The Purpose of Man
Genesis 1:27
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
The Purpose of Man
The last few weeks we have spent reflecting on the attributes of God. God’s attributes do not define God but God defines His attributes. There is His non-communicable attributes which is hard for us to understand like how He is all-knowing, all-powerful and everywhere at all times. We spent most of our time looking at His holiness, justice, righteousness and love. It is these attributes that we do understand because we as humans are supposed to be able to imitate them.
Genesis 1:27 says that, “God created man in His own image.” The definition of the word image is likeness or resemblance. What God is saying is that He created man to be living statues of Himself. We were created to be memorials and the purpose of man is to reflect back to God His moral character. We can’t be everywhere at all times, know everything and be all-powerful. What we can do is understand His holiness, justice, righteousness and love.
The image that God intended for us to reflect back to Him and others is His character or in other words His moral nature. By nature God is holy, just, right and love. In order to reflect His image we must understand what these attributes are and how they function. Delighting in God should cause us to want to joyfully imitate His attributes thus reflecting back His image. The purpose in which God created us was to do just that.
The fundamental problem with man is that we do not naturally love and adore the glory of God. We imitate what we enjoy. The Bible makes it clear and our own experience tells us that we are not attracted to God. Romans 1:22 and 23 says, “Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” Instead of finding God as beautiful we would rather forget Him and worship His creation.
The next few devotionals will be spent exploring the nature of sin. This is not an easy topic to discuss and one that we would rather skip over but to stay true to the full counsel of God we must talk about it. Another reason to study sin is that God is more glorified when sin is rightly understood. The depths in which He traveled to save us through His Son should cause us to love Him more.
Let’s prayerfully consider the topic of sin. Our hope is to be better equipped to deal with our own sin, explain it more accurately to others and love God more for what He is doing for us through Christ!
