The Image of God (2) Fallen Humanity

“Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed… In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Gen 2:8-9, 15-17)

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,
but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” (Gn 3:1-6)

​Review
Thank you all for coming to our young adult worship service. Last Sunday, we started to talk about the image of God. This is a very important subject that we all must know about because it explains the kind of being we were created as and the kind of being God wants us to be in Christ. The Bible proclaims that we were created in the image of God. But we lost and distorted this image because of sin.
 
However, God gave us forgiveness and redemption through Christ. And Paul reveals that the reason God saved us through Christ is for us to be conformed to His image. So, Christians are essentially called to recover the image of God that we’ve lost until we are completely transformed into the glorious image of Christ on the last day.
 
In the Bible, there are three different types of humanity—created humanity, fallen humanity, and new humanity in Christ. We focused on the first one in the last sermon by learning about some interpretations of the image of God.
 
In Christian theology, the image of God has been interpreted in many different ways. It has been understood as physical resemblance, human reason, authority to dominate, and human freedom.
 
Each interpretation has its own merits, but the interpretation I said that I agree with the most is that the image of God refers to the ability to have relationships with God, others, and other creatures.
 
When creating human beings, God didn’t say, “I will make mankind in my image, in my likeness,” but “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Gen 1:26). And God made both male and female in His image.
 
These verses imply that God Himself exists in communion, in intimate relationships, and that God wanted human beings, made in His image, to have the same kind of relationships with Him, with one another, and with other creatures in the world in mutual respect and love.
 
I believe that’s the image of God we were created in, lost, are to conform to, and be fully transformed into. And we find what the image of God really looks like in Jesus’ life. Jesus was fully responsive to God and the needs of others.
 
 The way Jesus maintained His relationship with the heavenly Father and how He perfectly obeyed the Father shows us the kind of relationship we should have with God.
 
The way Jesus reached out to people, had compassion on them, and treated them also shows us the kind of relationships God wants us to have with others. So, Jesus is the perfect example of what God intended human beings to be.
 
Fallen Humanity
Today, we’ll focus on the second subject—fallen humanity. The Bible doesn’t only say that we were created in the image of God. If Christian doctrine only talks about the bright sight of human beings, it would become mere idealism that’s unrealistic.
 
But the understanding of human beings in the Bible is realistic because it doesn’t only talk about the fact that we were created in the image of God but also reveals how human beings have lost and distorted it.
 
A famous theologian that I personally like is Reinhold Niebuhr. He once said,
 
“The Christian view of human nature is involved in the paradox of claiming a higher stature for [human beings] and of taking a more serious view of [their] evil than any other anthropology.”
 
The Bible not only affirms the good possibilities of human existence as created by God but, at the same time, it depicts the profound separation, alienation, disorder, and evil that characterize the actual human condition.
 
And this condition is described in one word: ‘fallen.’ The Scriptures clearly say that we are fallen, sinful beings. And this fall is portrayed vividly in Genesis chapter 3.
 
In the previous chapter, God created Adam in His image and put him in the garden of Eden. There were two special trees in the garden—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
 
When putting Adam in the garden, God commanded him,
“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Gn 2:16-17)
 
God gave Adam the right to take care of the world that He created. In the garden, Adam was like a king. But he had to remember that his authority was given to him by God, the true Lord and King of the universe who created everything in it.
 
I think that’s one of the reasons God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden despite the possibility of Adam eating from it and dying. God didn’t make Adam a robot.
 
By giving Adam the choice to obey or disobey, God gave him free will, hoping that Adam would keep choosing to obey God and remain in a close relationship with Him. In other words, obedience was the key to maintaining a proper relationship with God. By obeying God’s command, Adam continued to remind himself that even though he acted like the king in the garden, there was a true King that he was to surrender to.
 
