for those involved, Talbot demonstrates with characteristic conviction and authority that all redemption from suffering must be understood in terms of the unique revelation of God in Christ.”

Carl Trueman, Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies, Grove City College

“This second volume in Mark Talbot’s tetralogy on suffering is a masterful handling of the vexing and deeply personal problem of suffering in the life of the Christian. Talbot the philosopher shows his skill as a biblical theologian by situating suffering within the grand sweep of the Bible’s fourfold storyline: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Both elegant and wise, as well as judicious and kind, this is biblical and theological reflection at its very best—the kind of thoughtful, mature analysis that feeds the people of God. There are treasures to be found on every page—and, as a bonus, in many of the endnotes! Christian, here you have a sure and steady guide. Take and read—and learn from someone who has thought more deeply and scripturally about suffering than anyone I know. Highly recommended!”

Todd Wilson, President, Center for Pastor Theologians; author, Real Christian; coauthor, The Pastor Theologian

“One of the greatest difficulties about enduring a time of suffering or sorrow is that it so often seems purposeless. It hurts so much and appears to accomplish so little. The path to peace is to set our suffering in the context of a wider story that God is telling in and through us—a story that Mark Talbot describes so well in the pages of this precious book.”

Tim Challies, author, Seasons of Sorrow

Books in the Suffering in the Christian Life series:

Give Me Understanding That I May Live: Situating Our Suffering within God’s Redemptive Plan (2022)

When the Stars Disappear: Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture (2020)

Give Me Understanding That I May Live

Situating Our Suffering within God’s Redemptive Plan

Suffering and the Christian Life

Volume 2

Mark Talbot

Give Me Understanding That I May Live: Situating Our Suffering within God’s Redemptive Plan

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Appendix: “Why God?” is used with permission. © Herbert McCabe 2007, Faith Within Reason, Continuum Publishing, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: Bridgeman Images

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked NAB are from the New American Bible, revised edition, © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, DC and are used by permission. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335–6746-9ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6749-0 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6747-6Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6748-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Talbot, Mark R., author.

Title: Give me understanding that I may live : situating our suffering within God’s redemptive plan / Mark Talbot.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Series: Suffering and the Christian life ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Suffering in the Bible. | Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Bible—Theology.

Classification: LCC BS680.S854 T348 2022 (print) | LCC BS680.S854 (ebook) DDC 231/.8—dc23/eng/20220120

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055039

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055040

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-05-23 10:36:01 AM

For Cindy

The abyss and the light of the world,

Time’s need and the craving for eternity,

Vision, event, and poetry:

Was and is dialogue with you.1

1. Martin Buber’s dedication to his wife of his book Zwiesprache in 1932.

Contents

Prologue: Picking Up the Thread

1 Creation: When Everything Was “Very Good”

2 Rebellion: The Cause of All Our Suffering

3 Suffering: What It Is and How It Affects Us

4 Redemption and Consummation: What Suffering Should Prompt Us to Seek

Epilogue: Give Me Understanding That I May Live

Acknowledgments

More Advice for My Readers

Appendix: “Why God?” by Herbert McCabe

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Prologue

Picking Up the Thread

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith,

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand,

and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings,

knowing that suffering produces endurance,

and endurance produces character,

and character produces hope,

and hope does not put us to shame,

because God’s love has been poured into our hearts

through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Romans 5:1–5

A central claim of When the Stars Disappear: Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture, the first volume in this series, is that we understand our lives as stories. Stories help us orient ourselves in life by placing us somewhere on a trajectory that has a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, we need two different kinds of stories to give our lives their full meaning: a particular (or personal) story and a general one. The particular story is about what our individual lives mean. Each of us needs to be able to tell a story that orients us to the particular people, places, and things around us, describing where we have come from, where we are, and where we think we can go so that we can project ourselves into hopeful futures where we can get what we want and need. The general story answers questions about what human life as such means. For instance, are we just chance products of blind, meaningless cosmic forces, or have we been created by God to fulfill some specific purpose? Is human life about nothing but making money and pursuing our own personal happiness, or is it about believing and obeying God and caring for others? Metaphorically, these two kinds of stories set the stars that must guide us in place, enabling us to navigate life’s otherwise uncharted seas. These “stars” are the deep and firm convictions we rely on to tell us who we are and what sort of world we live in. They include convictions about who our parents are, what we take to be deeply meaningful, what we take to be worth doing, whether there is a God, and whether Jesus Christ is God’s Son who redeems us from our slavery to sin.1

Suffering tends to challenge our stories, prompting us to question whether the stories we accept are true. Even a mild headache can make me doubt a small part of my personal story—the part that assumes that in a few hours I will be relatively pain-free. Profound suffering may threaten to blot out completely the light of the stars that are guiding us by making us doubt the general story we have accepted about what human life means.

