To Whom Do Our Children Belong? (7)

Today we are pleased to share the seventh instalment of an important work from Geoff Thomas, “To Whom Do Our Children Belong?” The first six are available here and here and here and here and here and here.

Geoff was the pastor at Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, for fifty years. He is retired, and the author of many books and articles, having been a frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world. He still preaches at the Chapel he attends in London, as well as travelling extensively to speak in different churches.

In the previous instalment, it was established that Our Children Belong to God because He Created us.

To Whom Do Our Children Belong?

Our Children Belong to God Because He Made Us in His Image.

Men and women are unique among all the living creatures in the world. We have been made in the image and likeness of God. Caesar demands our taxes. That is mere justice for what he does, and he is asserting his authority to receive our payment by setting his image on our money. But we are all made in God’s image so that we can understand who we are only in relation to some comprehension of who he is – 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). What does it mean that our children are made in the image of God?  How does this reveal itself?

(1) knowledge

Men have a mind and a conscience. Yes, a great deal has been lost. Man’s intellect has been disordered. Man is often mistaken as to matters of fact, origin, purpose, destiny. Man is fallacious in his reasoning, but he is still a rational being; he is capable of investigation, of forensic science, of deliberation, of maintaining the rule of law. He may be a competent scientist or a brilliant reporter, worthy of credit in his field as those politicians of whom Paul wrote, powers that be, ordained of God. The theory of relativity is not invalid simply because Einstein was an agnostic Jew.

Every human being knows the rudiments of the moral law. He knows the wrongfulness of pornography, theft, betrayal and greed. The Romans knew that even as they practised their perversions those who did such things were worthy of death. Felix was not uncomprehending or blasé when Paul reasoned with him of righteousness, self-control and judgment to come. He trembled because his conscience told him Paul was right. He knew! His tragedy was how to stop doing what was wrong and do what was right.

Man knows that the world was made by an omnipotent and glorious God. He understands that truth from the things around him which have the handiwork of God all over them (Romans 1:20). The sunsets over the Irish Sea and the murmurings of the flocks of starlings both tell an observer of the living Creator who made them, while yet that man is refusing to glorify God as the Creator. He clamps down on this truth in his unrighteousness. He knows the being, the power, the goodness and the wrath of God. That is part of the ineradicable mental equipment of every human being, but he suppresses and distorts this knowledge. He says, “I will not have this God rule over me.” The unbelief of men and women who have long sat under a biblical ministry is not due to their ignorance of the Christian message but to their disobedience and defiance. So the fact that men are made in the image of God means that men do have knowledge. What else is a consequence of being made in the image of God?

(2) freedom

Men possess a vestigial freedom. God freely created all things. Of course, in his natural state man suffers from the bondage of the will. His will tells him to reject Christ, ignore the Bible, never think of his eternal soul, dismiss any thoughts of prayer, never question what lies beyond death, and never seek to know God for himself. Man, the slave to King Sin, resolutely obeys his master. In Galatians chapter 3 and in verse 22 we are told that the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin. You understand man is freely submitting to his master, sin. He chooses to obey the exhortations of sin. He is not programmed to respond at the touch of a button. He has not been computerized. He makes his own decision to have nothing to do with his God, as sin has urged him. He is a free agent acting under no external compulsion save that of sin. He is not being forced to say no to Jesus Christ. There is no absolute necessity to reject the gospel. This is his own free choice of sin rather than God.

You understand how significant this is. It is not because of man’s animal ancestry that men kill other men. It is not some necessary stage in humankind’s development. It is not because of glandular reactions or other purely biological phenomena. Christians are no friends of determinists. Christians do not parrot the words ‘whatever will be will be’.  Yes, all our lives as believers have been determined by the loving fore-ordination of our Father in heaven. We sing,

His decrees who formed the earth, Fixed my first and second birth;

Parents, native place, and time, All appointed were by Him.

