The Uniqueness of Man. Gen 2:7
Luke 1:44, “For, lo, as soon as the
voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for
joy.” When we look at that verse in the English it looks as if the baby is
leaping is caused by joy. This is the preposition “for” which in English is a
multi-functional preposition. It can be used in a number of different contexts.
But what we have here is interesting phraseology in the Greek. It is not the
normal word that one would expect for joy, which is the word CHARA [xara], it is the
preposition EN [e)n] plus AGALLIAO, [a)galliaw] another word for exuberance or exultation. This is a word that is used
for exaltation in the Psalms to translate the word “joy” when the context is
salvation. So that relates to the fact that the Messiah is coming and there is
joy because of His coming. But this phrase “in” does not have the idea of
cause. Cf. Ephesians 2:8, which is not “because of faith” which would be the
preposition DIA [dia] plus the accusative, it is the phrase DIA plus the genitive. When you have DIA plus the
accusative, that expresses cause. DIA plus the
genitive indicates intermediate means, “through faith” is Ephesians 2:8. So
here we don’t have DIA plus the accusative which expresses causation. What
we have is EN plus the dative which usually indicates some kind of
means or instrumentality. But even that is an unusual idea in this kind of
context, and according to the latest edition of the Greek lexicon Arndt and
Gingrich this usage is the mark of circumstance or the condition under which
something takes place. So this is the condition under which the leaping takes
place. So the joy, then, is not necessarily that of the fetus. The English
translation makes it look like the baby is having joy, but that is a
particularly troubling concept on a number of fronts.
Genesis 2:7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The next issue that
we need to address, developing from this verse, is the answer to the question:
What is man? “And the LORD God” – emphasis on the LORD as Yahweh, the creator of
Israel and the one who is in a covenant relationship with Israel; therefore
bringing into play at this stage a moral quality to God. What is being referred
to when using the idea of morality is that God is a holy God. That word “holy”
is over used and doesn’t have a lot of significance and meaning in our
every-day language. It is a word that has to do with the fact that God is set
apart. He is unique in His righteousness and His justice. So we refer to that
as part of His integrity. God is holy. He is righteous and just, which means
righteousness is the absolute standard of His character, it is absolute
perfection, and justice is the application of that standard to His creatures.
What we are saying here is that the Hebrew tetragrammaton, YHWH, is directly related in the minds of the Jew to the Mosaic
covenant that God has given to
Israel. That covenant is preceded by a preamble that is called the Decalogue or
the ten commandments. God has one commandment He is about to give Adam in
Genesis 2, but in Exodus He has ten commandments that precede the giving of the
Mosaic law. When the Jews thought of Yahweh they thought of His covenant which
imposed the righteous standards of God on people. So whenever we see the use of
the term Yahweh in the Scripture part
of the the baggage that that word is carrying is this quality of righteousness.
It brings in the fact that there is a moral mandate placed inherently upon man
as the image of God.
“ … and man became a living
soul/being.” The word for soul in the Hebrew is nephesh. In the Septuagint the Hebrew word nephesh was translated PSUCHE [yuxh], which we usually transliterate “psyche.” These are
important words which we tend to translate into English with the English word
“soul.”
We are answering the question from
this verse, What is man? The Psalmist asked, What is man that thou art mindful
of him? … you have made him a little lower than the angels,” but he will be
elevated eventually above the angels. Why is it important to begin here with
understanding man? We can’t start with human observations because our
observations are always going to be limited and affected by the fact that we
are sinners with an orientation to rebellion against God and rejection of God’s
absolutes. That does not mean that empiricism and rationalism do not have their
place, do not have their value and some significance, but they must operate
within the framework of revelation. What happens as a result of the fall is
that fallen man rejects, blocks out, special revelation of Scripture so that he
is left with empiricism, rationalism and mysticism operating independently.
Illustration from Genesis 2: When God places Adam in the garden, let’s say God
didn’t give him any revelation. All Adam has is his unfallen, unaffected five
senses and his reasoning—better than anything we have. Under this idea
Adam can go out and investigate all the trees, all the animals, and come up
with many different conclusions based on his observations of the data. Yet
there is one conclusion that he could not come up with by observing the data.
He couldn’t learn that by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil he would die. He could only learn that from revelation. So
observation is good to a point but it is limited. There are certain things we
can only know because they are revealed to us by God. So reason and empiricism
operate within the boundaries established by revelation. We have to start with
a biblical anthropology, a biblical understanding of man and his nature. What
we see is that this affects many areas of study. It affects biology. If we
study biology without taking into account the fact that man was created from
the dust of the soil as God says, then we are going to have a skewed view of
biology at some level. It affects anthropology, which is a branch of sociology
in the study of man and the development of humanity. It affects sociology and
psychology.
