THE GLORY OF GOD IS MAN FULLY ALIVE (?)

 

“In the beginning, God created the universe and all in it alone. But when God creates it again, He has with him a partner – man.”

 

I believe that God did not just create everything once and for all. God recreates and that is every moment of the creatures’ life. Once the creative hand of God stop creating, everything ceases to become what it is, including man. It goes on by saying that everything ‘experienced’ a new creation each moment.

In God’s creation, man is the apex of everything (Ps. 8). God made him in His divine image and gave him dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth (Gen 1: 27-29).

Philosophically speaking, God is great even before time began. The glory of the Lord does not rest mainly on His creation. Even without creation, He is magnanimous all the same. He does not necessarily need man’s utterance of praise in order to prove His grandeur. However, the goodness of God prompts Him to share His greatness, which He possessed since time begun. The happiness that He experienced flows out from Him and affected His creation. “The heavens proclaim the glory of God”. Everything that man finds around him tells of the glory, which originates from the Creator.

However, all creatures fail in some way or another to unveil who God really is. They are faint reflections of God’s magnificence. What pictures God in His beauty more is man. This is beautifully enshrined in Psalm 8:

“When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place.

What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him?

You have made him little less than the angels and crowned him glory and honor.”

 

            Indeed, God’s glory is man’s glory; God’s honor is man’s honor; and God’s life is man’s life. Man became the image of God. As ruler over God’s creation, man became the partner of God in recreating the world. He was given the mission: “fill the earth and conquer it (Gen 1:28)”. This mission is essentially to sustain the world. Look! God’s glory is mirrored in the image of the human being; imagine that! Man is the partner of God in sustaining the world, and not angels. What more can he ask for?

            However, we know for the fact that man sins against God. What does this sin of man comprise of?  In the Book of Genesis, the serpent entices Eve in this way: “No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it (fruit), your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who knows what is good and what is bad (Gen 3:5)”.

            Therefore, man disobeyed God’s command because he wanted to be on equal footing with God’s majesty. He wants to rival Him in His goodness and grandeur forgetting that God created him little less than the angels. Now the partner - builder became the enemy-destroyer. And in this way, man ceases to be fully alive; he stops being the image of God’s glory. For in his feeble mind, he thought that the glory he enjoys is intrinsically his.

            So if in the beginning, God fills the world with everything that is good and beautiful, man poisoned the world with his presence. The world was slowly debased in its grandeur and became what it was before: “a formless wasteland and an abyss covered with darkness (Gen 1:1)”. God’s co-builder of beauty became the destroyer of God’s goodness. The glory of God ceases to reflect in his design, more so in being steward of his creation.

 

“The disobedience of man is reflected in the evil of his world. What God has created as good, man has turned it into evil. God – from darkness into light; man – from light into darkness.”

 

            However, the world did not completely end with man’s disobedience. God’s glory even more shines inasmuch as He sustains the world all the more. God’s goodness was not overcome by man’s wickedness. In fact, it became all the more brighter against the formless and dark background of the universe. God even became man! Even if man loses his faith in the all-good God, God did not lose his hope in the all-evil man. Man dies in his sin but God recreates him in His love. A new Man becomes fully alive in order to give life to the fallen man and restore his dignity as image of God, in Jesus Christ. The old man scatters darkness; the new Man brings the light. Simeon sings these famous lines when he saw the child Jesus in the temple:

“My eyes have seen the salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light for the revelation of your people Israel (Lk. 1:69)”.

 

Man again becomes God’s partner in creation. And creation is restored to its beauty and fullness, through Jesus Christ, the New Man. In Jesus Christ, man became fully alive again:

“All things came to be through Him, and without Him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was LIFE, and this life was the light of the human race, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn. 1: 3-5).”

 

“But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God to those who believe in his name (Jn. 1:12).”

 

“God became His image so that man might become a true image of God’s glory to all His creatures.”

 

INDEED, THE GLORY OF GOD IS MAN FULLY ALIVE…

… IN JESUS CHRIST!

 

 

 

By: A. Wilbert S. Dianon, SDB

            Seminaryo ng Don Bosco, Parañaque City, MM

            January 31, 20001