What does it mean to be a human being?

In my Bible, Genesis 1:26-28 has been highlighted for quite sometime, I think about 2 years for verse 26, where it says, “Let us make people in our image, to be like ourselves.” It’s highlighted pink. It was probably the only one I had at the time.

Verse 27 has been highlighted in two parts; “So God created people in his own image;” is highlighted orange, and “God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them” is highlighted yellow. A faded yellow. It’s probably been there 3 years, the orange is far more fresh, perhaps one year.

Then, in verse 28, fresh highlighting from only 6 months ago at a conference has scrawled over “Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters over the fish and birds and all the animals.” Next to it, I have written “The original commission.”

What does it mean to be human? You only have to look at my Bible, on the first page to realise. We were given a huge privilege...and we ruined it all.

Being fully human means that there is a long, hard fought process to figuring any of this thing out. Wright writes “Wise Christian worship takes into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been corrupted and spoiled, so that a great fault line runs down the middle of it - and down the middle of all of us, who, as image-bearing human beings, were meant to be taking care of it.”

My highlighting in my Bible is a perfect example of this. A few years ago, I highlighted the first verse, something in me stirring at the fact that God patterned us after himself. The process began.

Years later, I have had fresh revelation after watching Dan’s video “The nature of the human being” and reading the various media for this week, and the process that has been going in my life through these different moments of reading these verses, has finally been pulled together into a more tidy pile of theological thinking. It is not complete, but it has been pulled together tighter, with a bit more structure, and with a bigger picture painted. But this is just another part of the struggle that rages on, a struggle for my attention between the Creator, and the Fall. I am torn between.

What does it mean to be human? It means a struggle. It means fronting up to the fact that all is not actually “cosy and nice”. It means realising that we took the most amazing gift of all time - being made the imago Dei - and crushed it into the ground in an effort to become higher than it and the One who created it.

And now, things take time to figure out, and things take years to realise. Because of our ego’s, our pride, and our own echo inside us which says “I can be the creator...I can be the one...” we are blinded, side-tracked and quite often have our gaze set shamefully on our own feet, rather than lifted to heaven in adoration of the One who started this whole thing off with a different plan in mind.

The nature of the human being, is being the imago Dei, who ruined things. As John Newton calls the human being in his famous song, Amazing Grace - “a wretch like me.”

It’s weird though, how an understanding of this then opens a can of worms to how amazing God’s grace actually is.