A theology of life

Think of the amazing gift we have been given in being made in God's image, in being “image bearers” of the Lord of the universe:

·       We were created for eternity with an eternal soul

·       We were made for a relationship with our creator

·       We were given the gift of relationships with one another

·       We were granted the gift of moral freedom

·       We were given the amazing capacity to create

·       We were given the ability to love deeply

The apostle Paul puts all this in perspective in Ephesians 2:10. “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” The word “workmanship” means a unique work of art, a one of a kind. As unique works of God we were created for a personal relationship with him in Christ Jesus, in order to join him in His work in this world (good works) which God prepared for each of us “in advance.”

In endowing us with His image, He gave something of Himself to mankind. Our very ability to know and love him and one another is part of that gift. I can adore and love my spouse and my children and have meaningful relationships with others because He chose to make me in His image. I can know Him, serve Him, join Him in His work in this world because he made me in His image. I can use all my creativity in loving and caring and serving and living because He made me in His image.

I remember meeting my son Jon for the first time knowing that this was my flesh, my offspring. The day I met my first grandson, Gavrel, was even more profound, Again, here was a precious child with my DNA, flesh of my flesh of my flesh entering the world. In making us in His Image, God deliberately planted something of Himelf in His created. Just as I look at my grandson with a love too deep to describe, so He looks at us with a love that is able to see beyond all of our brokenness for He sees His image in us, however flawed by the entrance of sin into our world – deliberately planted in us by Him.

Our news is full of stories of the brokenness of our world. It is easy to become numb to the human needs and issues we become aware of. But stop for a moment and put on the lens of God. Your neighbor who is hurting is made in God’s image. The thousands of children who needlessly suffer from malaria every year for lack of mosquito netting are made in His image.

The disabled who are so easily treated as throw away people in much of the world are made in His image. Those who suffer from chronic dysentery for lack of clean water are made in His image. Those young slaves of the sex trade internationally are image bearers of God. The millions who are aborted annually are stamped with His imprint. The elderly who are shuffled off to a lonely existence are made in His image.

Seen in that light, we cannot ignore the spiritual and human needs around us or of our world and be like Jesus. Life is precious. People are precious. Even the most broken individual is a potential son or daughter of the king because all were stamped with His image. 

No other part of God’s creation was endowed with an eternal soul or an eternal destiny. To care for people and their situations is to see people as Jesus sees them and to love them as He loves them. To live selfishly, immune from the suffering of others is to reject the nobility God placed within man, even though sin has made much so ignoble.

Every time we uphold the dignity of human life, uphold biblical sexuality, treat our spouses well, care for those that society throws away: widows, orphans, AIDS victims, those with unwanted pregnancies, the disabled, the sick, those in dire poverty, the elderly, we join Jesus in bringing value to life made in His image. We join Jesus in His prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” How is it done in heaven? Perfectly! 

When we join Him in meeting the physical and spiritual needs of our world we start bringing little bits of heaven and His values to a world that is lost and dehumanizing to those He created. We join Him in His quest to reimage an image made wrong by sin and bring out the beauty of what God originally intended.

We cannot meet all the needs of our broken world but we can make a difference for someone who is an image bearer of God. Every act of compassion that meets physical and spiritual needs is an act of obedience to our Father who cares so deeply for every human being. He hurts when they hurt, and wants every image bearer to find Him and be ReImaged into His likeness. 

Every time we go out of our way to bring life to a situation, we make the heart of God glad. Each word that encourages, touch that shows love, help that brings hope or Good News that speaks to the soul mirrors the heart of God toward those He created. None are beyond His grace, none are too broken for his healing or beyond His divine touch. 

Do you see people through human eyes or Jesus' eyes? 

The fall and its direct connection to us today

While we don’t think of the fall very often, it changed everything for our world and for our lives. There is a direct connection between every sin we struggle with and every heartache we experience with the fall, when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God.

With the fall, what God had declared to be “good” and “very good” became bad and very bad. It is hard to comprehend the terrible consequences of that act of disobedience for in an instant everything changed. Immediately Adam and Eve lost the innocence of righteousness and realized they were naked and ashamed. Then when God came to commune with them as He did in the garden they hid from Him.