The Great Fall
However, in the next chapter, the relationship was broken because Eve and Adam eventually disobeyed the command and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
 
However, what’s more important than the action of eating is what motivated them to eat. The serpent said to the woman,
 
“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gn 3:5)
 
After hearing this, Eve looked at the tree. And being filled with the desire ‘to be like God,’ she ate from it and then gave some of its fruit to her husband to eat.
 
Here, the phrase “You will be like God” best describes the nature of sin. Sin is to drag God down from His position as King and for us ourselves to sit there. The nature of sin is to deny the God who created us—and who therefore must be the Lord of our lives—and to live as if we’re the lords.
 
Therefore, sin severs our relationship with God because we can only maintain an intimate, close relationship with Him when we’re in the right position in the relationship. God must be the Lord. Otherwise, if we try to take a higher position than God, the relationship is naturally cut off.
 
Sadly, driven by their desire to be like God, Adam and Eve ate from the tree and were banished from the Garden of Eden where God’s presence was. And the severance of the relationship with God affected every area of human life, especially in our relationships with others.
 
Our alienation was not only from God but also from ourselves and others. That’s how the great fall came to the whole world through Adam’s disobedience and human beings lost the image of God that they were created in. The image of God was obscured and distorted by sin.
 
The severance of our relationship with God was reflected in the brokenness of human relationships. The first act that took place outside the Garden was Cain’s murder of Abel. And the violence continued to grow and spread throughout the whole world.
 
In this sense, sin can be defined as the denial of our essential relatedness to others, including God. Fallen humanity denies our dependence on God and rejects our need for others around us.
 
Sin: Resistance to a Relationship with God
So, sin is much more than just a violation of law, or doing something that’s commonly considered bad. Instead, sin is primarily the disruption of our relationship with God. As David writes in Psalms, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps 51:4).
 
The disruption of our relationship with God, which is the essence of sin, appears in many different forms. First, sin takes the form of rejecting God and His grace.
 
If being human in the image of God means life in free response to God, then sin can be described as the resistance to our essential relationship with God and our need for God’s grace. It is to refuse to recognize the limits of our lives and our total dependence on God. Instead of living by God’s grace, whose source is beyond our selves, sin makes us seek to be our own God.
 
So, by this definition, sin is fundamentally opposed to grace. It is to say ‘No’ to receiving God’s grace, and ‘No’ to a life of joyful, complete obedience to God.
 
But the disruption of our relationship with God may take a very different form as well. In rejecting God’s grace, we may also despise ourselves for not meeting worldly standards of being ‘nice’ people.
 
Rather than seeing the beautiful image of God that He has put in us and being grateful for it, we often compare ourselves with others and think that we’re not good enough.
 
Because we fail to find who we truly are in God, we keep looking for other things on which we try to build ourselves. In other words, we allow other things to take the place of God in our lives. This is called the sin of self-rejection and self-hatred. This sin of self-loss is often ignored but it is also a very important aspect of the fall.
 
As a result of the severance of humanity’s relationship with God, we’ve lost who we truly are.
 
So sin can take both aggressive and passive forms. Judas’ act of betrayal was an active, aggressive form of sin. And the fear and denial of the other disciples in the face of Jesus’ trial was also sin in its passive form. We’re to guard against both.
 
The first change we experience in Jesus is how we see ourselves. Everyone loves themselves, but it seems that many people don’t know how to love themselves. And I think it’s impossible for us to love ourselves without God because only in God can we know how worthy we are.
 
The world suggests many standards of ‘worthiness,’ and many people spend all their lives striving to meet them, but God says that we don’t really need those standards because we’re worthy as we are. Those who acknowledge the fact that they have the image of God in them know how worthy they are in Him.
 
That’s the identity we’re to recover in God. And this change of perspective also affects our relationships with others because once we see ourselves as God’s masterpieces, we also see others as God’s valuable, precious children. That’s exactly what sin keeps us from seeing.
 
