The Church: A Closer Look

The Church was not Plan B for God. The Bible says that the Church was conceived in the eternal purposes of God before the foundation of the world:

…He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. - Ephesians 1:4

This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Ephesians 3:11,  

We as Christians know that Jesus died for our sins so that we can go to Heaven. Praise the Lord for this! But from our viewpoint in space and time it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We fail to realize that the Cross was not God’s final goal but rather a means to a greater end. It was a restoration project. It was a means of moving mankind back toward God’s original purpose. 

Let us return to the beginning so we can see what the Lord’s original purpose was. In Genesis Chapters 1-3 we have the creation account. We observe that

1. God made man in His image (Genesis 1:27)

2. He made man to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28)

3. He made man to have dominion (Genesis 1:28)

Before we unpack these let us lay a little groundwork. First, the creation of man in Genesis 1 marks the crowning achievement of the creation week. It was the grand finale if you will. God exalted man over the rest of the creation, including living plants and animals. Mankind exists in between God, who is above, and all other living creatures, who are below. (I’m not including angels at the moment, we will return to that later.) 

Obviously man is lower than God - He created us. He is eternal, has all power and knows all things. We are finite. We have limited power and limited knowledge. 

Many seek to put mankind on the same level as God, as in the New Age Movement. This is beyond folly. Others seek to lower mankind to the same level as the animals and other living things - such as in pantheism and Eastern religions. This is also error. It puts us below where we were created to be.  

With that said, let us look at Genesis 1:26:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Let's break this down.

Then God said

The word for God in the original Hebrew is Elohim, which is the plural form of El, meaning God, Mighty One, or Power. The word has a plural ending - transliterated nas -im, much like adding an ‘s’ in English. There is one God yet a plurality is implied.

Let Us make

Notice the use of the First Person Plural here - Let Us make.  (We cannot derive a full-blown doctrine of the Christian Trinity here but it is certainly laying groundwork.) To think of God rightly we need to think of Him in terms of both unity and plurality. 

For our purposes now this is important because it implies relationship within the Godhead. God is a relational being. 

man in our image, after our likeness.

We are created in the image of God. What does that mean? Before we get into specifics, let’s look at this in a general way. John Piper offers a concise summary:

…being created in the image of God means that we image God. We reflect God. We live in a way, we think in a way, we feel in a way, we speak in a way that calls attention to the brightness of the glory of God.(1)

God is a relational being. God created man as a relational being. Namely, He made man for relationship with Himself. This is a fundamental truth of Christianity. 

Question one of the Westminster Catechism (both the shorter and longer) reads:

Q. 1. What is the chief and highest end of man?

A. Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

St. Augustine rightly said,

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

The redemptive work of Christ at the Cross was a means by which God was restoring the relationship with man that was broken by sin in the Garden of Eden. 

Being made in the image of God means being made for relationship. Relationship requires personhood. What distinguishes people from conscious animals is mind, will, and emotion. We have a living soul. We think, we have desires, and we have feelings. Man is a relational being.

Man is also a moral being. Genesis 3:22:

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.”

Again we see the use of the first person plural pronoun ‘us’. After eating the forbidden fruit, man became like God in the sense of knowing good and evil. Romans 2:14-15 shows us that man has God’s laws written on his his heart, even if he has not been formally instructed on the 10 Commandments and the Law of Moses:

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness…

The first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity does a brilliant job of showing how man is always making moral judgments, even if he is not conscious of doing so. Lewis shows that we constantly take for granted that there are good actions and bad actions, which itself assumes a higher standard by which we can judge the difference. The human conscience is a built-in warning system as it were to alert us when we are violating God’s perfect standard. Paul talks about how he strives to have a clear conscience toward God and man (Acts 24:16). 

To be made in the image of God means to be relational and to be moral. It also means that we are infused with creative ability. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). Let us make man (Genesis 1:26). 

God is the Creator God. 

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31)

The heavens declare the glory of God, 

   and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. - Psalm 19:1

And,

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. - Colossians 1:16

Man has been imbued with creative ability. We create art, music, literature, architecture, and so on. But we also have the ability to procreate through sexual union. Through us God creates more image bearers. 

Finally, the Bible says God is spirit (John 4:24). Man, created in God’s image is a spiritual being. This encompasses what we have already touched upon - relationship, mind, will, emotion, and morality, but there is at least one more component to this as well. When we say God is spirit it means that God is immaterial. He cannot be defined by physical matter. Similarly, though man has a physical body that we can see and touch man also has an immaterial soul and spirit. The human body and the five senses are limited by the constraints of space and time (or, more precisely, space-time). The human soul and spirit are not. This strongly implies that they exist outside of and independent of space-time, meaning that they are eternal / immortal. God is eternal - from everlasting to everlasting (Psalm 90:2). There was a time when you and I weren’t, but there will never be a ‘time’ when we will not be.   

Very good. Now that we have some appreciation for what it means to be created in the image of God, let us return to the subject of the eternal purposes of God. 

We pick back up in Genesis 1:28:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…”

Through procreation we create more image-bearers. God the Father desired a Divine family and that family was to grow as its individual members multiplied over the face of the earth. The Father wanted a people to love who would be His treasured possession (Deuteronomy 7:6-8). They would collectively comprise a Holy Nation and a Kingdom of Priests (Exodus 19:5-6). 

and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

He made man to rule and reign as His personal ambassadors and representatives. Psalm 8:6 says,

You have given him (man) dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under his feet…

To summarize, God’s original purpose was for man to be Divine image-bearers, to establish a Divine family, and for mankind to rule over His creation. The fall of man in the Garden of Eden impacted these objectives.