Times the tempters power to prove; Times to taste the Saviours love;

All must come, and last, and end, As shall please my heavenly Friend.

Plagues and deaths around me fly; Till He bids, I cannot die;

Not a single shaft can hit, Till the God of love sees fit.

John Ryland, 1753-1825

That, however, is very different from saying that my life is mapped out for me by remorseless factors in the environment like the influences of my parents, and working conditions, and companions, and education, and the laws mapping out my society and its values. None of those factors forced people to lie and cheat and lust and kill. I individually and personally made the choice to do those things. Everything is gone if we throw out man’s freedom. Morality is gone if everything is determined and we are mere puppets. We are not prisoners of fate. Hold fast to the doctrine of man’s freedom!

People will protest at our assertion that there is abundant evidence for the living God who created and sustains all things, “Look at the wickedness in the world,” they cry. “See the destruction, disease and death everywhere. How can you believe in God when there is all that?” Surely it is a grim picture, but those are the doings of fallen man who brought sin and death into a creation that was not like that in the beginning – And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)  Boys and girls, men and women, all live their lives in defiance of God. That is their choice.

If you deny the fact that man freely defies God and is deliberately choosing to break his good commandments then you are diminishing man’s sense of responsibility. What a baleful effect that will have on crime and punishment. In Scripture we are presented with man in the most perfect of environments and we see him falling into sin. Later on in the Bible we are presented with young Joseph far from home, meeting the seductions of a married woman and rejecting them. Joseph overcame temptation and maintained his integrity in a very hostile environment. Simply, your guilt and shame cannot be off-loaded onto other factors. Pleading “the devil made me do it” is thrown out of court. You cannot plead the pressures of your companions or your own personality or your genetic inheritance. It is possible to transcend all those pressures. Your guilt is yours! You answer to God. You minimize that and imperil the dignity of man. We refuse to stand before a man found guilty of a crime and say, “He is not to be punished. He could not help it. What he needs is treatment. Inject him and brainwash him.” That is a gross insult. Yes, there are a tiny group of mentally deranged individuals who cannot even plead in a court of law, but the vast majority of law-breakers are accountable men who when caught suffer just retribution. We ask from the legal system that the offender receive precisely the punishment his crime deserves, and when he has served his sentence that he be freed again, his debt paid.

(3) a sense of beauty

The image of God in man means that man retains an aesthetic sense, in other words, man has a sense of beauty; he can create and appreciate form and sound and can respond to it. That is how temptation came to Eve, when she saw that the tree was pleasing to the eye (Genesis 3:6). But intoxicating as it is that man has a sense of beauty, it is also a veritable powder keg. Tribute is paid in Exodus to a man called Bezaleel whose gifts were especially in those areas, that God had filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts  (Exodus 31:2).

We cannot ignore that aspect of human personality, for example, in how we promote the message of Jesus Christ. Of course God overrules the ugliness of our presentation as he does the errors of our doctrine but that justifies neither. What care is shown these days in printing books: the dust-jackets are attractive, and the typeface is large, and the margins are wide. We are not to be obsessed with these things but we are not to ignore them either. Hugh Miller said that the first essential of a book is that it be interesting enough to be read, and for judging a preacher that his sermons be sufficiently engaging that people will attentively listen to him. Without that all the merit of his orthodoxy and righteousness is of little avail. Yet, there is no divine conversion and regeneration in writing, sculpting, painting, composing and playing. Those activities are not man’s chief end. We are not to live for those things. Culture is not our religion; the worst crime for some people is not to be a ‘philistine’. How many are utterly blinded by their appreciation of beauty of form? We know that that attractiveness and style can serve to obscure the evil of the content. It can promote a godless message to be received because the package in which it was offered was attractive. Much contemporary literature and television is basically degrading.

