This is the first sermon I preached in Ukraine after returning in January 2011 from my Aug-Dec 2010 furlough in the States. The sermon can be considered a highly condensed "take" on the series of sermons I did several years ago, "A Holy Place, A Holy Purpose", which is also posted on this blog. The advantage of this one is, of course, that it gets the gist across in one convenient bite-sized piece.
A particular stylistic touch in this sermon does not, sadly, translate from Russian to English. The very last word of the sermon in Russian is "sotvorim", which means "we will make", from John 14:23 which, in the exact Russian word order, reads like this: "Who loves me, that one will observe word My, and Father My will love him, and We will come to him and {an} abode with him… SOTVORIM." It works beautifully for "sotvorim" to be the final, dramatic conclusion in Russian, because the same word, with its implications, plays a key role almost from the sermon's beginning. Unfortunately, this element of sermonic suspense and climax is lost with the English word-order, with "we will make" rather swallowed up in the middle of the sentence. Besides which, it doesn't even echo "Let us make (man in our image)" in English the way it does in Russian, where it's one and exactly the same word in both places: SOTVORIM. So, having made this something-of-an-excuse, I hope that there is still plenty of worth in the sermon, even without the fine linguistic nuances.
(There is also a slight wordplay at the very end, in Russian, that disappears in English. When the text says, "thanks to His grace", in Russian it sounds like "blah-gah-dah-RYA Yivo blah-gah-DAH-tee", the word for "thanks (to)" coming from the same root as the word "grace.")
By the way, "let us make" is one word in the original Hebrew, too, if I remember correctly.
(Read John 5:39-47)
On the basis of this passage I want to take a look at the first chapters of Genesis, the narrative about the creation of the world, of man, about the Fall, and try to specify there, even if a little, the testimony about Jesus Christ, about who he is, what he's like, what the eternal mystery of God's being and love is, and about how one and the same Person radiates through both the narrative in Genesis and the words of Christ in the Gospel of John.
Before opening Genesis, highlight the following key words from John in your mind:
Scripture
Life
Testify
Glory
Love
Father
Believe
And now we open the first page of Holy Scripture, where it says, "In the beginning." And this is a testimony, testimony to the inscrutable uniqueness, the singularity of God. In the beginning of everything, when nothing else was yet, God chose to commit the act of creation. This was God's choice, God's affair, God's intention and aim. Without our advice, without our participation, commentary, observations—yes, even without our existence before the sixth day! Only God is acting here.
And yet, in this testimony about the unique, singular, sovereign deed of God, we bump into unexpected words in verse 26: "Let-us-make [sotvorim] man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
In this plural "Us" can be heard testimony about Jesus Christ, who said, "I have come in the name of my Father", who spoke about the glory that is exclusively God's, who once prayed, "Father, glorify me with the glory I had with you before the creation of the world."
"Scripture testifies of me", Jesus told the people, and precisely so the Scripture here, in the words "Let us make", hints at the eternal love that was in God and which God was before the creation of the world: "Let us make". You can't mention the plurality of Persons existing in the one eternal God without speaking of love, because love, which God is, consists precisely of the eternal interrelation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It's a remarkable fact—and I consider it not only a fact but also an essential part of the sense and significance of this revelation—it's remarkable that the first time in Scripture where God says "Us", when Scripture first testifies of a plurality in the one God, it's right where God is pronouncing his intention to create man. Think about that. The very concept of "We" first materializes in Scripture in connection with the creation of man. Only here does God say "We"—not when He said, "Let there be light" on the first day, not on the second day, or the third or fourth day, not on any day but the sixth, when He says, "We will make…."
Why? Because only man will be made in the image of God, and the essence of that image is relationship in love. Scripture says that God said, "We will make Man", and then it tells us that He created them, man and woman, and gave Man the right to rule over creation in subjection to no one other than God alone. Being a created reflection of God's nature, Man was endowed with the capacity to choose, to be responsible, to think, to strive, to imagine the future, to develop as a person, grow in love, be in relationship with Man and God, and to peer into the mysteries of his Creator. "We will make man in our image."
Only the eternal God could pronounce the word "We, and He exclusively endowed with this capacity the Man created in His image. He endowed Man with the capacity to love.
But Jesus says with grief in his heart (John 5:42), "But I know you. You do not have the love of God in you." Imagine this. The very Person who once, in the shining glory of God, spoke the word "We", says here in the Person of the Incarnate Son of God, "There is no love in you."
No love? But then what about the image and likeness of that eternal love which God IS? What's left of that image and likeness where… there's no love?