When the Stars Disappear examined the personal stories of Naomi, Job, Jeremiah, and some of the psalmists in order to help those of us who are suffering not lose hope that God is with us and working in and through our suffering for our good. Give Me Understanding That I May Live: Situating Our Suffering within God’s Redemptive Plan steps back to look at the general Christian story that explains why there is any suffering, why there is so much of it, and what will finally, gloriously, be true for those who confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead (see Rom. 10:9).

When suffering overwhelms us, it is hard to focus on anything else. Yet often our focus needs to shift. As we saw in When the Stars Disappear, when God finally spoke to Job, he did not commiserate with him. He didn’t answer Job’s questions or address his complaints. Instead, he shifted Job’s focus to the world’s creation, accusing Job of obscuring his plans “by words without knowledge” (Job 38:2). He then battered Job with questions, exposing Job’s ignorance and impotence while celebrating his own knowledge, power, and dominion over all things, including his dominion over wicked human beings and the world’s most terrifying creatures.2

By shifting Job’s focus, God enabled Job to gain some perspective on his suffering. What had seemed to Job in his suffering to be life’s full story was not in fact the full story. Job came to see that the full story involved much more than his suffering. This led him to confess that he had spoken of things that were, in fact, too wonderful for him to understand (see Job 40:1–5; 42:1–6).

This volume tells the full Christian story, “the true story of the whole world.”1 That story has four parts: creation, rebellion, redemption, and consummation. Scripture considers each part, and our coming to understand the main features of each is crucial if we are to live the lives for which God has made us and to which he calls us.

Just as our high schooler in When the Stars Disappear made sense of her life by embracing a storyline that aimed at her becoming a primary-care physician,3 so all of us make sense of our lives by the stories we tell. And none of us cook up these stories by ourselves. We learn to tell stories by others telling us stories that help us make sense of our lives.2

Even very young children understand that their personal stories are anchored in the past. They ask questions like, “Who made me?” “Who was your daddy, Grandma?” and “What did you do when you were a little girl, Mommy?” The answers they are given set some of the metaphorical stars that guide them in place. It is the same for us all. In particular, having an answer to the question, “How have human beings come to be?” is essential to answering other questions like, “Why are we here?” and “What does life mean?”

Whether we believe that God has created us to fulfill a specific role in creation or that we have evolved entirely by chance should make all the difference in how we think about ourselves now. A little girl’s “Who made me?” expanded to “How have we”—meaning all of us—“come to be?” is one of life’s most crucial questions. Moreover, knowing whether our ancestors made good or bad choices and whether their lives went well or poorly can be crucial for understanding ourselves. Learning that my grandfather was an alcoholic who left my grandmother very early in my father’s life tells me something important about my father’s history that inevitably has shaped his relationship with me.

In Scripture, God answers life’s most fundamental questions, helping us get our stories straight. As Luther recognized, the opening chapters of Genesis are “certainly the foundation of the whole of Scripture,” providing a true account of our beginnings.3 He found nothing more fascinating than the Bible’s first book. Of course, “curiosity about our beginnings,” as Henri Blocher notes, “continues to haunt the human race.”4 It accounts for the current flood of books about human beginnings, especially from those who deny divine creation.5

The question, “How have we come to be?” is answered by the story of creation in Genesis 1–2. The question, “Did our first parents make good or bad choices?” is answered in Genesis 3 where we are told that they chose to rebel against God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The consequences of that most disastrous of all choices started to become clear immediately. They became horrifyingly apparent in Genesis 4.

