WEEK FOUR INTRODUCTION
GOD’S PROJECT: FORMING HUMAN BEINGS
March 24 - March 30

Genesis 1 describes God’s special project,  “Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness.” This deliberate fashioning of the human being was the focus of God’s eternal plan. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states it beautifully, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The human being was the crowning glory of God’s creation. Pastor Scott Hescht writes, “To be fully human means to live into our true humanity the way God originally designed it. Jesus was the most fully human human to ever live; the way he loved, healed and forgave. Then by dealing with the power that sin and death has over humanity he gives us the freedom to begin to live likewise.” Yet, Christian theology teaches us that it is only through the valley of death and entrance into Heaven that we will become fully human. “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:20).

Sunday, March 24
God, The Lover of Human Beings
Scripture: Genesis 1:26-28
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And 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 him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and 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.”

Poetry:
Have You Eaten of the Tree?
by Paul Hoover

And the fourth river is the Euphrates

The first day was a long day
and the first night nearly eternal.
No thing existed, and only One was present
to perceive what wasn’t there.
No meaning as we know it;
difference was bound in the All.
On the first day, water,
on the second day, land,
on the third day, two kinds of light,
one of them night.
On the fourth day, laughter,
and darkness saw it was good.  
But when God laughed,
a crack ran through creation.
On the fourth night, sorrow,
staring away from heaven,
torn in its ownness.
No evidence then of nothing,
but worlds upon worlds,
underwritten, overflowing:
the worlds of fear and of longing,
lacking in belief,
and the pitiful world of love,
forever granting its own wishes.
Out of dust, like golems,
God created man and woman,
and cast them into chance.
And man was subdued in those days.
All that could leap, leapt;
all that could weep, wept.
First of all places, Eden;
last of all places, Cleveland;
and a river flowed out of Eden,
inspiring in the dry land
a panic of growth and harvest season.
The newly formed creation
took from flesh its beast
and from each word its sentence.
And early loves and hatreds blew
from thistle to thorn.
Each thing that God created,
he placed before man
so that he may name it:
cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,
and for each thing that man made,
God provided the name:
andiron, Nietzsche, corporation.
All speak of pain
subtle in its clamor,
as when the child, dying,
sinks into its skin
as under public snow.
Heartrending, each termination;
God-shaken, each beginning.
At the dawn of smoke,
pungent as creation,
the long chaos rises over these trees.
For we opened our eyes in Eden,
with the taste of fruit on our lips.
(Genesis)

A TIME OF PASSAGE OR A TIME OF BIRTH  

The thing about seasons is that the evidence of change is what marks the present-ness of each time. We long for change. In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the fact that it was always winter but never Christmas—always in the season of death but without Christ—held great sorrow. But in the moving through one season to another, we see evidence of what has passed and promise for what is to come. Through the changing of seasons, we see life and death; we see Christ in His grandeur and intimate smallness of creation and we see our mortality. Winter does come. Yes. But in winter we have Christmas. And with Christ, comes new birth—As the text on George Heywood Maunoir Sumner’s Spring says, “Spring and the light and sound of things on earth; Requickening all within our Green Sea’s girth; A time of passage or a time of birth.”    

In George Sumner’s illustrations, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, he depicts the seasons by rendering the different stages of working the land. Sheep grazing on the hills; Leaves in full bloom on the trees; Harvest brought in from the fields; Bare trees cut and hauled to be used for firewood.  Each season gives evidence of the one before and looks forward to the one that will come.

Perhaps it is in the fullness of all the seasons together that we can more closely understand our likeness to God. In the beginning of his poem Have you Eaten of the Tree, Paul Hoover writes No meaning as we know it: Difference was bound in the All. It was in the act of creation that differences came to be. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Later in the poem Hoover describes the days of creation as well as the seasons of death, longing, and sorrow that humanity experiences. Hoover calls us to remember that beginnings and endings are held together—heartrending, each termination; God shaken, each beginning.

If we think again about Sumner’s four panels of working the land, and how Scripture tells us that man was given dominion over the birds of the air and every living creature on the earth, we see that land is integral to humanity and to all of creation. Soil holds life and death. In his essay, Two Economies, Wendell Berry writes: “A healthy soil is made by the life dying into it and the life living in it, and to its double ability to drain and retain water we are complexly indebted.” Soil is what makes it possible for crops to grow, crops that go into the production of food, which we need to survive. And the dust of the earth is what God used to create man and woman—“remember that we are dust and to dust we will return” (Ecclesiastes 3:20).   

Today as we enter into the fourth week of Lent, let us be present in these earthly bodies, aware of our existence as human beings and living into the moments that are today. Yes, we are in the season of winter—Lent is a reminder that these bodies we inhabit are mortal—and yet, spring will come. We are indeed like the earth from which God created us: rich in life because death and life are held together.   

Prayer:
Lord Jesus, we acknowledge our need for you today. We acknowledge that these bodies we live in are mortal and to dust we will one day return. We also praise you for our life! Life to be lived and nurtured and planted in particular places and woven together with others’ lives. Help us to live fully into our humanness today and in years and seasons to come. We desire to delight in your Word and to be like the tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season. We praise you and thank you for making us so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous; how well we know it.
Amen.
(Psalm 1:3; Psalm 139:14).

Kari Dunham
Adjunct Professor of Art
Biola University