New City Catechism Question 4 with Nate Claiborne

In this episode, Nate Claiborne talks briefly about New City Catechism Question 4:

How and why did God create us?

God created us male and female in his own image to know him, love him, live with him, and glorify him. And it is right that we who were created by God should live to his glory.

Nate highlights the connection between being made in God's image and our ability to glorify him, something we strive to do as a community of people, male and female, adults and children alike.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I am your host, nate Claiborne, and today we are talking about New City Catechism, question 4. How and why did God create us? The answer that we will confess together on Sunday is God created us, male and female, in his own image, to know him, love him, live with him and glorify him. It is right that we who were created by God should live to his glory. We've mentioned a few times that in the app there is a children's mode that provides a shorter answer to the question. For this particular question, that shorter answer that we would encourage you to go over with your children is God created us, male and female, in his own image, to glorify him. I'm actually going to make that the focus of my discussion today, primarily because it's just me again, but also because I think it really does capture the essence of this question really well. We could say that in order to properly image God, we would need to know him, love him, live with him. Those are somewhat included in the idea of living in his image in order to glorify him and hopefully be able to explain why that's a case. As we're talking about the theology of this answer to this question. There's really a lot here, much like last week when we talked about the Trinity. I don't think we'll talk as long today, but we could talk for quite a while about all the theological discussions of what it means to image God and what it means to be made in his image. I'm just going to do a couple things, hopefully, to just keep it simple.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Let's read the passage that it suggests for us, which is from the creation account in Genesis 1. It's from the sixth day in the creation. If we start in verse, we'll actually start in verse 24. Genesis 1.24,. God said Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. It was so God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. God saw that it was good. Then God said Let us make man in our image. Pause right there when it says man, it's really the word for humans, it's let us make humans in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them, male and female. He created them and God blessed them. And he said to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and Every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to Everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life. I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth, the day.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Now we're gonna talk about the, the very good nature of this creation and get into a little bit more of the details of all that God has created in our question for next week, but for this week we'll just go back and look at you. Really, it was verse 26 was our key verse, when God said let us make man or humans in our image or after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So there's something to the image having a connection with, in this case, having dominion, but dominion in the sense of ruling or representing the rule of God, and and some of that we can kind of see and no pun intended by saying see that this idea of image means that we are supposed to reflect God in some ways. We are made after his likeness, but in a way that is supposed to reflect him To the rest of the creation, according to this Creation account, and so you could almost think of the idea of a mirror. When we look in mirrors, we are hopefully seeing an accurate representation of what we look like, and we could say that, for God's original intention is that humans would be an accurate representation of what God is like and Represent him physically on his create, on his earth, on his, in his creation, and that's what Adam and Eve were supposed to do.

Speaker 1: 5:36

There's that kind of draws us into the next point here, and that it is God created us, male and female. So there is not just it's not Men primarily which you could misread that passage to say that but it is humans, both as male and female together who are to image God. And this, this suggests something about the importance of community. It's not that any one of us on our own could image God Adequately or even accurately. It's that we best image God together when we are living in community, male and female, men and women, parents and children, even we could say as a healthy Community, we image God, we reflect him to the rest of his creation or to the rest of the watching world. There should be something distinctive about the way that we live our lives that when people look at it, they could see that we are trying to reflect the God that we say that we know and love. And so in community we're able to image God as male and female and this brings God glory.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Now the connection here, I think, when we say we think back to our short answer God created us, male and female, in his own image, to glorify him. We bring God glory when we show, when we, when we image him accurately, when we reflect him accurately. This, this idea of glory, glory it feels like one of those Bible words that we know how to use and we know we can say things like bring all, do all things to the glory of God. But when you really are pressed for explaining what is what does that word mean? What does it mean to glorify God? One way of answering that question is If you knew that the word that shows up a lot of times in the Old Testament that we translate as glory, it has a a more literal meaning of heavy, so it literally it could be used to talk about something that is weighty or heavy, and metaphorically that means Important.

Speaker 1: 7:46

And so when we, when we bring God glory, we are showing that God is important to us. He's important to the way that we live our lives and if we are trying to reflect him, that we are trying to image him properly, that's bringing him glory, because we're not trying to image other things in our culture, we're not trying to reflect other people or other things. We're trying to reflect God. We're showing that he is important in our lives, that he is the most important thing in our lives. We use this phrase sometimes where we have to be reminded that we are not the center of the universe and that there's something to that. Obviously we're not the center as individuals, or even as a planet, but in some sense God is the center of the universe in that he is the most important thing that is holding his universe together. The weight of his being and I don't mean literal weight, I just mean the gravity even of who he is is what holds everything together. We read about that in the book of Colossians even.

Speaker 1: 8:51

And so there's something to worshiping this God means imaging him correctly, which means striving to follow him, and we see that actually in Jesus. Jesus, it tells us in scripture, is the exact image of God, and so if we really wanna know what it means to image God well, then we do well to apprentice ourselves to Jesus or to follow Jesus and look at how he lived. And following him is how we can as a community of men, women, children, parents can image God well and bring him glory, and so hopefully that can be an encouragement to us that it's not something we have to do on our own, it's something we get to do together. It's something we get to do together in our families, in our communities and in our life together at New City. So we can reflect on that no pun intended a little bit more this week as we get ready for Sunday, and then we can come back again next week, where we'll talk a little bit more about God's creation, and then we can come back.