Even Christians may find themselves doubting God’s goodness or power when they become aware of some kinds or degrees of suffering. They can find themselves asking, How is suffering like this possible if there is a perfectly good, all-powerful God? Wouldn’t such a God prevent such suffering?4 Those doubts require us to consider the first two parts of the Christian story. We have to understand creation and rebellion in order to understand that while nothing that happens falls out of God’s hands, he is at the same time not to be blamed for the world’s suffering, either for its first appearance or for its persistence.

My first chapter considers creation, emphasizing the world’s perfection as God created it. Chapter 2 considers rebellion, telling how suffering entered the world. Chapter 3 explains what suffering is and how it affects us. And then chapter 4 begins considering redemption and consummation, the story’s third and fourth parts. Our redemption and creation’s ultimately complete restoration at the consummation of all things are the great gifts that suffering should lead us to seek. The epilogue returns to stressing how crucial it is for us to keep in mind all four parts of “the true story of the whole world”—and especially its first and final parts. If in your reading of my first two chapters you find yourself wondering why I am not immediately engaging the topic of suffering, reading the epilogue may help you see that we need to be concerned about much more than our suffering if we are to live the lives to which God is calling us.

Sometimes when we are perplexed about what should be our next step in life, we seek wisdom. In Scripture, the basic meaning of chokhmah, the Hebrew word for wisdom, is “skill”—as Allen Ross puts it, its various grammatical forms “can be applied to commonplace things in life that require skill,5 or to the religious life that may also be described as living life skillfully.”6 Two Hebrew words for understanding are often paired with its word for wisdom (see, e.g., Prov. 3:13–15, 18). Bin involves gaining the insight necessary to live wisely or skillfully, and tebunah the know-how necessary actually to live such a life.7 In the final analysis, we will have lived our lives wisely and skillfully to the degree that we have gained the insight and know-how to align the trajectories of our individual life stories with the trajectory of the world’s true general story, which has been revealed to us by God, who alone is truly wise (see Rom. 16:25–27).

If the price to be paid for our coming to understand the need for that alignment is that we must suffer, then ultimately we may see such suffering to be, as the apostle Paul claimed, a very small price to pay (see 2 Cor. 4:16–18). That was also the testimony of the psalmist who prayed, “Give me understanding that I may live” (Ps. 119:144), when he wrote:

You have dealt well with your servant,

O Lord, according to your word. . . .

Before I was afflicted I went astray,

but now I keep your word.

You are good and do good. . . .

It is good for me that I was afflicted,

that I might learn your statutes. . . .

I know, O Lord, that . . . in faithfulness you have afflicted me. (Ps. 119:65, 67–68, 71, 75)6

1. For more on the need for such metaphorical stars, see Mark Talbot, When the Stars Disappear: Help and Hope from Stories of Suffering in Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 20–23.

2. See Talbot, When the Stars Disappear, 75–76.

3. See Talbot, When the Stars Disappear, 65, 91–92, 96–97.

4. See, for instance, the series of insistent, unanswered questions that Graham’s parents kept asking after he committed suicide in Talbot, When the Stars Disappear, 15. An adequate answer to their questions can only come at the end of surveying the full Christian story. I attempt to give part of that answer in this volume’s fourth chapter.

5. Such as having the skill to discern what would be a good career for me, given my interests and talents.

6. For advice on how to read my books, please see the appendix “More Advice for My Readers” in this volume as well as the appendix “A Reader’s Guide” at the end of When the Stars Disappear.

Creation

When Everything Was “Very Good”

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was without form and [empty],

and darkness was over the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

And God saw that the light was good.

And God separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Genesis 1:1–5

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created,

when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. . . .

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground

and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,

and the man became a living [person].

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden;

and there he put the man he had formed.

The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground

—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.

In the middle of the garden were the tree of life

and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. . . .

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden

to work it and [keep] it.

And the Lord God commanded the man,

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;

but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Genesis 2:4, 7–9, 15–17 NIV

What is mankind that you make so much of them,

that you give them so much attention,

that you examine them every morning and test them every moment?

