Let Us Make Man

Then God Pauses

Everything changes there. Instead of saying, Let there be man, or, Let the earth bring forth man, God says, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Before man is created, God reveals His intention. Before man receives authority, God declares his assignment. And in between, He says what kind of creature this will be, in our image, after our likeness. Identity is my word for that, and Genesis does not use it.

The word for make here is asah, to make, to do, to fashion. The word does not say with care. And the pause is my way of hearing the change in the speech, not something Genesis says happened.

The Change in Language

Now read how He speaks about everything before this, because the wording is not the same.

Let the earth bring forth. Let the waters bring forth. Over and over, He tells the ground and the sea to produce.

And notice how much of that chapter runs the same way. And God said, and it was so. Over and over. You see it in the cartoons the children watch, the character says what he is about to do and then he does it. That has been God’s way from the first day, and it does not change when He gets to man. So the announcing is not what is different here.

And then He comes to man, and He does not say let the earth bring forth man. He says, Let us make man in our image.

And there is one more thing in the wording. All through the chapter the narration is singular, God said, God made, God saw. Then in His own speech it goes plural, let us, our image, our likeness. And then the very next verse goes straight back to singular.

So God created man in his own image. Not they created. God created, and his own image. Genesis records the change and does not explain it.

And let me be careful about one thing, because it would be easy to overstate. Genesis also says God made the firmament, and God made two great lights, and God made the beast of the earth. So making is not what sets man apart. What is only here is the speech, let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

As Christians we read that plural in the light of what came later, and let me put those up rather than just naming them.

And Genesis has already put the Spirit there in the second verse.

The Spirit of God. That is what Moses wrote, and naming Him the Holy Ghost there is me and not him.

So here is how I read it as a Christian, and I will say plainly that Genesis 1:26 does not identify who the us is. The plural shows me a distinction when I read it in the light of what comes later. The singular in the next verse keeps the creating with God, because it does not say they created. And the fuller thing comes when I read Genesis with John and Paul and not on its own.

But first let Genesis make its own point, and what I hear it making is that man is the climax of the making. Not the end of the account, because the seventh day comes after him in chapter two. The climax of what God made.

And David asked the same thing I am asking, and he put it in a psalm.

The moon and the stars are the fourth day, and dominion is the word out of our verse. So the two passages sit close together. Whether David had this chapter in front of him, or how he came to write it at all, Scripture does not say. What it gives me is the question. What is man. And I have opened that in The Honor God Bestowed Upon Humanity.

And the pause points somewhere, it points to the image, in Our image, after Our likeness, for of all that God made, only man has that said over him, in our image, after our likeness. Carrying His likeness is my way of putting it. We will open that image in verse 27, here we only mark where the pause is leading.

Man Does Not Escape the Pattern

Although the language changes, the pattern does not. And here is what I am about to trace, and I will say now that Genesis states it of this one making and not of all of them. Man is created with purpose, and the difference is that God declares that purpose before creating him.

Genesis 1:26 announces the purpose. Then look at the two that follow it.

Purpose is announced before the man is created, and the commission is spoken to them after they are created. That is the order on the page. And when I say identity comes before assignment, that is my way of naming the order.

The Principle

And here is what I hold, and it is mine. In everything I have laid out here, God creates with a purpose, and what He makes is expected to bear what He intended it to bear. Existence in God’s kingdom is connected to purpose, and that is how I have come to read Him.

The Thread Through Scripture

This pattern does not stop in Genesis.

God planted Israel as a noble vine, and when it became something different from what He had planted, He asked how the noble vine had turned into a degenerate plant of a strange vine. Now Jeremiah does not use the word purpose there. That is my word for what I hear under his question, and I am tracing a thread, not quoting one. Jesus continues the same theme:

From Genesis to the Prophets to the Gospels, this is the thread I am tracing. God creates. God plants. And across the passages I have put up here, I see what He makes and what He plants connected to what He intends for it. He calls and appoints and sends too, and I have not laid those out on this page, so take those three as where I am going and not as what I have shown you.

The New Creature

And this same pattern reaches all the way to us.

In the garden, God made man and gave him a commission, a charge to carry. In Christ, God makes us new and commissions us again.

We are not made new and left standing idle, we are made new and handed a charge.

So we too are commissioned, same God, same way, He makes, and then He sends. And here is what I hold, and Paul does not say it in these two verses. The commission is never the price of the new making. It is the fruit of it. The new making is a gift, and out of that gift comes the sending.