For the first time, they understood and felt guilt. For the first time they were afraid of God. For the first time they experienced relational disconnect as Adam blamed Eve. For the first time they blamed others for their sin: Eve, Satan and Adam, Eve. It was an awful, terrible, cataclysmic day of firsts that has dogged every one of our footsteps down to the present day. No longer would God walk with them in the garden. No longer could they even remain in the garden. For the first time, hardships would enter their lives and they and their offspring would suffer all of the effects of sin: Relational brokenness with God, with one another, disease, death, sorrow, pain, murder, war, bondage, addictions, and all the brokenness that we have experienced firsthand.

Of all the consequences of the image being broken the one most cataclysmic in its implications was the separation of the created with the creator. From friends with God we became enemies of God. Our sin made us objects of His wrath for sin cannot co-exist with absolute righteous holiness. 

From people destined for eternity with Him we now became people destined for eternity without him as well as physical decay and death.  Righteous hearts turned dark. Communion with God became distant where it existed at all. A friendly world turned unfriendly and uncooperative. It was a tsunami shift in every way.

Every heartache we have suffered, every fear, every setback, every funeral we have attended, every sadness we feel, depression we suffer from, sin we struggle with, physical ailment we deal with, emotions we struggle with – it all goes back to the fall. It was in every way a very far fall, a fall so far that it is impossible to adequately describe its impact. It was an eternal fall as people destined for life with God became absolutely separated from God. It was a massive fall as hearts that once embraced God now rejected Him. It was a fearful fall as people who once treated one another with love now used people for their own purposes. A perfect image became a ruined facsimile of its original form.

Yet, God in His love and grace left a residue of His image even in the fall. This includes a knowledge in the hearts of men and women that there is more to life than mere physical existence and a desire to understand what that is. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet on one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Think about that: eternity set in our hearts so that we would look for eternal significance. Yet it is still frustrating because “no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Paul makes a similar point in Romans 1:18-20, that God has indeed made himself known to mankind. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” 

The very magnificence of creation in all of its forms from the galaxies in the skies to the beauty of the depths of the seas clearly demonstrates that there is an eternal hand behind all of creation.

Furthermore, God left in the human heart the capacity, through our choice, and God’s call to respond to Him and to enter into new life with Him. In fact, His intention to come and rescue a world gone terribly wrong was announced at the very time that he pronounced judgment on Satan and Adam and Eve at the fall.

“So the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heel.”

It seems that serpents were forever destined to crawl on the ground as they became a symbol of Satan who had appeared to Eve in the form of a snake. But more important is what God says about the relationship between Satan and the woman and her offspring. There will be enmity between Satan and Eve which is understandable given his part in this terrible event. Eve would never forget the awful event that Satan had enticed her to participate in.

But then God says something more interesting. He will put enmity between Satan’s offspring and hers. But the apex of this verse is the last phrase, “he will crush your head and you will strike his heal.” 

Here God introduces a single male offspring who will eventually come and who will crush the head of Satan once and for all even as Satan strikes his heel. This is the first reference in Scripture to the One who would one day come and defeat Satan. Even on this terrible day that changed all of history, there would be another day that would also change history, the day that a Savior would come and defeat the evil one.

Think about this. From that day forward, Satan knew that he would be defeated by an unknown male offspring of Eve. He lived in eternal fear of who that would be and when that day would come. It is clear he recognized Jesus for who He was when He ministered on earth, which is why Satan tried to entice Him to follow Him in the desert temptations immediately after Jesus’ baptism by John. And, on Good Friday he was ecstatic that God’s Son was crucified! He had won! He had defeated the one who came to defeat him. Little did he count on Resurrection Sunday and on that day he knew he had met his waterloo. He had lost. God had won and all he could do from that day forward was to fight a losing rearguard battle.

All of history from the awful day of the fall has been a story of redemption as God, out of amazing love for rebellious people put in place His divine rescue operation that would climax with the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus and culminate in a New Heavens and New Earth where God and His redeemed will live for all time. 

Is your heart restless?

The older I get the more restless I am. For something more, something deeper, something that will fill my soul. There is a reason for that restlessness.

