This article is reprinted with permission from “The Edwards Epistle,” Summer 1997, Vol. VI, No. 2.
One of the most sublime statements in the Bible is surely Genesis 2:7, “And the Lord God fashioned the human from the dust on the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being.” In one sentence the ancient Hebrew writer succeeds in defining the relationship of human beings to God and the world. On the one hand, we are very much part of the earth. In a humble Hebrew play on words, we are adam (humanity) from the dust of the adamah (ground). The earth supplies the material from which we are made, the same material from which the animals are also made (2:19). God “fashions” and “shapes” the earth into humanity, like a potter fashions clay, according to the Hebrew vocabulary. In an equally ergonomic image, God later “builds” or “reconstructs” the rib of the man into a woman (2:22). Thus, one part of the human equation is a very earthy anthropology. We come from the earth, and whatever else we are or become, we never escape our earthly origins.
But there is more to the human equation than matter. What we are made of does not account for what we are. It is not earth that determines our nature, but the Lord God, the Divine Craftsman. The ground becomes plastic in his hands and is given new form. God infuses into it his own breath. It becomes an animate earthling, something that earth itself could not produce. The result is an entirely new order of creation, an enhanced creature, doubly alive, in fact. The human is a nephesh, an “alive being,” but more than that, a nephesh chaiyah, an “ensouled being.” The life that characterizes God himself is now imparted into matter, and the result is a human being.
By virtue of his creation, the human is a citizen of two realms—the mundane and the celestial, the city of man and the city of God. Genesis 1 signifies this difference by noting that all animal life is made “according to its kind,” but the human is made “in God’s image.” We share life in common with animals, but life itself, not even life as a gift of God, is not our distinguishing characteristic as human beings. The uniquely divine image in humanity is the very life of God in us. The Lord God is indeed the Lord of all life, but we as humans know this in a way that the rest of creation knows it, if at all, only inchoately or instinctually. The human is an earthling, to be sure, but an inspired earthling, a God-breathed creature.
In order rightly to understand our original nature—and it is this nature that the whole program of redemption is out to restore—we must remember that earth and heaven were not polar opposites before the fall. They were complementary then, perhaps similar to the way my muscles respond to my will, rather than in combat as they are now. The image of the garden in Genesis 2:8 completes the pristine story. The earth is our place of residence, but the earth was not a place of wild, untamed nature. Before it became unkempt as it is now, it was a place of divinely ordered beauty, a garden, literally, planted by the Creator and tended by a steward, the inspired earthling.
Genesis 2:7-8 answers the two greatest needs we have as humans: it tells us our place, and it identifies our purpose. Earth is our home, but God is our maker, and not only our maker, but since the fall our redeemer, and thus our eternal companion and our destiny. Genesis 2:7-8 is truly a life-ethic, indeed, a life-ontic.
What a contrast the modern world presents to this sublime understanding of life! How experimental, how arbitrary, how confused we have become, yes even in the church, on the meaning of personhood. The boundaries and markers of life that were so clear and sacred to the ancients have been moved in our day, and in some cases, removed. Naaman, a leprous Syrian commander, once implored the king of Israel to heal him. The king responded, “‘Am I God, to kill and make alive?’” (2 Kings 5:7). Would that we observed such reverence for life. The human womb, the grandest workshop in all creation, is now regarded as a mere cavity of uterine material to be legally (though certainly not morally!) invaded and “evacuated of its contents.” In place of the respect and honor once shown to the aged, the modern world places on their shoulders, and on the shoulders of their families and society at large, the terrible question of “death with dignity,” the inhuman task of trying to presage the future to determine whether the procedures now available to prolong life can ensure a life worth prolonging. Like the unborn, the aged are no longer guaranteed life if they pose too great a burden on the living.
On the one hand, then, we find it strangely beyond ourselves fully to acknowledge and honor, both legally and morally, God-created life. Our confusion about life has another and equally perilous side to it, however. In the midst of our hesitancy to affirm human life as it is given to us, we are becoming ever bolder in attempts to produce new life forms. I’m not only thinking about obvious attempts like cloning, which seems to me to carry a plethora of unanswered questions, but also attempts to impute human minds and even personhood to inanimate objects. A dramatic example was last July’s Mars landing, during which the scientists involved repeatedly referred to Sojourner, the Martian crawler, in personal terms. Sojourner received “wake up calls,” each morning, “sent greetings from Mars to Earth,” and was referred to by its controllers as a “being.” We have reached a new stage of confusion about human personhood when we deny it to the living and impute it to hardware.
All this would be awfully gloomy if the whole world were as misguided as we are. But fortunately it is not. God has seen to it that there is still one person bearing his image who has not succumbed to the world’s madness and evil. It is his Son Jesus Christ. You can read all about it in Colossians 1:15-20. Thank God for the truly Good News we read there! All things were made through God’s Son, they consist in him, they are made for him, and they will be redeemed by him! He overcame death itself, so nothing in this world can stop him. He intends nothing short of reconciling all things to himself, and his plans include using you and me!
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1997).