Job 7:17–18 NIV

In When the Stars Disappear, I tried to administer a kind of spiritual first aid to Christians who have felt ambushed by their suffering. That is why I recounted Naomi’s, Job’s, and Jeremiah’s stories. They suffered terribly, yet God rescued them in the end. And no matter how hard it may be for us to believe when we are suffering, as long as we don’t deny him our Lord will rescue us too.1

In fact, Paul declares that not even death can separate us from the love of the God we have come to know through Christ (see Rom. 8:38–39). Ultimately, God can and will redeem all of our suffering. He may not rescue us during our earthly lifetimes. Here we may fall by sickness or sword.1 Yet someday, Scripture attests, whether in this life or the next, the clouds will break, and we will realize that our suffering has been only a “light momentary affliction” that has prepared us for “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). It will then be clear that our loving heavenly Father has been with us all along our way.

Of course, our suffering may not seem light and momentary. It may seem interminable and too heavy to bear. And even when it is bearable, we may wonder why life includes any suffering or why it includes so much. This book explains why we Christians suffer, showing how God works in and through our suffering for our good, and thus how our suffering is in fact an aspect of God’s mercy.

From Creation to Consummation

Scripture’s first two chapters recount the world’s origin, and its last two chapters foretell this world’s end. Creation and consummation are thus the Christian story’s bookends. Consummation will involve God’s re-creation of all things. The symmetries between Genesis’s first two chapters and Revelation’s last two chapters show God wrapping up “the true story of the whole world” in profoundly satisfying ways. Creation and consummation are the full Christian story’s outermost coordinates. They are still points—fixed stars—that help to hold the rest of the story in place.

They tell us that once there was no human sin, suffering, or death, and that God’s people will be delivered from sin, suffering, and death once again in the end. In between, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20, we have the panorama of human rebellion and redemption. Human suffering began after our first parents ate the forbidden fruit. So the portion of the Christian story that focuses on creation doesn’t directly address our suffering. Yet our suffering can’t be understood without considering it. We need to know who God created us to be before there was any sin or suffering. And then we need to know how our first parents’ rebellion altered everything because this will enable us to understand the part suffering plays in prompting us to embrace the redemption that God offers us in Christ.

In telling the story of creation in this chapter, I haven’t attempted to show the relevance of that story to our suffering by making a comment to that end every few pages. The awe that we should feel in learning what God was doing in making our world should be allowed to stand independently of what comes later in the full Christian story. In fact, in the end our suffering is not going to be the focus of the full story. The apostle Paul, who the New Testament suggests suffered more than anyone other than our Lord (see 2 Cor., especially 11:21–29; 12:7–10), put it like this: “I consider that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the coming glory that will be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18 NET; cf. Ps. 30:5; 2 Cor. 1:3–11; 4:17; 1 Pet. 1:3–7). Our suffering is meant to prompt us, as we have already seen that it prompted the psalmist, to turn to God’s word for understanding—and for understanding a great deal more than simply why we are suffering (see Ps. 119:65–75).

So human suffering plays no part in the first part of the full Christian story. In the second part—rebellion—we learn about the choice that our first parents made that brought human suffering into the world, but even then, in my second chapter, suffering isn’t the primary topic. Suffering arose as a consequence of our first parents’ rebellion, so what it is and how it affects us get the third chapter. Then, finally, the role of suffering in our redemption and our anticipation of the world’s consummation will occupy us in this volume’s fourth chapter.

The story of creation helps us counter false assumptions about God, the world, and ourselves that we easily make. It helps us grasp what human life in God’s world was to look like so that we, as God’s redeemed people, can begin living closer to what God intends. It also helps us understand creation’s proper patterns and rhythms—patterns and rhythms that, once we are aware of them and try to live by them, can alleviate some suffering.

At first glance, Genesis 1 and 2 appear to give two different creation accounts. But in fact they are one account, told from two perspectives.2 Genesis 1:1–2:3 tells the story from God’s cosmic perspective. It places our creation at the story’s peak, as God’s final creative act. Genesis 2:4–25 retells the story from our local perspective, where we are at the center of God’s creative acts. Chapter 1:1–2:3 situates us in the rest of creation, and especially in relation to God as our Creator. It emphasizes our unique role in creation. Chapter 2:4–25 emphasizes the uniqueness of our nature.3 Together these two perspectives enable us to understand who God has made us to be.

