The Picture of a Promise

Image by Anja ​

When I was growing up, I remember seeing a brand that was outdoors related that had little stickers that said, “Life is good.” It depicted little stick figures relaxing in hammocks or driving little Jeeps. We’ve often used the phrase ourselves after a great meal, or sitting on the back porch watching our kids play in the yard. There’s nothing wrong with that at all; life is good. But when the hammock isn’t out, or when life is hard, another common phrase in our fallen world, the statement “Life is good” can feel glib or in really dark places, can feel like a lie. That’s where this passage comes in to help us. This passage tells us that not only is life good and worthy of preservation, life is precious because it is made in the image of God. Life is good, and because it is, it has real demands, actual, personal responsibilities on how we treat it. Questions 135-136 of the Larger Catechism go into great detail that the command “you shall not murder” goes way beyond just not killing people, but goes into preserving life as well. In fact, in 136, it sees that the sins this commandment forbids goes all the way down to “desire of revenge; all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.” This passage has a lot to say to us today!  

God provides parameters for people

Our passage begins with a blessing from God. This blessing is going to be the fact that they will be able to be fruitful and multiply on the face of the earth. Seeing children as a divine blessing is something that one scholar highlights in this way: "Children are the universal evidence of the Lord's creation 'blessing,' who are not to be disparaged nor exploited but celebrated by responsible parenting and societal protection" (Matthews, 399). In other words, we need to see children the way God sees them, the way Jesus sees them in the New Testament as people who were worth His time. 

As we go on in our verses, we will see that God is going to lay down a lot of parameters for the protection and respect to all life, human and otherwise. God goes on to tell us that all animal life is given to humanity for food, hence the fact that all the animals now run away from us! We’ve gone from protectors and providers in the garden to predators in the post-flood world. Though the post-flood world was allowed to eat meat, God still puts a parameter around it. We can’t eat it in any old way that we want to. God tells them that they are not able to eat the meat with the blood still in it, blood being a symbol of life, something that comes from God. Everytime human beings are to eat meat, they have to pour out the blood in recognition that life is special and belongs to God. 

Side note: Does this mean we can’t eat medium rare steak? Meat-eaters, rejoice! The answer is no. In short, the red stuff you see coming out of a properly prepared steak actually isn’t blood. It is a protein called myoglobin in animals that turns red when exposed to air. The blood is drained in modern butchering techniques, so go ahead and make your steak medium rare. Be good Presbyterians! 

Now, since even animal life is precious, one could only imagine what is in place to honor human life, and indeed, that is what we find in verses 5-6. Here, we see God institute capital punishment for murder. If you kill someone (or even if an animal does so as we see in Exodus 21:28), God will require all of your blood as the penalty. Now, this is not meant to be a license for personal vengeance, as we see in Romans 13, that it is the government’s job to do. We don’t get to kill people back ourselves. They are going to have to go through the justice system as established by our government. Now, it is worth spelling out what the government is doing by taking on this responsibility. All told, the government is “…executing God's vengeance." (Matthews, 405). They are meant to be carrying out what God would do in light of these verses. That is an enormous responsibility, and one that cannot be entered into lightly. And just because we here in this building aren’t sitting on the bench, doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibilities, indeed, in our country, direct responsibilities. Our most basic duty is to pray for those in our justice system. Our second duty is to be informed and elect our rulers well. Our government (at least as originally envisioned) is for the people, by the people. In other words, as one podcast I listened to this week put it, the government is us. We elect representatives to act on our behalf. So we must choose wisely whom we are going to have representing us as they execute the vengeance of God and pray for them regularly. 

It is also worth noting why human life is getting this kind of treatment. Only human life is made in the image of God, so as one scholar noted, “"First and foremost, the taking of human life is offense against God;" (Matthews, 403). The image of God is what makes taking human life different from animal life. Life in all its forms is precious because it is from God, but human life is made in God’s image. There is a special stamp put on by God on human life. That is why the intentional killing of it demands the ultimate response. 

Why is this important for us to realize and reflect on? One doesn’t have to murder someone to have this verse apply. Anytime we hurt, belittle, or reduce someone we sin against the image of God. I have seen myself do this in traffic. Instead of seeing the person in front of me who forgot to use their blinker as someone who bears God’s image, I reduce them down to an inconvenience to me. Instead of seeing them the way that God sees them, I filter all people down to how they relate to me, how I see them. Often I act as if I am the only one made in the image of God with everyone else around me as either advantages or disadvantages to me. Do you not do the same? Perfectly natural for a sinful human being, but this is not the way that God calls us to act. 

We are called to something far more profound.This isn’t just how we aren’t supposed to act, but governs how we are supposed to act. One scholar pulls this out of the Hebrew, "Obscured by the modern rendering 'fellow man'...is the Hebrew idiom, 'His brother,' [at the end of verse 5]  which possesses a double entendre. Here it echos the first human murder, the fratricide of Cain and Abel, 'his brother' (4:2,8). 'Am I my brother's keeper?' argues Cain...Our passage answers explicitly 'yes.'" (Matthews, 404). Do you hear what he is saying? When someone is murdered by a human being, they are murdered by their brother, and we, as fellow brothers and sisters, need to take care of that. We gotta get involved because the image of God has been insulted. The blood on the ground cries out for justice, and this needs to be dealt with carefully, like we are acting on behalf of God because we are. We are called to care because those are our brothers and sisters. 