Then we get into another part of
this subject in this chapter as look at man’s relationship to nature, because
he is set over nature and there is quite a difference between the human
viewpoint concept of man and the divine viewpoint concept of man. In human
viewpoint paganism, which goes all the way back to the ancient world, is the
idea that there is a continuity of being. This is the idea that there is no
major distinction between anything in nature and man and God. As we go up the
chain of being from nature, to man, to god, there is only a difference of
complexity and a difference in degree, but there is no difference in kind. So
they are all part of the same chain. The only difference between gods and man
is that the gods have more power and more ability. For example, in ancient
Greek mythology the gods are prone to all the same foibles and failures and
flaws as any human being, but they are blown up in their magnitude. Their
powers are greater but the are still human beings. Man is just another
extension of nature. Ultimately there is no difference between man who is just
another biological creature, another kind of animal. That is the whole
continuity or chain of being idea. Yet this is not what the Bible teaches in
terms of divine viewpoint. In terms of human viewpoint man is then part of nature,
he is just another cog in nature. This idea has radical implications on how one
views the environment and technology and the use of nature in technology.
Whereas the biblical view, the divine viewpoint, what we have is the
creator-creature distinction. The creator is wholly and completely distinct
from His creation. This is the biblical teaching of ex-nihilo creation, that there is a distinction between the creator
and the creature; and they are not the same, they are completely different in
kind. In creation there are two distinctions, the animals and the rest of
nature on one level, but over them and completely separate is man. He is unique
in all of creation; he is not another animal. The Bible teaches that man was
set over nature to rule nature and to have dominion over nature.
The word PSUCHE is a real blight on our understanding. If we are of western European
descent, either physically or intellectually, then we have been infected by a
false view of the soul/PSUCHE, and that is because we are all heirs of the
intellectual tradition of the Greeks— Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Plato had a certain view of the soul that really dominated later Greek thought.
It became a major problem in Gnosticism and Docetism. The Gnostics saw this
dualism and separation between what they called spirit and matter. In their
thinking spirit was good and matter was inherently evil. So the soul/PSUCHE in Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought is in the realm of the spirit.
Plato had the idea of pre-existent souls. There is one important implication
from the idea of a pre-existent soul. That is, that the soul can exist without
the body. That gives the idea that the soul is important and the body is
somehow less significant. This is where the idea that matter is evil comes from.
The body is material, so it is evil. The error in this is that it downplays the
body. How did that affect thought? In the early church it affected thought in
monasticism. Monasticism was heavily influenced by this whole idea form
neo-Platonism, and so that affects their view of sex. God creates Adam and Isha
from the very beginning to enjoy sexual relations as something that is
pleasurable, and it is not merely functional, i.e. for the purpose of having
children. But in medieval thought in the early middle ages and the early church
fathers there was picked up this idea from Platonism that anything associated
with the body is not that; so therefore sex isn’t that good and should be
restricted to only producing offspring and if you have sex for pleasure that is
a sin. So we have to recognize and be very careful how we handle the idea of
soul because we don’t want to pick up this sort of autonomous idea from Plato
that the soul can have an independent non-bodily association.
1)
Man’s unique
creation. When we look at this in terms of divine viewpoint and human viewpoint
what we see in human viewpoint is that man is the product of chance plus time.
He just happened and is a cosmic gamble. Self-image is the emphasis in human
viewpoint and in contrast to this we have in divine viewpoint the image of God.
Genesis 1:26-28. For the believer the issue is not self-image, it is the image
of God or the image of Christ. What happens at the fall is that image of God is
marred and distorted and corrupted by sin. It is not destroyed or erased; it is
simply corrupted. But at regeneration there is a new birth, a spiritual birth,
and then for the Church Age believer there is a renewal that takes place in the
believer as he grows and advances in the Scriptures, and this is called the
image of Christ—Colossians 3:10, “And have put on the new self [which
comes with regeneration], who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to—KATA [kata] plus the
accusative, according to a standard—the image of him that created him.”
Romans 8:29, we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ, so there
is a renewal of that image taking place through progressive sanctification as
the believer matures and grows. This shows that there is an importance to man
that is based not on who and what man is or what he does—his value isn’t
based on what he does. His value is based on the fact that he was created in
the image and likeness of God and even though born a fallen sinner he still
bears that image. The image is the totality of man. There are two errors that
people have slipped into over the years. The first is that the image is the
physical body of the human being. This is the distortion that you find in
Mormonism. Their idea is that God has a physical body. On the other hand, to
avoid idolatry and a too-heavy emphasis on the material body, Christians have
tended to restrict the image to just the invisible or immaterial. The human
soul never exists without a body.