We can glean what we need from these two chapters by considering three topics: our creation, our composition, and our calling.

Our Creation

In Genesis 1:1–2:3 we were created after God created everything else and before he judged everything to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31). While Genesis 1:1 is properly interpreted as creation ex nihilo—in other words, as God’s creation of everything from nothing, simply by speaking4—many of God’s subsequent creative acts involved his separating and differentiating between various things. For instance, after he said, “Let there be light,” he “separated the light from the darkness,” calling the light Day and the darkness Night, and thus created the first day (1:3–5). On the second day, he separated the atmospheric waters from the surface waters—the clouds from the seas—and on the third day, he separated the land from the seas (see 1:6–9).

God began filling some of these separated spaces on the third day. He commanded the earth to produce all sorts of plants to cover the land, differentiating the various plants and trees he created from each other by means of their seeds (see 1:11–12). On the fourth day, he filled the heavenly expanse with lights “to give light upon the earth” and “to separate the day from the night.” They were also to be “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (1:14–15), enabling Israel to know when to celebrate her appointed feasts (see, e.g., Lev. 23). On the fifth and sixth days God filled the waters, the skies, and the land with living creatures, each “according to their kinds” (vv. 21, 24–25).

In all of this God was preparing a place for us. He “formed [the earth] to be inhabited” (Isa. 45:18). From the earth’s formlessness in 1:2, he was fashioning an ordered cosmos where we can understand, name, and classify things. As C. John Collins writes, Genesis 1:1–2:3 informs us that “the things [we] are familiar with work the way they do because God intended them to work that way: there are edible plants and domesticable animals—every farmer knows this, and Genesis explains why.”5

“Let Us Make”

Into this ordered, inhabitable world God prepared to introduce human beings. All of the story’s earlier elements point toward our creation, including its increasingly detailed focus on those elements that affect us most directly.6 The progression from plants through the aquatic and winged creatures to the land animals involved creating a biological hierarchy to which we were now to be added as the highest living beings. As Paul Beauchamp observes, “The living creatures converge towards the man.”7 But our creation involved another difference. For the first time, God paused to announce what he was about to do, making an unexpected first-person-plural statement: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Gen. 1:26 NIV). As Gerhard von Rad has written, “Nothing [in this account] is here by chance; everything must be considered carefully, deliberately, and precisely. . . . What is said here is intended to hold true entirely and exactly as it stands.”8Us and our are here for good reason.

They alert us that something momentous was about to happen, something of a different order than all that had happened before.9These pronouns are probably what Derek Kidner calls “the plural of fullness,”10 which suggests “there is within the divine Being the distinction of personalities, a plurality within the deity.”11 They match the fact that the word for God in Genesis 1 is the plural noun elōhîm, which in Scripture unexpectedly takes singular verbs.12 These pronouns may echo the possible distinction of personalities that Genesis 1:2 may have been hinting at with its observation that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Verse 26 merely suggests such a distinction. It doesn’t refer explicitly to the members of the Trinity, since the fact that God is three-in-one became clear only in later biblical writings. Yet “this fullness,” Kidner writes, was indeed eventually “to be unfolded as tri-unity, in the further ‘we’ and ‘our’ of John 14:23 (with 14:17).”13 So these pronouns represent “the first glimmerings of a Trinitarian revelation,” which “illumine all the more brightly the announcement of the creation of mankind” as imaging God.14 Our lives as human beings—as persons in relation—are patterned on the fact that the Christian Godhead involves persons in relation. And thus these pronouns illumine why God declared, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18), as we shall see later in this chapter.

“Human Beings in Our Image, after Our Likeness”

The “Let us make” in God’s announcement emphasizes that we are only creatures,15 while the “in our image, after our likeness” stresses our difference from all other living beings. Because these are God’s first words concerning human being,2 we must understand ourselves primarily in their terms. As Blocher says, “An image is only an image. It exists only by derivation. It is not the original, nor is it anything without the original. Mankind’s being an image stresses the radical nature of his dependence.”16 Ultimately, we must understand who we are in terms of the relationship that defines us.17 We will never adequately understand ourselves if we think of ourselves merely as the most highly developed animal species or if we try to calculate our worth against the vastness of the stars. We must think of ourselves primarily as God’s earthly images. This divine word is one of the most crucial of the metaphorical stars that Scripture puts in place.18