This is why Christians have gotten so involved in the abortion tragedy that is in our country, and I’m going to tell you that the fight is going to extend to adults as well. As I said before, it isn’t just the murder of the image of God, like what we see in abortion, that demands our attention. Things that mar the image of God need our focus as well, and that is found in the trans movement.

In the trans movement that we see in our country, there is an assault on the image of God. The trans movement, which is part of a much larger movement called transhumanism, is basically saying that our bodies don’t matter. In this passage, God says that they do. We were made in the image of God, and that includes our bodies. We are not souls zipped up into an “earth suit” that we will one day take off and be free of forever. Paul talks about in Romans 8:23 longing and waiting for the redemption of our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, we see the same hope that our bodies will be renewed and made immortal. Paul is being explicit that the hope is not to be unclothed, but to be further clothed. The goal is not to be rid of the body but to have our bodies redeemed, made immortal, to have and to hold forever! This shows us that God is very concerned about our embodiedness as it really does make us who we are, not just what we have. One secular writer, Mary Harrington, talks about how the trans movement sees our bodies, in a phrase that I desperately wish that I thought of, Meat Lego. We are not meat legos! We are not made of a bunch of different pieces that we can take off and replace. We are a unified whole, body and soul, in the image of God. We care for our bodies. Mary also looked at how we view medicine as going from repairing what was broken to breaking what was perfectly fine (you can listen to the whole podcast here). 

Hear me when I say that repairing that which is physically or mentally broken is fine. Jesus did that. Having a hip replacement to repair the hip that God gave you that wore out due to our fallen world is a blessing to rejoice in. Again, Jesus restored limbs to their proper function (Mark 3:1-6) backs to their proper function (Luke 13:10-17), wombs to their proper function (1 Sam. 1:1-20; Luke 8:43-48). Restoring that which is lost or repairing that which didn’t form correctly is one thing. But it is quite another to try to fix a mental issue like gender dysphoria with the breaking of a perfectly functional body.   

In the last 50 years, our culture has lied to us in both directions of what it meant to be in the image of God as body and soul. The abortion movement told us that it was just a body, with no soul, and the trans movement has told us that you are just a soul with no importance to your body. Might as well not have one. This passage tells us, no, soul and blood (i.e. body) are precious and are not to be spilled. To do so is to neglect our brothers and sisters and cause offense against God. 

So what do we do? One, we need to know what passages like this say to teach the next generations. Even as late as my generation grew up to have somewhat instinctually known that our body is important, but we haven’t really had to know why. We do now. My generation is going to be carrying on this fight that is coming for our kids. Our youth group is dealing with this right now. Those kids in the nursery right now are going to be the ones dealing with the aftermath of this. All of them are looking to us to guide them. It’s time to get serious about knowing what God says. 60 million have died since 1973 because our culture lost sight of God’s view of the soul. Now, around 10,000 people a year are changing their bodies permanently (source) because we’ve lost sight of God’s view of the body. And, yes, it’s happening to young people, too. Knowing John 3:16 and the Lord’s prayer doesn’t cut it. It never really did. God gave us the whole book for a reason, and we’ve got to know it. So that’s the first thing, we’ve got to know what God says. We’ve got to prepare our minds. 

The second thing we need to prepare is our hearts. I’m going to say that we are going to have a crisis on our hands in about ten years. A crisis of people who have made permanent changes to their body and now feel like nothing. It is already happening in Europe, and some individual stories here and there are popping up in this country. Once the culture has swallowed up people’s money and spat out the person, we have the opportunity to say to them, as Rosarria Butterfield put it, “God doesn’t throw people away. The culture did that to you, but we won’t. Yes, you bear the marks of the sin of envy on your body, but one day Jesus is going to take those away.” We can tell them that Jesus cares about their bodies and will raise them up and be restored. All reference to sin will be erased in the new world, even those that we have put on ourselves. God came to earth in a body. Lived in a body. Died in a body. Raised in a body. And most importantly, ascended into heaven with a body, where even now He sits at the right hand of God overseeing the redemption of your body and soul. That’s the hope that we hold out. 

And do you know what we can look to in order to remind ourselves of that? The rainbow. We’ll cover this more next time, but the rainbow is a sign to us that God keeps His promises. He is giving us time and mercy. One day all will be restored. One day, all of God’s enemies will be destroyed. And we will have peace. 

So what do we take from this? God cares about life, and so should we. God gave us bodies that we need to respect and take care of because they, together with our soul, make us who we are. Yes, they break down. Yes, even some of our children and grandchildren break them on purpose, but even then they are not beyond the redemption of God. Approach this issue with that in mind. Tell people the truth. Don’t live by lies. But don’t throw anyone away, because God doesn’t.