The Image of God--The Ability to Create

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1) God originally created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He literally spoke them into existence with the words of His mouth. He went on from there to create everything else by the same method. He rested on the seventh day and that is as far as the Genesis account goes. In fact, God has never stopped creating. His work of creation continues to the present time except that now the work is carried on by His Spirit through The Church. The thing that trips us up when we try to understand exactly how all this creative process is accomplished is that we cannot comprehend with our minds the concept of a being who was not created. We can know it with our spirit, but still not completely understand it with our minds. That is the way it is with many things of the kindgom of God. Given that we cannot understand it, we have 2 choices, we either believe it or we do not. For the purposes of this writing (not to mention our firmly held convictions) we have chosen to believe. The larger problem here is whether we are soul centered or spirit centered. If this concept has to make sense to our finite, human minds we are soul centered. If, instead, we can believe it without it making sense simply because we believe the Bible to be the word of God, we are spirit centered. Faith is a function of the spirit, not of the soul. That almost sounds overly simplistic, but the fact is we can only believe what we cannot process from the world with our spirit.

The Greek language of the New Testament has two words for "know". One of them means to come to know, or to learn. The other indicates a knowing without having learned. We understand the first to be a knowing in the mind (soul) while the second is to know in the spirit. We know on the basis of scripture that God is (Hebrews 11:6) and that he created what we see out of things we do not see (Hebrews 11:3)


So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27) In this verse, man means mankind, male and female. God was able to reproduce beings in his image by himself. A man needs a woman to reproduce beings in his image.

I will never forget the birth of our first child. I had never seen a baby being born, at least not outside a reproduction on film in a high school physiology classroom. So there I was, watching the scene unfold when the next thing I knew there were two people laying on the delivery table where there had been only one mere minutes before. I realized in a very real sense, we had created another human life. More precisely, we had reproduced a human life and we had created a new, spiritual being. We had not created something from nothing as only God can do, but we had used his creative ability to reproduce after our own kind.

When man creates something, he has to have raw material with which to work. We create songs from pre-existing notes. We create various forms of artwork and functional products out of various materials. We create blogs out of known words and ideas. Sometimes we even become surprised when we write something we did not know we knew. This is the Holy Spirit interjecting his creative ability into our activities. We are able to do all these because God created us to be creative beings.

Let's tie this one up by going back to the beginning where God spoke all things into existence. Since God created all things by speaking words that had creative power, and since we are created in His image, it should occur to us that our words are more powerful than we have ever thought. We know how words affect us. Words can affect us positively or negatively. A word fitly spoken, the Bible says, "...is like apples of gold in settings of silver. (Proverbs 25:11) Words can cut and tear at our psyche and self image. Depending on who speaks the words to us, they can affect us for years to come or even throughout the remainder of our days. It is not a stretch to get from there to understanding there is creative power in our spirit inspired, spirit driven words. When we speak the words God puts into our spirits, we set events in motion that we ordinarly do not see or comprehend. Sometimes God is gracious and shows us the results of speaking those words. (Or perhaps in some cases He is gracious in not showing us that?) For the most part, however, we believe by faith God is answering our words with his own actions to bring about what we spoke. He promises that his word will not return void, but will accomplish the things he sent it forth to accomplish. (Isaiah 55:11) The fact we have so often overlooked in that equation is that we get to be His partners when we speak His words. His words, even though spoken by us are still His words. Speak the word!