Posts tagged with “humanity”
So then, whatever we are by creation we must affirm: our rationality, our sense of moral obligation, our sexuality (whether masculinity or femininity), our family life, our gifts of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love and experience of community, our awareness of the transcendent majesty of God, and our inbuilt urge to fall down and worship him. All this (and more) is part of our created humanness. True, it has been tainted and twisted by sin. Yet Christ came to redeem it, not to destroy it. So we must gratefully and positively affirm it.
Whatever we are by the Fall, however, we must deny or repudiate: our irrationality, our moral perversity, our blurring of sexual distinctives and lack of sexual self-control, the selfishness which spoils our family life, our fascination with the ugly, our lazy refusal to develop God’s gifts, our pollution and spoliation of the environment, the anti-social tendencies which inhibit true community, our proud autonomy, and our idolatrous refusal to worship the living and true God. All this (and more) is part of our fallen humanness. Christ came not to redeem this but to destroy it. So we must strenuously deny or repudiate it.
Unique
Posted at 9:53 AM
Humans are obviously unique. But it’s surprisingly hard to say why. (New Scientist, 24 May 2008.)
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created human beings in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27, NIV.)
When God is no longer in the picture, we’re left with the blind, pitiless indifference of the Selfish Gene. Without God, we can never be clear on what it means to be truly human. Because of Jesus, we can see clearly what humanity is like! We’re more sinful than we ever imagined (the necessity of the cross shows us that, and we stand in stark contrast to the way Jesus lived), but we’re more loved than we ever dreamed (the fact that Jesus died that death for us shows us that!). In Jesus we see a picture of true humanity, worshipping God with our whole lives, as we were intended to be.
We find the eternal joy we were made for in the eternal God who made us. We find what it means to be human.