Did God Create Us So Wicked and Perverse?

Did God, then, create man so wicked and perverse? 

• No, on the contrary, 
• God created man good and in His image, 
• that is, in true righteousness and holiness, 
• so that he might rightly know God his Creator, 
• heartily love Him, 
• and live with Him in eternal blessedness to praise and glorify Him. 

The most important purpose of the creation of man in God’s image was in the fellowship with God. 

• That purpose is explained in all that follows the words “so that”:
• so that he might rightly know God his Creator, 
• heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness 
• to praise and glorify Him.

Briefly stated it means that man would have eternal fellowship with God. 

• All too often, we see these things from man’s point of view 
• and then in this way, 
• that therein for man would be the greatest happiness. 

Nevertheless, there is a fundamentally different side: 

• God wanted a response to His love from the world He created;
• God’s honor and pleasure were in the response that He would receive from the world. 
• For that, He made man in His own image.

We always stand in amazement about the fact that God could receive a response to His love from the world He created that satisfied Him, and from which He derived honor and pleasure. 

• After all, what does dust and ashes mean to Him? 
• In the creation of man in God’s image, we see the kind of prominence of man we can hardly realize or describe. 
• God brought forth a creature who was able give a voluntary response to His love, 
• something that was actually an answer that thus responded to God’s love. 

Man was, and continued to be a creature, fully in God’s hand and controlled by Him; 

• and yet there also needed to be in that man his own responsibility
• something spontaneous that went out from him as his own choice, his own answer. 
• Even as God decides and chooses for Himself, so also man must decide and choose for himself. 
• Moreover, something similar was not found in any creature on earth – 
• This personal responsibility is the first thing we observe in the image of God. 

This is merely the formal aspect of God’s image, and at the same time remains its permanent part. 

• Also, those who are lost retain their own responsibility, 
• even as they use this negatively for the eternal rejection of God’s love. 

In the creation of man, so much was connected with this personal responsibility: 

• and because man needed to be a creature with his own responsibility, 
• he was a creature with faith, with love, with a sense of justice and of beauty, with language, with brains, with feelings, etc. 
• All this belongs to the image of God in a formal sense, 
• and cannot be lost; 
• even though it can all in the negative sense be turned against God. 

With his own personal responsibility came also man’s ability potentially to turn away from God. 

• The response of love needed to be given by a free and independent decision. 
• Only then was it an answer that would satisfy God. 
• And only then was it truly a response, a deed of a creature who was God’s image. 

We say sometimes that man was created “changeably good.” 

• That could hardly be different in his being created in God’s image.
• The hour of decision needed to come; 
• only when he had chosen for God’s love in his own responsibility would he eternally remain in that relationship with God. 
• Then his entire subsequent life would be governed by, 
• and bear the character of that first voluntary decision and thus fully satisfy God. 

To be continued...

Adapted Excerpt from The True Faith by Simon Gerrit De Graaf (1889-1955)