God created men and women specifically to have a relationship with their creator. In fact, it says that in the cool of the evening God would physically stroll in the garden with Adam and Eve. He took great pleasure in their company. The popular view of God for many, including Christ followers is that we should be afraid of Him. Yet, the creation account would indicate that God delights in the fellowship of His created.

Remember that God is three in one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They, as One, experience perfect relational peace with one another. In the same way, God created Adam and Eve to experience that relational peace with Him. As the Father delights in fellowship with the Son and the Holy Spirit, so He delights in the fellowship of those He created. In fact, he created us for fellowship with Him. Until they disobeyed God and understood what sin was, Adam and Eve simply took it for granted that they could commune with Him. It was natural, unimpeded, and just as God created it to be.

Here is the mystery of God’s heart: That he would want to create us in order to have fellowship with us. In order to love us and be loved by us. He delights in our worship of Him and he delights in showing His love to us. It was to men and women that God gave the capacity through our souls to have a relationship with Him. Of the created order, only mankind has this great privilege! It is no mistake that Satan went for the juggler with Eve: he specifically tried to sever and destroy this relationship that they were made for with God. In doing so he went to the very core: the fellowship and relationship between the created and the creator.

We often think that we have an obligation to spend time with God. That somehow by doing so we gain God’s favor. Here is the truth: God delights in our presence with Him. It is hard to understand but He, complete as He is in Himself, loves to be in our presence. This is the lesson of Mary and Martha in the Gospels. Martha was full of doing (obligation) while Mary simply sat at the feet of Jesus to listen. Jesus said to Martha, “Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.”

It has been said that there is a hole in every human heart that only God can fill. It is why mankind seeks in all kinds of ways to discover the transcendent and relate to God even when looking in the wrong places. The reason for this is that our hearts were designed from the beginning for relationship with our creator. We were designed for Him! It is integral to being made in His image. That is why the longings of our hearts are never completely satisfied by anything else – or anyone else. As image bearers we are never complete until we are connected in heart relationship with the One who created us and the closer that relationship the more complete we become.

Redefining what it means to be pro life

I would like to redefine the "life" issue from a one topic agenda to a holistic view of life from a broader theological framework. Being pro life for me is not being anti abortion (although I am) but about understanding the sacredness of all human life and what it means to be a life giver like Jesus (John 10:10) in all situations. 


Why is human life sacred? Because God imbued it with an eternal soul! This is part of what it means to be made in His image. This is why God was so angry when Cain killed Able in the worlds first homicide. He had taken the life of a living person with an eternal soul who was made in God’s image. That eternal soul is a reflection of God’s eternal being and to treat it without the greatest dignity is to demean God Himself.

How we treat other human beings matters because they are made in His image. Unlike the animal kingdom they have eternal souls. This is the foundation of the command, “Thou shall not kill.” This is why Able’s blood cried out to God when Cain killed him (Genesis 4:10). This is also why God demanded strong punishment for those who murdered others, "For in the image of God has God made mankind (Genesis 9:6)."

Based on this understanding of the sacredness of human life, it was the early Christians who fought against the infanticide of unwanted infants in the Roman empire. It was Christians who cared for those dying of the plague throughout the Middle Ages, at the risk of their own lives. It is why Christians established orphanages, hospitals and homes for the elderly. Human life is sacred. It possesses an eternal soul. It is to be honored, cared for, and treated with dignity and respect. Anything that detracts from the dignity of human life is to be resisted. It possesses an eternal, God given soul.


This is why we care about those that others often ignore: the sick, the elderly, the marginalized and the disabled. It is the "widows and orphans" that scripture talks so much about. This is why we care about issues like human trafficking, pornography, prostitution, racial discrimination, injustice, famine and the atrocities of war. Human life is sacred and anything that takes away from its dignity is an affront to God and the image He gave each one.


Being pro-life is caring about the dignity of all people, understanding the intrinsic value of all people based on their eternal soul and being made in the image of their creator. I want to be pro-life in every relationship I have by treating each individual with dignity and honor.

Moral freedom and what it tells us about God's love for us

An amazing aspect of being made in the image of God is the gift we were given of moral freedom. It is amazing given the cost God knew He would pay for that gift.