David understood this. In Psalm 8 he cast his eyes upward toward the starry heavens and felt “the staggering contrast between a human and the great bodies, processes, and powers in the world and the cosmos,” which, “when noticed, [can bring] with it an overwhelming sense of insignificance and displacement.”19 This led him to ask, “What are mere mortals that you”—that is, God—“should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” (Ps. 8:4 NLT). But then with the ears of faith he heard God say that he has situated us just a little below himself and thus crowned us with glory and honor.20 David cured the vertigo induced by looking up at the heavens by accepting a truth he could know only by faith (see Heb. 11:3). As one wise commentator has put it, Psalm 8’s main point is that “we can say ‘human being’ only after we have learned to say ‘God.’ . . . Humankind recognizes itself fully only in the recognition of the Being from whom all reality arises.”21

“And Let Them Have Dominion over All the Earth”

After declaring that he would make us in his image, God said: “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” (Gen. 1:26). As the sovereign Creator’s images, we are creation’s sovereigns, meant to reign benevolently over the rest of creation.

David reiterated this. For right after he declared that God made us only a little lower than himself, crowning us with glory and honor, he went on to say:

You gave them charge of everything you made,

putting all things under their authority—

the flocks and the herds

and all the wild animals,

the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea,

and everything that swims the ocean currents. (Ps. 8:6–8 NLT)

David glanced downward after he glanced upward, surveying the rest of creation. Perhaps he had been wondering whether we are just another animal species (cf. Eccles. 3:18–21). Yet by hearing God’s word he had steadied himself, coming to understand that our being made in God’s image makes us unique. He then understood our situation for what it actually is: as God’s images, we stand between him and the rest of the creation, where we are to fulfill the office of ruling all the rest of it wisely and well.

“So God Created Man in His Own Image”

Then God did what he had declared he was about to do:

So God created human beings in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27 NLT)

Here the singular pronouns referring to God imply that whatever sort of plurality of persons the us and our in the previous verse may suggest, it involves a “unanimity of intention and plan.”22

In declaring in verse 26 what he was about to do regarding human beings, God used the word make—‘asah in Hebrew. Here in verse 27 the Hebrew word for created is bara’, as it is in verses 1, 21, and 2:4. Collins says Genesis 1 and 2 uses bara’ more narrowly than it uses ‘asah, using bara’ when it “wants especially to stress that [what God is producing involves] some kind of fresh start.”23 At 1:1 and 2:4 God is creating the cosmos from nothing, bringing into being the visible creation. At 1:21 God creates animate life. Passages like Job 34:14–15 and Psalm 104:29 suggest that animate life did not just spring out of what existed before.24 God imparts to all living creatures their life and breath. The appearance of something from nothing and of animate life are, then, fresh starts that reveal the world’s dependence on God in a way that the separation of light from darkness and the gathering of the seas so that dry land may appear do not.

Since nothing in this account is accidental, the threefold repetition of bara’ in our verse must be significant. Scripture’s other threefold repetition occurs when the seraphim attending God on his throne call out to each other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isa. 6:3). “Hebrew uses repetition,” Alec Motyer writes, “to express superlatives or to indicate totality. . . . Holiness is supremely the truth about God,” and being created in his image is supremely the truth about us.25 The threefold repetition of bara’ in verse 27 confirms how significant our creation in God’s image is. We have been made in his image as the special objects of his love.

The alternation of the words created and image in verse 27’s first two lines reiterates that we must understand who we are in terms of who God is. As Blocher said, who we are is radically dependent on who God is.26 This is another orienting star that Scripture sets in place.

Everything about us images God. As Kidner says:

The Bible makes man a unity: acting, thinking and feeling with his whole being. This living creature, then, and not some distillation from him, is an expression or transcription of the eternal, incorporeal creator in terms of temporal, bodily, creaturely existence—as one might attempt a transcription of, say, an epic into a sculpture, or a symphony into a sonnet.27

Understanding ourselves as God’s image, Kidner goes on to say, “excludes the idea that our Maker is the ‘wholly Other’” and “requires us to take all human beings infinitely seriously (cf. Gn. 9:6; Jas. 3:9). And our Lord implies, further, that God’s stamp on us constitutes a declaration of ownership (Mt. 22:20, 21).”

