Transcript
The Old and New Testament are one book. They are not competing faiths. They are two phases of the same faith. One the root, the other the fruit, the fulfillment. How often in the find it repeated and enlarged and amplified and fulfilled. I want to read a passage from the book of Hebrews in the New Testament in which we find a man trying to make clear to fellow Christians the meaning of the mystery of the incarnation. This
being so, we ought to give all the more attention to what we have been taught for fear we should drift away. For how can we of all people expect to escape if we disregard a salvation as great as this? A writer has somewhere emphatically said, what is man that thou shouldst remember him or any man that thou shouldst visit him? Thou hast made him for a while lower than angels. With glory and honor thou hast crowned
him. Thou hast set him over all thy hands have made. Thou hast placed all things under his feet. This placing of everything under man implies that there was nothing which was not placed under him. As yet, however, we do not see everything placed under man. What our eyes do see is Jesus, who was made for a while lower than angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of his sufferings and death, so that his tasting the
bitterness of death should in God's mercy be on behalf of all mankind. Therefore, since human nature is the common heritage of the children, Jesus also shared it, just as they do, in order that by his death he might render powerless him whose power lies in death. And consequently, it was necessary that he should be made like his brothers at all points, in order that he might prove a merciful as well as a faithful high priest in
all that relates to God. The fact that he himself was tempted and suffered enables him to help others who are tempted. When I consider the heavens, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou should visit him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. Some of the new translations put that, thou hast made him a little less, a
little lower than divine. A little lower than divine. A census taker making the rounds in lower East Side New York came to a home where a Buxom Irish woman was putting up her wash. Lady, he said, I'm taking the census. What's your name? How many children have you? Well, let me see. There's Marcy and Michael and Amy and Judy and Patrick and never mind the names. He broke in. Just give me the numbers. She straightened up
hands on her hips with a twinkle in her eyes. She said, I'll have you to know, sir, we ain't got to number them yet. We ain't run out of names. Perhaps that's a rather undignified story with which to launch a sermon. But it has its points. It suggests two opposing ideas which are struggling now for mastery in the earth. What is a man? Is he a name or just a number? Is he a person or just
part of the totals? Is he someone to be that counts or is he just something to be counted? Between these two concepts, a great battle is raging now. Part of the everlasting conflict, the real Armageddon that is perpetually waging in the earth. And now suddenly there's a great pressure on us to know the answer to it, who we are, who our neighbor is, what it means to be a human being. In normal times when life flows
smoothly, we scarcely bother to ask the question. We go on being persons without taking thought of it. But when human affairs are going badly and danger looms in the earth, we are thrown back on the basic questions. And we must have now a doctrine of man. It's no longer an academic question. One thing sharply emerges in all New Testament literature and the whole Bible for that matter, the dignity of man, the sacredness of a person, the
infinite value of every human soul. It's on every page of the New Testament and in the whole Bible it is the underlying assumption made a little lower than divine. Call it poetry if you insist. Say it is borrowed from an ancient Hebrew psalm a long time ago composed by a simple-hearted shepherd who watching his flock by night looked up into the grandeur of the eastern sky and burst into rapturous poetry. Nevertheless, it's poetry that means
something. It sets forth an estimate of man, his place in the purpose of God, his dignity, his destiny without which there can be no decency on the earth. What is man? What is a human being? Both Old and New Testaments say he's a person created in the image of God, crowned with glory and honor the supreme concern of God and the supremely worthwhile value in the whole universe of God. Now granted, it's not an easy faith
to hold. Bombarding us from every side are facts and voices which seem to belie it. How easily by simply paraphrasing the words of the poet we could turn his own argument against him when we consider the heavens, the new expanse of them which the telescope has opened up. What is man? The appalling arithmetic of the astronomer seems a shattering blow to the ancient faith that a man can count for anything. Or when we consider the philosophies
of men, the psychologies, the political ideologies, the collectivisms and the totalitarianism, what is man? Nothing but a pawn on a chessboard to be pushed around. Or when we consider man's own history, his endless wars and cruelties and stupidities, where is the evidence to justify or verify the poet's rapture made a little lower than divine? It's not an easy faith to hold. And yet we must get hold of this faith again and stay with it. For when
we lose it, the world goes mad. In fact, the forces which are now destroying and crushing man are unable to do so only or when men have forgotten in large measure what it means to be a human being. Dr. Iddings Bell said there are many ways of saying what's wrong with the world. But as penetrating as any is that which says man is about to perish on this planet because he has lost the vision of his
true greatness to such an extent. He has become scarcely more than a self-destructive animal. It makes an enormous difference what you think of yourself, who you are, and who your neighbor is. Oh Lord prayed the Edinburgh weaver as though praying against all the forces that would crush his soul. Oh Lord, help me to have a high opinion of myself. Our subject this morning, the image of God. Thou hast made him a little lower than divine.