Because mankind was created for relationship with God, it was imperative that they be given the choice of whether to choose or reject Him. To force someone to love another is not love but coercion. God would not coerce His creation. Rather He created Adam and Eve with pure hearts, unmarred by any sin, but still He gave them a choice: They could eat from any tree in the garden except one and if they ate of that one tree they would die.

The fact that God created mankind with moral freedom to choose right or wrong tells us a great deal about Him. Choosing Him and righteousness had to be a free choice if it was to be a true relationship and followership. Adam and Eve had a great advantage that we do not have, they were without a sin nature, so like Jesus who lived a sinless life, they could choose to reject sin. And they did, until that fateful day in the garden when they discovered the awful ramifications of their choice to rebel.

There is another facet to giving mankind this choice to follow or not. God is omniscient, which means that He knows all things, from beginning to end. Thus He knew that in giving mankind moral freedom that they would choose to rebel. He also knew that He would initiate a divine rescue operation that would cost His Son His life on the cross to pay for our sin. Knowing all this, He still chose to create mankind – knowing full well the cost it would require to redeem men and women from their sin.

What this tells us is the value that God places on men and women created in His image. Not only was He willing to create them knowing the outcome but in spite of their rebellion and the cost of reconciling men and women to God, he still desires our love, followership and fellowship.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 5:6-8. "You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

 If you ever wonder how much God loves you or desires your love and followership just think of the price he knew he would pay in order to make that love and followership possible.  He created us for fellowship with Him. In order to make that fellowship a free choice on our part he gave us the gift of moral freedom in spite of the cost to Him. That is how much He desires our freely given love and worship.

Image Bearers

Before the universe was, there was nothing: a vast dark infinity without time, beginning, light or sound. Except, in that place known as heaven where God resided, One in Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perfect fellowship, surrounded by multitudes of angelic beings worshipping their God day and night. Here there was the light and joy of God, the music of the heavenly hosts and perfect peace.

But the heart of God was restless. And a restless heart is not easily satisfied. God had the worship of the heavenly hosts but they were created to worship. God had the perfect fellowship of the triune Godhead but His heart was restless still. We cannot know what was in the mind of God except by what He has revealed to us in His word and echoes of His creation.

We exist because of God’s restless heart. It is a heart made for fellowship and worship. Why God would crave the fellowship of others is hard to fathom but that is His heart, to give and to receive love. The very fact that we exist is testimony to the loving heart of God who chose to give us life. He did not need mankind but he chose to bless us with life so that we could live in fellowship with Him. Without His love we would not be.

Every story has a beginning and this one does as well. In fact, this beginning reveals the amazing heart of God for He chose to not only bring creation into being but to create the master work of His creation, mankind, in His image. Everything in this story, everything important to you goes back to these amazing and incomprehensible words:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind 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 mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).”

These simple words contain within them the amazing heart of God. In creating the universe and fashioning our planet, in setting the stars in place with its billions of numbers, in carving out the seas and forming the mountain heights, God showed his creativity.

Into that setting he brought the life of flora and fauna that brings beauty to our days and food for our bodies. The animals of the land, the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea reflect not only His creativity but His sense of humor. What child is not delighted to go to the zoo and marvel at the amazing faces that stare back at them and laugh at the antics of chimpanzees or the impossibly long necks of giraffes!

This is no Darwinian saga but the creativity of our amazing God. What do you think He was thinking when He created the kangaroo? Or the peacock? Or playful dolphins and funny looking penguins? Or what about dinosaurs? Anyone who thinks God does not have a sense of humor has not looked carefully at His creation!

But the last of His creation was different in every way. The words, “Let us make mankind in our likeness” or “image” puts a great distance between all other creation and the creation of man and woman. Here was not an expression of His humor but His heart. For here the creator endows His created with nobility, a precious and unprecedented gift – something of Him, something that reflects His majesty, something that no other creature has: His Image! Not only did God personally form the first man but He breathed His breath into him, “the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).”

You and I and every human who has ever walked this earth are image bearers of our creator! Think about that. You are made in God’s image. You were deliberately created by God in His image. In some way you bear His likeness. He is the God of the universe and you are imaged after Him. Even after the fall when Adam and Eve fell into sin remnants of that image remain.