And God created Man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
The creation account moves through light, sea, sky and living creatures. Then it stops for something different. Here God makes a creature in His own image, male and female. Commentators ask two questions here. What does "image" mean? And how much of it survived the fall, when Adam sinned?
Every earlier act of creation came by a word of command. The making of man reads differently. Writers point to the planning behind it.
God did not create man as He had done in every previous case, by a simple order from His lips. The creation of man was the subject of divine counsel. "Let us make man," etc. Notice here that man was to be, and was, made in the image and likeness of God. This is his first great difference from everything God had created before. The second is that he was to rule over all of it.
"Image" is not a word about resemblance in the first place. One writer follows the word through the Bible and points to the coin Jesus asked for.
How the Bible uses the word, in both the Old and New Testaments, seems to show that "image" represents, while "likeness" resembles… In the New Testament, the coin our Lord asked for had the image and inscription of Caesar on its face. It might have been a poor likeness, but it was an unmistakable image of the Roman emperor. It expressed his authority and represented his claim.
The second word, "likeness," adds something the first does not.
God made man, then, to represent Him to the lower creation that He put under him. But he was also made after the likeness of God; that is, he was really like God in certain important respects. Not in all respects of course, for God is infinitely holy and man was merely innocent. Still, man was God's "offspring" (Acts 17:28-29). He is a spirit being, though dressed in a body of flesh and blood. So he has intelligence and a moral sense, and these reflect what exists on an infinite scale in God Himself.
Kelly sets the verse against the theory that man rose from the animals.
How far this is from the brute finally evolving into man, a theory suggested by Satan to brutalise the race! Here is the simple yet wonderful truth. No one brought God down to the human level; God created man, and man alone, after a divine pattern.
Kelly notices that Scripture later changes the wording when it speaks of Adam's son.
Man is no longer in the likeness of God, but he is always in the image of God. For man, now as ever, fallen or not, is in the image of God; but the likeness of God was lost through sin. Seth therefore was born in Adam's own likeness, not in God's. He was like Adam fallen, not only his representative.
Commentators differ here. Others hold that both terms still stand.
The fall has not cost man either the image or the likeness of God (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9).
Both sides agree on what God Himself says about murder. This verse is the reason He guards human life.
The murderer does more than meddle with man and injure him to the worst degree. By killing a man he also defaces God's image, and God sentences him to die. Murder seizes what belongs to God, and no man has that right.
The verse shifts from "him" to "them" without changing subject.
Verse 27 says that man is twofold… the few words here show us how closely Scripture ties male and female together. The word "man" covers both, and jointly they were to have the dominion.
Jesus later answered a question about marriage by pointing back to the beginning.
Christ brings out God's glory in these things, and He shows how it was at the beginning. God did not make one man and two women, but "male and female he created them." So from the very forming of man, God's mind was clear.
God made Adam in the image. Christ is the image. Writers weigh that difference in wording.
God created man in His own image and likeness. But no one could call Christ, "who is God over all, blessed forever," the likeness of God, since He is God. But He can be the image of God, for "image" is what represents another, and Christ did this for God perfectly.
One writer says what it takes for anyone else to hold the two words together.
To be true to the image, there must be moral likeness. For us that means a new creation. So Col. 3:10 says the new self "is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator."
- Counsel — God took counsel before making man. Everything else came by command.
- Image — The word means representation. Man stands in creation as God's appointed stand-in.
- Likeness — The word means resemblance. Man has a moral and mental capacity like God's, and is God's "offspring." Commentators differ on whether sin destroyed it.
- Life — The image remains. So killing a man defaces God's own representation, and God claims the murderer's life.
- Restoration — Adam was made in the image; Christ is the image. Real likeness is regained only in the new man, renewed after Him.
And God blessed them; and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over every animal that moveth on the earth.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb producing seed that is on the whole earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree producing seed it shall be food for you;
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
and to every animal of the earth, and to every fowl of the heavens, and to everything that creepeth on the earth, in which is a living soul, every green herb for food. And it was so.
On the sixth day God hands out food: seed-bearing plants and fruit to man, and every green plant to the animals, the birds and the creeping things. It pictures a world where nothing yet killed to live, and it raises hard questions about fossils, predators, and what changed.
The verse describes a diet. One writer draws the conclusion, and notes which creatures it names:
"To every beast of the earth I have given every green plant for food." This would imply that animals were not carnivorous. There is a difference between cattle and beasts; but in that statement the cattle are left out; the "beasts" are what we call wild beasts. It is perfectly within God's power to have restricted them for the time, or to have changed them.
This diet belongs to a state that did not last. One writer marks what ended it:
Man still has his distinctive place in God's commission and plan; but it is in the state of innocence. After the fall came corruption and violence. Animal food was not permitted to man till after the flood. Herbs and fruit were given at first to man, and to the subject creation every green plant. Death was not in the Adamic earth till sin. True, Romans 5:12-21 goes no further than the human race, fallen under death through sin. But Romans 8:19-22 looks at "all the creation" as ruined through the fall of its head.
Did death exist before the fall? One writer limits Genesis to the world of which Adam is head, and leaves everything earlier open:
So I conclude that death was not in the creation of which man was the head until his fall. But scripture says nothing about what may have happened between the creation of the heavens and the earth and the forming of the present world out of chaos... So geologists may find as many fossil giants and sea reptiles as they please. They do not touch the statements of scripture one way or another, because scripture makes none about it. Death entered only into the creation connected with man, and by man's sin. Scripture states that, though it does not deal with what it meant for the beasts. Genesis 1:30 confirms it, for it gives the green grass to the beasts of the earth.