Sin: Resistance to Relationships with Others
If being human in the image of God means responding to God’s grace by living with others in mutual love and respect, sin is to resist loving others. This sin also has dual forms—active and passive.
 
Sin as domination and mastery over others is familiar to us. However, we should know that sin in our relationships with others is revealed not only in the active way of violating others’ rights, but also in passive indifference to others, which is more common. The problem is, the latter often isn’t recognized as sin even by many Christians.
 
But sin indeed has many faces. Sometimes, the passive form of sin is much more dangerous than the active one. In the Bible we read both ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’. We know that doing what God prohibits us from doing is sin. But at the same time, we should also know that not doing what God commands us to do is a passive form of sin, which is secretly pervasive in many Christians’ lives.
 
That’s what I’m struggling with most. I feel alarmed when I see that I don’t have compassion on others. As Christians, we’re to be interested in what God wants us to be interested in.
 
We are to know where God’s eyes are turning to. When we hear news of war, famine, disasters, persecution, oppression, and all kinds of evil things that are happening in this world right now, we shouldn’t be indifferent to them, thinking that they are none of our business, because they are actually relevant to us if we’re indeed God’s people.
 
We’re to know that indifference is one of the most powerful aspects of sin that severs our relationship with others. So whenever we find ourselves not being concerned about social problems, feeling thankful that we don’t have to deal with them, we need to know that that is a sign that there’s a problem in our relationship with God.
 
If God hadn’t been interested in us or had compassion on us, He wouldn’t have sent His Son to us and we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be saved but would have died in our sin. Jesus didn’t have to come to the world because sin was our problem, not His.
 
But Jesus wasn’t indifferent to us. Rather, He actively loved us by becoming like us, bearing our sin in His body, shedding His precious blood, and dying on the cross.
 
And if we really receive the great love of Jesus, we shouldn’t be indifferent to others. We are to learn how to see others with His eyes and treat them as He treated us.
 
So today, we talked about what caused human beings to fall and what fallen humanity looks like. Just like how the central concept of the image of God lies in our relationship with Him, sin is also very closely related to how we treat our relationship with God.
 
Sin is to resist God, and it takes two forms—the active form of rejecting God’s grace by trying to be the god of our own lives, and the passive form of self-rejection and self-hatred.
 
And sin as resistance to relationships with others also takes two forms—the active form of hurting others and the passive form of being indifferent to others.
 
When we think about how we were created in the image of God to have loving, respectful relationships with Him and with others, we see how sin makes us live in opposition to that. These are the result of losing the image of God in us. That’s the reason the world we’re living in is filled with evil things right now.
 
However, we still find hope in Jesus, because Jesus came to the world to restore the image of God we lost and to make us new creations in Him. That’s what I want to talk about next Sunday. Let’s pray.
 
<Closing prayer>
Heavenly Father, we repent of our sins. We repent of all the moments that we’ve lived without You and all decisions that we’ve made that were not in accordance with Your will.
 
Lord, we still see our sinful nature working powerfully in us.
 
And we don’t have the power within us to resist it. So we ask for Your forgiveness, mercy, and power. Please allow us to see Jesus Christ so that we can recover our relationship with you that has been cut off because of our sin.
 
Let us see how finite and weak we are so that we can continue to ask for Your grace and live by it. Please allow us to see how beautifully You’ve created us in Your image so that we can love ourselves the way You love us.
 
Please forgive us every sin that we’ve committed in our relationship with others, especially our sin of indifference to others’ difficulties. And give us Your heart and Your perspective so that we can see and love them the way You do.
 
We thank You for giving us new hope in Christ Jesus.
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
 
<Sharing>
Today, we talked about fallen humanity and the results of sin. Here are the questions I want us to think about.  
 
1) What active or passive form of sin do you find in your relationship with God? What is the  main thing that keeps you from knowing who you are in God?
 
2) What active or passive form of sin can you find in the world? How are your relationships with others around you? Are you interested in or indifferent to the problems of those around you?