But the eternal Son, whose whole life's meaning—the whole meaning of Life itself which subsists in him—this eternal Son lives for the Father's glory, the glory of the Father with whom he says "We." His whole life's meaning is love. Love is glory with God His Father. And this same Son says in grief, "How can you believe when you receive glory from each other, but the glory that comes from the only God—you don't seek?"
Human glory—yes, there is such a thing—human glory consists in the fact that the One God endowed Man with the image and likeness of the eternal living Creator. To seek a different glory is to strive towards death.
It's no accident, therefore, that when Man fell in sin, he did it looking for another glory. (Genesis 3:6) "And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and was pleasing to the eyes, and desirable because it gave knowledge…"
(Genesis 3:5) "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." Man wanted that knowledge. Man, the only creature in the whole world created in God's image, wanted to become "like God", as if he wasn't already "like God"! He was! In his capacity to love, to communicate, to exert himself for the good and glorious, Man was already "like God", since God invested His image and likeness into him exactly for that. That was God's gift, to man alone.
But the devil fooled Man, deceived him into seeking a different, somehow "better" glory—the glory of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the glory of the knowledge of God Himself.
And having known evil, Man became evil. That's what the Deceiver hid from Man when he said, "You will know good and evil." Man couldn't know evil without experiencing it in himself. Receiving the words of the Deceiver, our first parents instilled into their entire race the inclination to receive deceptive, seductive words. So Jesus says to those who were rejecting him (John 5:43), "I have come in my Father's name, and you don't receive me, but if another comes in his own name, you will receive him."
The One who eternally says "We" in love with the Father, came to us in the name of the Father, but they didn't accept him. But if a deceiver comes, they’ll accept him. Imagine what grief that is to the One Who once said, "We will make Man in our image and in our likeness."
The second time in Scripture when God speaks of Himself using "We", is after God has declared the punishments to Adam, Eve and the snake. (Genesis 3:22): "And the Lord God said, 'The man has now become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat and live forever.'"
It's no accident that when, yet again, the eternal God speaks in the plural, about "Us", the word is pronounced in an event directly tied to the very nature of God and man's likeness to Him. There was a grain of truth in what the snake said to Eve; tasting the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, Man really did find out what evil means, similar to how God knows. But the difference is that God, understanding what evil is, doesn't experience it but remains holy. But unholy Man, having become sinful, mustn't live forever in that kind of condition. That would be an utter distortion of the marvelous original idea of all creation. It would be not only an offense to God but grief to all humanity and creation itself.
Therefore, God—yes, the very same God who is love and who created Man in love—this same God says, once more in the plural "We", that Man mustn't live forever in such a state, in the disfigurement of sin.
By punishing and exiling Man, God saved Man from an eternity of sin, an eternity of life in sin. For when God said, "Let us make man", in His love He intended better for His children – unimaginably better. So even punishing and driving Adam and Eve from the Garden, God is being a Savior.
In the fifth chapter of John, Jesus asserts: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." (vv.39-40)
Compare: in Genesis we read how God forbade Man to touch the tree of life. And that was mercy on God's part. But here in the Gospel we read how the same God, "having taken the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man," doesn't forbid at all. On the contrary, He practically begs the people, with love, to come, take, receive perfect life from Him, life bought at the price of His own life in our place. But they don't want to. They don't believe.
"If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?" (Jn. 5:46-47)
But God , who says "We" within Himself in eternal love, so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have real eternal life in freedom from sin and the joy of pure fellowship with his holy Maker. God, who once revealed His love in the creation of Man, and revealed it again by excluding Man from the tree of Life, displayed the whole essence of His saving love in the sacrifice of the Son, in the sacrifice of the One with Whom He said, "Let us make man in our image", the One who is "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being", the One who thirsted for the glorifying of His Father by the sacrifice of His own life for the redemption of Man. So loved us God. So intent was the Maker to carry out everything to return us to His fellowship and knowledge, to the knowledge and fellowship of the eternal, holy God—so we would be "like God, knowing…" love and holiness.
Jesus Christ offers this new fellowship, thanks to His grace, when he tells his disciples these words (Jn. 14:23): "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and [we will] make our abode with him." (and our abiding place with him we will make.)
(IN RUSSIAN, THE ECHOS OF BOTH THE "WE" AND "WILL MAKE" FROM GENESIS MAKE A PERFECT POETIC AND DRAMATIC ENDING TO THE SERMON, AS THEY ARE THE FINAL WORDS IN THE SENTENCE.)