But lions do not eat grass. One writer meets that objection head-on:
Scripture states plainly that herbs were given for food to the beasts of the field. This was not written out of ignorance, for lions were eating men in Moses' time. Moses wrote it with the deliberate intention of claiming a revelation, and so he contradicts the whole existing order of facts about animals... He declares that at first they were given the green plant for food. Scripture gives us to understand they ate that in the ark... It is a direct contradiction of universal experience, and claims to be a revelation. To say that it cannot be true is absurd.
The verse calls these creatures "everything that has the breath of life." An older translation reads "in which is a living soul." What then separates them from man?
The beast also is, and has, a living soul. Genesis 1:30 describes every beast of the earth, every bird of the air and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth as "everything in which there is a living soul." "Likeness" to God cannot be said of such a one as this, for God is not "soul," but "spirit," and the "Father of spirits." So man stands alone in relationship to God, because he has not only soul but also spirit.
After the flood God changed the terms, and set a limit:
God now first gave every moving thing that lives to be food for man (Genesis 9:3), as freely as He had first given green plants to beast and bird and reptile (Genesis 1:30). But He put a marked restriction on the blood... It was the life, and this God reserved for Himself.
This peace is not gone for good. One writer points to the day it returns:
Creation at large will be restored. No longer will the strong prey upon the weak. Even the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the lion will eat straw like the ox (Isaiah 11:6-7)... When the sons of God are revealed, that will be the signal for the complete deliverance of all from the bondage of corruption (Romans 8:19-21).
- Gift. God feeds every creature from the ground: herbs and fruit for man, every green plant for the beasts, birds and creeping things.
- Peace. The verse implies animals did not eat meat, and that death had no place in Adam's world until sin.
- Loss. Man fell, and the creation of which he was head fell with him — Romans 8 views all creation as ruined through its head.
- Limit. Genesis speaks only of the world connected with Adam; on any earlier state, and on fossils, it makes no claim either way.
- Restoration. The same peace returns when the sons of God are revealed: creation goes free, and the lion eats straw like the ox.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning -- the sixth day.
God's account of the six days ends with a survey and a verdict: He looks over the whole finished work and calls it very good. That verdict raises three questions: what makes it very good, what happened to it, and whether God will ever say it again.
Earlier in the chapter God repeatedly calls His work good. The last verdict is different because of what God has just added to the scene.
With the creation of man, God's work had reached its high point. Up to now we have read the same words four times over: "And God saw that it was good." That covered all the rebuilding and creating, apart from the creation of man. But on the sixth day God surveys the whole scene, including man and woman in their ordered place with dominion over it all. Then we read, "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was VERY good."
The verdict covers material things — soil, sea, animals, human bodies. That rules out a whole way of thinking about the physical world.
Take note of this, for it destroys at one blow the whole system of error wrongly called "Christian Science." One of its most basic teachings is the idea that matter is evil and only spirit is good. The truth is the exact opposite, for when evil entered it came in by way of spirit, not matter.
Nobody watched the world in its first condition. No study of the world as it is now can rebuild that picture for us. This verse comes to us as revelation.
Here experience must fail us. Only the Bible could give us the truth about the first condition of man and the creatures around him. But once it is revealed, it proves itself at once. It is the only state we can imagine in which the Creator could have placed creation and its head in a way that fits His own goodness. That is the force and moral beauty of His final survey in the last verse. With the one exception of the second day, He had called each thing "good"; now, as a whole, it was good in the highest degree in His eyes.
Kelly presses the point against those who assume the world has always looked as it does now:
It is illogical, and unbelieving too, to assume that the present state is the normal one, or that God made men sinful, vain, proud and selfish… Clearly the state of the world is offensive to God, and it has been so as far back as man's records reach. This is a fact, Bible or no Bible.
The verdict leads straight into the seventh day. It also tells us what God's rest is like.
This led to creation rest, with its two marks. First, God was satisfied with all that He had made, as we read, "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good." Second, He stopped all His creation work completely, as it is written, "he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done." (Gen. 1:31; Gen. 2:2).
The world we live in no longer matches this description. The man God set over it is the reason.
Sin broke God's Sabbath, His rest in creation. From then on the verdict He had just pronounced had to change from "very good" to very bad. Man, the masterpiece, fell, and dragged down with him the creation God had placed him over. The beautiful work of God's hand was spoiled, as it were, in a moment.
The point is not that God's work was faulty, but that He tied its wellbeing to the obedience of one man:
It pleased God to make that first creation dependent on its head, the first Adam. He listened to a voice which he ought not to have listened to; sin came in by him, and by sin death, and now the whole creation groans in bondage. (Rom. 5 and Rom. 8)
Genesis 1:31 is not God's last word on His creation. Writers point forward to a day when the same delight returns.
Sin has marred the fair creation, so that now the whole creation groans and suffers pain. But the saints in heaven share the mind of the Lord, and they can see that all the evil will be dealt with in judgment. Then God can take pleasure in His creation once again, just as He did long ago, when the creation work was finished: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).
The first verdict came by a word. The satisfaction still to come is reached through suffering:
He declared the work of His hand to be very good, but in the anguish of His soul He will find satisfaction. The first creation, for all its beauty, was quickly marred by sin.
- Verdict. Earlier statements call the work "good"; only after man and woman stand in place over the whole does God survey everything and call it very good.
- Vindicated. Matter is not the source of evil; evil came in by way of spirit. And no study of today's world can tell us what the first world was like. Only Scripture reports it.
- Rest. The verdict produces the seventh day: satisfaction in the result, then the complete end of the work.
- Ruin. Sin broke God's rest: man, the masterpiece, fell and dragged down the creation he had been set over, and "very good" became very bad.
- Restored. The verdict returns — God will take pleasure in His creation once more, and the One who spoke it will find satisfaction through the anguish of His soul.