What Does It Mean to Be Made in God’s Image?

What does it mean to be made, as it is usually translated, in God’s image? Ordinarily, we take being-made-in-the-image-of something to mean being made to copy its visible form. Yet Moses reminded the Israelites that when God made his covenant with them, they heard him speak but saw no form: “There was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12; see 4:9–20). So our being made in God’s image is not primarily a matter of our possessing some visible form but, rather, of our imaging the sovereign Creator God in more profound ways.28 God created us to be his image, caring for the creation as he himself would. He created us as—and not (as most translations have it) in—his earthly image, as his earthly representatives.29

In the ancient Near East around the time when Genesis was written, kings erected images of themselves throughout their realms to assert their sovereignty where they weren’t physically present.30 And thus the incorporeal Creator has made us as his corporeal images so that we may assert his sovereignty. We do so by acting as kings and queens reigning benevolently for him over the rest of the creation.31

Our role as God’s images is a structural feature of our place and role in creation. It is thus something we cannot lose, although we can obscure, mar, tarnish, diminish, or abuse our place and our role by our disobedience. We were made to obey God, and we truly fulfill our calling only when we wholeheartedly obey the words of the God whose form we do not see. God’s words are to resound through every aspect of our lives. They should shape all that we are and do.32

“Then God Blessed Them and Said, ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’”

Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” (Gen. 1:28 NLT)

These words, along with God’s declaration that he gave our first parents the seed-bearing plants and trees for food (see v. 29), heighten the contrast between the biblical story and other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. Biblically, as David summarized it, God has made us just a little lower than himself, crowning us with glory and honor (see Ps. 8:5). He has made us rulers over the works of his hands, putting everything under our feet (see Ps. 8:6–8). But in the ancient Near Eastern creation myths, we were not the gods’ focus, and when we were finally created as a kind of afterthought, we were “created to be [their] servant . . . and to relieve them of their toil.”33 For example, in the Babylonian Atrahasis Epic, we were created to relieve the lesser gods of the grunt work assigned to them by the greater gods. This task “took the form of digging the beds of the waterways, the corvée work later considered a menial occupation.”34 As A. R. Millard states, “The underlying idea of the Atrahasis Epic and the other Babylonian Creation stories . . . is that man was made to free the gods from the toil of ordering the earth to produce their food.” In these myths, we labor so the gods can rest. But in Genesis, God works so he can bless us.

To bless, Kidner tells us, “is to bestow not only a gift but a function . . . and to do so with warm concern. At its highest, it is God turning full-face to the recipient . . . in self-giving.”35 The greatest gift we can receive is unhindered and full fellowship with God himself. On the earthly level, God bestowed a twofold function on us: to have children and reign over the rest of creation. In Scripture, Gordon Wenham writes, God’s blessing

is always regarded as the result of a divine promise of blessing. The word of blessing, [when] pronounced by God . . . , guarantees and effects the hoped-for success. So . . . the words . . . “be fruitful and multiply” carry with them the divine promise that they can be carried out. Once uttered, the word carries its own life-giving power. . . . Genesis may be described as the story of the fulfillment of the divine promises of blessing.36

In blessing the water and air creatures in verse 22, God simply issued a command—“Be fruitful and multiply”—while in verse 28 it is added, “‘and God said to them,’ thus drawing attention to the personal relationship between God and man.”37 The fact the land creatures didn’t receive their own blessing may mean they are blessed along with or through us. Blessings are to flow down to them from us.