Let's start in the very lowest place. See it first in the two-legged creature standing halfway between an atom and a star as the most ingenious piece of mechanism ever put together. Wherever you begin with him, in his hand, his eye, his brain, or the inner realm of his personality, you are confronted with a labyrinth of mystery right away. You don't have to go to the stars to find mystery. There it is, right? Wrapped up in
you. And a masterpiece of engineering skill. We take it all for granted. We live often without a thought of it. No instrument man has made can match the instrument he is. He makes tools to extend the power of his hand, and yet his hand itself is the combination of all the tools. He invents a pump to lift water from the earth, but he carries a pump inside of him that pumps ceaselessly, night and day, day and
night, without attention, without repair, for 70, 80 years. Tons and tons of blood every year, so silently the doctor listens to it with a stethoscope. He makes a telephone system and sometimes stands gaping in wonder at the intricacy his hand has wrought. But he walks around every day with a telephone system in his head, infinitely more complex. Up here at Harvard, they have a mechanical brain, a 35-ton calculating machine that's able to take 25 figures
and multiply them by 25 other figures in five seconds flat. How would you like that on examination day? It's a wonderful instrument, but it's a clumsy device in comparison with a 35-ounce brain that solid out. Those who are confused by science, and many are, should remember that nothing that science has been able to discover in the process has in the least altered or even questioned the supreme or the central assumption of the divine revelation that
man stands at the summit of creation, the Lord of creation, the end product of all its amazing processes. And it's nonsense to talk about losing him in the immensities, for obviously it is he who measures the immensities. He's bigger than the stars because he knows the stars are there. He tracks their orbits in the sky. He measures their distances. And for all the wonder of the glittering worlds that swirl around him, the biggest wonder is still
at the small end of the telescope. The little two-legged creature who can think one bit of mind stuff, one touch of gray matter that can think outweighs all the stars that burn and blaze through space. So like the Scotsman, we refuse to be astronomically intimidated. You can't lose man in the immensities, for the real immensity is in him, made a little lower than divine. Nor can you lose him in the animal world, as some have
inferred from the process. For he towers above it. He holds dominion over it. He begins where the animal stops. Walt Whitman, you remember, had an off-coded poem about, in which he envied the contentment of a cow. He'd like to be like an animal. Animals are so peaceful. To which some clever fellow made answer, although Walt Whitman could write a poem about a cow, no cow could write a poem about Walt Whitman. And thus he put
his finger on the difference. It's precisely that, that restlessness in man, which the animal does not share, that makes the poet and the singer, and like God in lesser degree, the creator, made a little lower than divine. The fact that he cooks up more devilment than the animals, sometimes sinks to lower levels, does not disprove the superiority. It rather confirms it. Animals living by instinct seem content. But when a man tries that, he's in deep trouble,
