Bible Questions

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The Bible is full of statements that people like me may, in the past, tend to (or have tended to) reject out of hand for what would look like as being blatantly false. I've decided to spend the rest of my life seeking to understanding the Bible so I must also seek to resolve problems like this when I come across them. In what follows I address some ideas regarding this notion. I also touch on questions people have about God which the Bible addresses directly.

"God created man to His own image"

Recently, perhaps back in November of 2005, I came across a book which addresses a comment in the Bible which has always confused me. The comment is from Genesis 1:27-28 which says

So God created man to His own image, to the image of God he created him; ...

At various times throughout my life I have found it from difficult to impossible to fathom what this means. The Father is far from being comprehensible to the human mind and to even have what we would refer to as an image may be meaningless. So I was quite perplexed. Come to the rescue St. Augustine who said

Man is a noble being created in the image of God, not as regards his body, but in that he excels the brute animals because of the gift of a rational soul.

And St. Thomas Aquinas says further 

Man excels all animals by his reason and intelligence; thus, it is because of his intelligence and reason, which are spiritual, that man is said to be according to the image of God.

This still leaves the question of what God actually looks like. This we will never know and we cannot possibly imagine. There is a wonderful book out called The Knowledge of the Holy, by A.W. Tozer. On page 7 Tozer writes

When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea from our own head and make it mean "in the exact image." To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that-which-is-not-God. To think of creature and Creator alike in essential being is to rob God of most of His attributes and reduce Him to the status of a creature.

And thus I have come to an answer with which I can be comfortable with. Each of us must find their own answers.

The creation of the universe has been described in scientific terms and compared to Genesis by Nathan Aviezer in his book In the Beginning ... Biblical Creation and Science. The correlation Aviezer establishes is astonishing!

To be continued....

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