“God Saw Everything That He Had Made, and Behold, It Was Very Good”

After making and blessing us, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (1:31). Then we are told, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them” (2:1). The word the ESV translates as “host of them” can refer in Scripture to an army, the countless stars, or the myriads of angels as “models”—or patterns—“of perfect obedience and of regular motion.”38 “In all its usages,” Blocher observes, “the word translated ‘army’ or ‘host’ designates a diverse totality that is properly arranged, organized and differentiated.” He comments that it “is not for nothing that the throng of creatures is . . . called literally an army”—although this army “does not fight, it parades.” “When they were created, earth’s living creatures followed as perfect an order as the order of the heavens” and thus “the heavens and the earth and their inhabitants constitute a cosmos.” Wenham adds, “The harmony and perfection of the completed heavens and earth express more adequately the character of their creator than any of the separate components can.”39 No wonder that on seeing it, God pronounced the finished creation “very good”!40

Our Composition

The creation account in Genesis 1 portrays us as living within a framework involving three kinds of relationships, each shaping and sustaining us in its own way. Our primary relationship is with God, then there is our relationship with other human beings, and finally there is our relationship with the rest of creation. Living within the space created by these three kinds of relationships constitutes our specifically human way of being.

Once we know our place in creation, it helps to know how our nature makes us capable of occupying it. Genesis 1:1–2:3 identifies our position relative to God and other creatures. Genesis 2:4–25 specifies our composition.

Here we have two crucial questions. First, what did the creation of the first human person entail both naturally and supernaturally? And, second, what are the implications of God’s declaration, “It is not good for the man to be alone”?

The First Human Person

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up . . . , then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living [person]. (Gen. 2:5, 7)41

This sentence signals Genesis 2:4–25’s changed perspective in at least three ways. First, no local plant life appears until after the creation of the first man. He is the center around which all else clusters, including the planting of a garden (see vv. 8–9),42 the appearance of the animals (see v. 19), and the making of the woman (see v. 22). Second, God is no longer just elōhîm, the world’s creator and sustainer. He is also “the Lord”—that is, Yahweh, God’s “real” or personal name43—who makes and keeps covenant with his people.44 Third, Yahweh’s personal—dare we say hands-on?—involvement with our first parents is shown by a shift in the kinds of verbs describing his creative activities. “The word of God (1:26ff.) is now augmented by the work of God (2:7).”45 God no longer creates or makes just by speaking; he now forms (vv. 7, 19) and breathes (v. 7), plants and places (v. 8 NLT), builds a woman (see v. 22 ESV margin note46), and brings the animals and her to the man (vv. 19, 22).47

Formed from the Ground

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground. (Gen. 2:7a)

Here God is portrayed as a potter “who forms [the] man from moistened dust.”48 The Hebrew has a definite article affixed to the word adam,3 implying that this verse is focusing on the creation of the first human being as a real individual who is also a prototype for future human beings. The fact that he was formed from the ground means we are earthly beings, like the animals in verse 19. The fact that we share the sixth day with other creatures (see 1:24–31), are made of dust as they are (2:7, 19), feed as they feed (1:29, 30), and reproduce with a blessing similar to theirs (1:22, 28a) means that we, as Kidner writes, “can . . . be studied partly through the study of them; they are half [our] context.”49

Breathed into Life

. . . and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living [person]. (Gen. 2:7b)

In spite of the fact that we can be studied partly through a study of the earth’s other creatures, the stress throughout Genesis’s first two chapters, Kidner emphasizes, “falls on [humanity’s] distinctness.” Here at Genesis 2:7 we are told that the Lord God breathed into the first human being’s nostrils the breath—the Hebrew word is neshamah—of life, something he didn’t do with any other creature.50

This made him an earthly person, with capacities that distinguished him from all of the earth’s other living creatures. As Elihu declared in attempting to get Job to listen to him in spite of his youth,

it is the spirit in man,

the breath [neshamah] of the Almighty, that makes him understand.

It is not the old who are wise,

nor the aged who understand what is right. (Job 32:8–9)

In other words, wisdom and understanding—traits we may attribute to persons but never in the same way to any other living being4—are not endowments that arise naturally in the ordinary course of biological development or that we inevitably acquire as we grow older. They are attributes that ultimately depend on supernaturally bestowed capacities from God.51

What capacities? Here the parallelism in Job 32:8 proves crucial: “It is the spirit [ruach] in man, the breath [neshamah] of the Almighty, that makes him understand.” When Elihu applied Genesis 2:7 to himself a few verses later, he paired spirit and breath again: “The Spirit [ruach] of God has made me, and the breath [neshamah] of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4).52 Isaiah similarly declared that God,5 the Lord (Yahweh), who created the heavens and the earth, “gives breath [neshamah

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