like the prodigal out there in the far country feeding pigs. The pigs, I suppose, were not a bit disquieted in being pigs. The torment in him was the measure of the difference and the proof of the higher heredity. Nor can you lose him in the material world, for he transcends the world of matter. To be sure, he has a kinship with the earth, and there's nothing to be ashamed of in that. Like all animals, his body
is made out of mud and matter. The Lord God formed him of the dust of the ground and goes on making him out of dust. Chemical elements in his body, exactly the same as in all creatures that feed and depend upon the earth. But it's quite clear that the material substance in him, or somebody has computed about 90 cents, is in him only to help him become something more than dust. Edison said the chief function of
the body is to carry the brain around. Ideas leap up within his brain. Emotions stir and war within him. Imagination leaves the dust of his body to fashion dreams that nature never dreamed. Visions of the future. Conscience whispers. He hears the overtones of the invisible world, like those ancient mariners sailing over the sunken city of Atlantis and hearing voices rising up from the long-buried city. So there are voices in man, ideals and hopes and racial
memories, now and again sending up mysterious voices to remind him of his linkage with the invisible world of spirit. Here sits he shaping wings to fly. His heart forebodes a mystery. He names the name eternity. The uniqueness of man is not that he was created by the hand of God. All things were created by the hand of God. His dignity consists in the fact that he was created in the image of God, made a little lower,
yet in his likeness, which means that he possesses powers in a finite range, like the powers God holds in an infinite range. There's a likeness to God in man, a likeness in mind and spirit, so that above all the creatures he can think God's thoughts. He can feel his presence. He can know and follow his will. He can receive a divine revelation because there's a likeness in man to God and spirit with his spirit can meet.
What is man? The Christian answer is that he's a restless child of earth and a child of eternity too. A strange mixture of dust and deity, frailty, and dignity, crowned by his creator with glory and honor, and made a little lower than divine. Surely God must have had some high purpose in his mind when he made the body, the mind, the spirit of man. Consider further how God has dignified a man by weaving in his nature
the mysterious gift of freedom. Thou made-est him to have dominion. Think around about that for a while. Thou made-est him to have dominion. How can he have dominion? There's a very ancient story of creation, an old legend, that describes the day when all the little seeds of life came up before God and he let them choose what they wanted to be. Some wanted to be elephants and tigers and so God made the animals. Some reasoned that
there was more water on the earth's surface than land and so they wanted fins to swim in it and so God made the fish. Others thought there was more air than water. They wanted wings to fly in it so God made the birds. Others wanted to be safe. They were so concerned about their security they wanted to carry their houses around with them. So God made the turtles and the shellfish and the oysters. And after all
the little seeds had spoken, one quiet little seed was left. So humble God thought and shy. A modest little creature. And what about you little fellow? I don't want wings or fins, he said. Just let me be made in your image. I will make my own wings and boats and houses. Just make me in your image. I'll take my chance with that. And so the legend went on to say God was well pleased and made man.