All works of art have a message and the nature of that message is an important factor in the evaluation of the work as a whole. In the parables and discourses of our Lord, in the poetry of Isaiah and David, in the narratives of Luke and in the epistles of Paul, beauty is the handmaid of truth. Goya’s genius proclaims the brutality of war. Shakespeare’s analyses the subtleties of the human heart. Pascal exposes the sophistries of the Jesuits. In Bunyan, Chalmers and Spurgeon, art is wedded to the theology of the Reformation. But modern art proclaims with almost unanimous voice the tenets of ungodliness, and if we apply aesthetic criteria alone the evil goes undetected. Novelists, dramatists and poets have consecrated their genius to the commendation of secularism, permissiveness, violence and despair and the beauty of the form is too often used to excuse the obscenity of the substance. For them it is enough that the work is well-written. It is irrelevant that it degrades. In this situation we must realize, first of all, how easily and how entirely we (and our children) are influenced by what we see and read.  To quote T.S. Eliot, it is the very literature that we read for amusement or purely for pleasure that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, and what people watch on television, demands to be scrutinised most closely.

So far as scrutinising them most closely is concerned, the important point is that literary and aesthetic criteria are not enough. We need more than the assurance, it is well-written and well-acted. We must ask, ‘What is the message?’ And we must evaluate the message in the light of ethical and religious considerations. We must tirelessly criticise it, wrote Eliot, according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press. (Donald Macleod, “God’s Image in Man”, Banner of Truth, Issue 122, November 1973, page 13).

(4) in relationality

The image of God in man shows itself in relationality, in other words, man’s capacity to experience close communion with other people. There have been great friendships in the world, like Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and Coleridge and Wordsworth. One recalls the contemporary friendship of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Los Angeles. In the church there have been friendships like David and Jonathan, Paul and Timothy, or William Cowper and Morley Unwin. How precious are our friends. Yesterday’s newspapers with their lonely hearts’ pages, show us men and women advertising for a companion. The first article of the Christian faith is that God is one, but the one God is not solitary. He is triune; there is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is reflected in the life of man. It is not good for a person to be alone. Take community away from him and he will be the most miserable of creatures. Of course, people are affected by sin in each part of their beings but they are yet capable of natural affection. Husbands and wives are bound together in the commitment of total, permanent and exclusive love. Sacrifices are made for children. Obedience is rendered to parents. There are many wonderful non-Christian marriages, there are some struggling Christian marriages. All men and women are made in the image of God and so are built for other people.

The longing for communion shows itself in the fellowship of Christian believers who come together for mutual support and affection. That is why a division in a church destroys peace of mind, takes sleep away, and ruins the lives of many in the congregation, for we need the friendship of the family of faith. The loneliness of man is one of the basic characteristics that the Gospel addresses. In the world he finds  competition, rivalry, prejudice and animosity. A man finds Christ and finds at the same time the fellowship of those who are also finders. The church is a healing community. Its ethos and influences should be ruthlessly sanctifying. The victims of a callous society should find acceptance, and love, and sympathy. To the Christian not only Christ is precious, the congregation, the body of Christ, is precious, too.

But most of all we are made for communion with God. This was the original relationship, one of peace and love, and its disruption hasn’t destroyed man’s need for it. God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. Come to me and I will give you rest, says the Son of God.

(5) in the distinctive lordship with which man was invested

An element of being made in the image of God is the distinctive lordship with which man has been invested –  And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26). All the animals and birds and fish and insects have been made, and finally man is made and given dominion over them. Man is the image of God. Since God is sovereign then man’s likeness to God involves the exercise of a corresponding sovereignty. He is God’s vice-regent because he is like God. King of all upon earth, but subject to the King above. It is impossible to consider man on a par with other animals. In a multitude of ways God has made him different from them and given him authority over them. In his very anatomy this is evident. You have thought how man’s hands are unique; the tip of each of our fingers is able to touch the tip of the thumb, and the thumb itself can move across the palm of the hand to point to each finger. This is a star feature of the human hand: man alone has a hand like that. Again, man walks on two legs not four so the foot has a large surface of contact with the ground; the hip socket is in a different place in man. Man stands erect; his back bone is vertical not horizontal. Man has frontal vision to see the way he is going. Man has an enlarged brain, and a reduced jaw and weaker teeth, fewer in number. His body is hairless, his palate is domed, shaped like a letter ‘C’. When God made man he made all these features together. They are the features needed for dominion over every other creature before we even consider man’s superior intelligence and powers of concentration. Man may eat sea creatures, birds and animals.  He must ensure that domesticated animals have as pain-free lives and deaths as they possibly can. In nature every animal, sea creature and bird, when it grows too frail to protect itself, meets a gruesome end, being eaten alive. We are under obligation in our authority over the humbler creation to ensure they have a mercifully brief dying.

