Genesis 5:2 (NKJV)
He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.
This is a blessing God gives to all peoples, regardless of belief in Jesus Christ. It is the blessing of our humanity, our nature. It is that which makes us uniquely mankind. And while we celebrate the rest of creation, we must never forget the special blessing of our humanity.
This blessing which makes our position special is not that we're at the top of the food chain, but that we've been created in God's image.
Of course, this doesn't mean we're like God when it comes to power, wisdom, worthiness, and a whole host of things which define God, for life experiences tell us otherwise, often times in all too painful ways. But when it comes to being created in God's image, I think of two special things. These are our blessing of being mankind.
The first is that we've been created in God's image to have a soul. This is makes us different from other animals, for both God and mankind are the same through our spiritual nature. From our earliest days, we're inward thinkers. We're introspective. Some call this our consciousness, or our inner being, or our selves, but this is what makes people uniquely blessed of God.
We're the only ones with a soul. We're the only one of the animal kingdom with the capacity to make moral decisions. Our spiritual nature tells us right from wrong. Without it, we'd have no society at all, with the strongest ruling according to the forces of their might.
That leads to the second aspect of this blessing--we're created to live in relationship. That's the whole idea point male and female. God made one from the other, and then called us both mankind. We can't be separated. We're both needed to identify humanity.
At its core, our sexual nature is all about living in relationship. This is God's image given to us. This is the image which tugs upon our souls to know God, to want to commune with him, to desire to please him.
In recent decades, people have begun to struggle with their self-image. Am I really male or female, or even both? Am I really any different from the rest of the animals? Am I just part of natural selection and evolution? The Bible warns that these types of questions come when people purposefully forget the blessing we have in being created in God's image.
When God is out of the equation, we're forced to see ourselves as nothing special at all. No wonder people are so messed up. The spirit nature continuously tells us we've got it all wrong, calling us to reach out and accept God's blessing for ourselves, but the rest of humanity says there is no God!
The only way out of this struggle is to embrace God's blessing, that he's created us uniquely as humanity, and he remains ready to have a relationship with you.
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