Freedom. No one can say what freedom is. So spiritual a thing it is. A bit of God's own nature woven into ours. A bit of the same infinite dignity he possesses in himself bestowed upon a human being. It ought to be a tremendous asset. This likeness to God in us. Although we know that all the tortures of the damned are wrapped up in it too. I never speculate much. Sometimes I like to think of it, perhaps
he could have made us without it. Wound us up like a clock every morning so that we'd have to do right as Thomas Huxley said he would like to be. Bound to his will as a machine is bound to ours and thus escape the risk and consequence of choice. Have you said sometimes to yourself I wish somebody would show me what is right and make me do it? Huxley wanted to be a clock. Well God chose
to make a person. Set him down in this rough and risky world with the awful power to choose. Make or mar his destiny. Climb into the heights or sink into the depths. It's all on you. Tremendously dangerous endowment freedom. Yet without it what is man? Well we're beginning to see what man is without it. As in one country after another he has lost it. Turned over the gift to the strong man and lost his personality in
the mass mind and the mass will. We've had some frightening glimpses into the corrosion of the human spirit when men forget who they are, what it means to be human and try to explain themselves as the offspring of this earth only. A few years ago some of you will remember two officers of the Russian Air Force flew their plane to a neutral zone then escaped to America and for a while lived here as free men. And
about a year or so later as I recall one of them could not stand it any longer. He almost blew his top. He gave himself up to the Soviet embassy and asked them to ship him back home to Russia. Why? The other one staying on later wrote an article for a national magazine under the title Freedom Frightens Me in which he told why a most illuminating revelation of what happens to the human soul when the light
of God is blown out and the religious basis of civilization is abandoned. My friend, he said, went back to Russia because he could not face the exacting demands of freedom. Accustomed all his life to having his choices made for him, he couldn't make his own. Freedom meant that he was on his own, that he had to find his own job, he had to economically, morally, everywhere. No one was here to tell him what to do, where
to work, or even what to think. And so he was a lost soul in the terrifying atmosphere of freedom. The whole responsibility of life was upon him and he couldn't make his own choices. In other words, he had been unfitted to be a man and rather than face the terrifying responsibility of being a person, he was ready to trade his dignity for security, even the security of start asking glib questions about divine omnipotence, why God doesn't
do this or that, solve our problems, cure our headaches, be the almighty dictator of our destiny. Against the background of these sub-human views, which for a long time have been unfitting men to persons, we are beginning to see a little more clearly what a profoundly spiritual thing freedom is, how deeply rooted it is in divine sonship and how quickly the image of man, not God, the image of man is defaced and his dignity disappears when
the image of God is forgotten. God made man here to take the risk with all the responsibility upon him. Thou made-est him to have dominion. That means danger, but it means dignity too, and it means a profoundly divine respect for human dignity. I would like to read Edwin Markham's very beautiful poem about that. When in the dim beginning of the years, God put in man the rapture and the tears and scattered through his brain the starry
stuff, he said that's good but not enough, for I must test his spirit to make sure that he can bear the vision and endure. I will withdraw my face, veil me in shadow for a certain space, and leave behind only a broken clue, some crevice where the glory glimmers through, some whisper from the sky, some footprint in the sand to track me by. I will leave man to make the fateful guess leave him torn between the
no and yes, leave him unresting until he rests in me, drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, leave him in his loneliness to choose with all in life to win or all to lose. It's all on you. But what a sublime compliment it is to man, this likeness of God in us that he should trust us with the gift of freedom. Now we must go to the very highest point of vision, the incarnation. The
true dignity of man in the earth is not apparent until we begin to see him in the light of what the New Testament called the gospel, the good news of God. For the message of the New Testament is, listen to it now, the message of the New Testament is that not only are we made in the likeness of God, his nature, but that God has supremely dignified man in clothing himself in the likeness of our nature.