David Feddes has pointed out how one of the first ministers to believe Darwin’s theories was Charles Kingsley, the author of edifying moral tales for children. He was renowned as a social activist, author, professor, chaplain to the queen, and canon of Westminster. Kingsley said he was in awe of Darwin’s theory, even though it meant, as he put it, “I must give up much that I have believed.” He tried to blend Darwinism with his own version of Anglicanism, known as ‘muscular Christianity.’ Kingsley taught that humans evolved from apes and later received a divine spark, which enabled us to keep making more and more progress toward God’s pattern of perfection. “But what if some people groups did not evolve as far as others, had no divine spark, and couldn’t grasp the gospel of progress? The Black People of Australia, exactly the same race as the African Negro, cannot take in the Gospel,” said Kingsley. “All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly . . . Poor brutes in human shape . . . they must perish off the face of the earth like brute beasts.”

Those ugly words upset John Paton. Unlike Kingsley, Paton was not a powerful figure in society He was just a humble, godly missionary who knew his Bible and personally knew people whom Kingsley had labelled “poor brutes in human shape”. What Paton saw among these people, he said, would shatter to pieces everything that the famous preacher had proclaimed. Paton told how thousands of cannibals were transformed into wise, loving people by believing the Bible’s message of salvation through faith in Jesus. Many went on to be preachers and teachers. Why had they formerly been barbaric and murderous? Not because they hadn’t evolved far enough beyond apes but because they were sinners who did not trust or obey their Creator. They didn’t need to be dismissed as animals. They just needed Jesus Christ and the word of God. They needed to know that they were created in God’s image, that sin had marred God’s image in them, and that Jesus had come to save them from their sin and make God’s image shine in them again.

Ironically, today’s barbarians who seem least able to accept the gospel have a white skin. Throughout Britain, western Europe, and among North America’s intellectual elite, a superstitious faith in evolution blinds many to the gospel. Meanwhile, throughout the world, people with darker skin – far from being too primitive to grasp the gospel – are flocking to Christ by the millions. The apostle Peter was right when he said, God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right (Acts 10:34-35). It’s not race or class but faith and obedience that matter most.

The gospel is the same for all. It begins by teaching that all humans have the same origin: we are descendants of Adam and Eve, created to image God and to rule creation on God’s behalf. Our spiritual dimension, our mental ability, our emotions, our capacity for relationships, our position as the crown of creation, even our bodies – all these are part of what it means to be human and to image God. Herman Bavinck wrote, “Among creatures human nature is the supreme and most perfect revelation of God. We all have the same origin, and we all have the same problem: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We have rebelled against God, defiled and defaced his image in us, and despised and degraded others created in Gods image. The gospel also presents us all with the same solution: faith in the perfect life, sacrificial death, and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel embraces rich and poor, genius and mentally disabled, infant and elderly, male and female of every nation or shade of skin. Scripture says we all must be saved through the blood of one man, Jesus Christ, the man who perfectly images God and is himself divine. With his blood, he purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. . . And they will reign on the earth”. (Revelation 5:9-10) (David Feddes, The Radio Pulpit Back to God Hour, Volume 45, Number 10, “Creation’s Crown”, October 2000, pages 14-17)