The coming of Christ to the world marked a new epoch in the story of creation, so important it split history in two, B.C. A.D. Why? Something happened in the coming of Christ to vastly heighten the sense of individual and personal and human worth. We are made in his image. Now he has come in ours. What the son of man that thou shouldst visit him, the infinite God, has now visited him, clothed himself in our likeness, walked our
ways to link our human nature with divine nature forever. Don't ask me to explain that, I can only say it. But it's the basic message of the New Testament and it's amazing how even we Christians have missed the hopeful, encouraging point of it, dwelling as we do even in our theologies on the negative side of human nature, the dark side, chanting our durges about the weakness and wickedness of man, so emphasizing the perversity and depravity in
man, we almost miss what Jesus saw most in him, his divine possibilities and his power to become. What a different Christianity we would have if we had followed Jesus instead of the medieval theologians, if we had emphasized the possibilities of the perversities instead of the perversities. You keep telling people that they're the scum of the earth and they're likely to prove what you preach about them, but tempt them as Jesus did, to believe in the possibility
that they might be the salt of the earth and you put something in man's spirit that lifts his head. I've always thought of the curious and twisted logic to suppose that we exalt God by debasing ourselves, that in order to think highly of God, we have to think meanly of the human nature he created. You can't get that kind of theology out of the New Testament. True, there's no book that makes you feel so unworthy and
ashamed of yourself as the Bible makes you feel. That's quite natural because it's because it holds such a high appreciation of what you are, but the message of the Bible is not about man's sin, it's about God's grace. It tells the story to men of how God so loved the world that he visited it. That's what Calvary means, or that's what Bethlehem means, and that he cared about man so much that he died for him. That's
what Calvary means, and that he believes in man so much that he's out on all the roads of life seeking him, calling him. That's the rest of the New Testament. It ought to be tremendously encouraging, this divine confidence in human worth. You'd think that nobody could ever hold himself cheaply anymore, or do anything that would mar that likeness of God in him, or hold with contempt any person made in the image of God. It has vastly
heightened the sense of human worth, this coming of Christ into our nature. Somebody said, the preacher's real business is not to rail at people for their sins, but to tell people who they are. I believe that. Our business is not to rail at people for their sins, but to tell people who they are. Do you know who you are? You see, Jesus doing that, out on all those roads, sitting down with public and sinners, the people
who had almost forgotten what it meant to be human, not railing at them and their perversities, but calling out their possibilities, telling them who they were, and how important they were in the eyes of God. He told them that God was so mindful of them, that like a shepherd knows his sheep, so the good shepherd knew their names. They were not numbers. They were names. They were persons, and that there was no reason for their anxious
fear that they didn't count for it. They were important. There was no reason for their fear that they could drop out of the picture unnoticed, like a dime rolling into a dusty crack forgotten. It was a ridiculous doctrine, he preached, but it has changed the moral climate of the world. No one can think meanly of himself anymore, as he looks into the face of Christ. John Wesley once recorded in his journal that he preached to the
miners, those people who had been forgotten there in England, and he used as his text, to as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God. And then in a characteristic note, he added, they seemed greatly encouraged, just so. One of England's gifted preachers told a friend of mine, I wish I could remember this preacher's name, I can't, that when he was a college youth, he was so unruly and
wayward that his whole family unanimously predicted he would go to the bag. And there was enough resentfulness in him to determine to live up or down to their expectations. And then one never to be forgotten night, or in the small hours of the morning, when he crept upstairs to his bedroom, shoes in his hand, a door opened in the hallway, and his grandmother stood there with a lighted candle. And she put his hand on his shoulder
and said five words that changed his life. John, I believe in you. And there, in the darkness of his room with his head in his hands, the great miracle came to his heart. The first immeasurable contribution that Christ makes to human life is this sublime confidence in common man and his power to call out the possibility in the ordinary man. Well, it would be strange indeed if in a congregation the size of this there were not
some who need this sort of message, who need to be reminded of the divine confidence in human worth. Say this to your soul, if you've lost faith in life, God hasn't. If you've lost confidence in yourself, faith in the future, faith in your fellow man, he hasn't. Christ never despaired of human nature, not even at the cross. He knew all about human nature, but he never despaired of human nature. Sometimes when I'm tempted to be cynical,
to lose faith in the future, in other people, in myself, I turn to him. He keeps me believing in life, he keeps me believing in my fellow human being, and more than that he keeps me believing in myself and my power through his power to become. Let us stand please. Say this to your soul, I am in the sight of God a person, who has made some way in his image and likeness, and because I'm a
spiritual person I have depths in me and possibilities beyond my knowing. Say it to your soul, God is mindful of me, he believes in me, his spirit speaks to my spirit, he knows all about my sin, and yet he believes in me. Help us to say it to our souls, and make our mortal dreams come true. Through the work we fame would do, clothe with life our weak intent, and let us be the thing we meant,
the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, the fellowship and communion of his Holy Spirit, rest and abide with you now and evermore. (music)