God with Us (Part 2)

Last week’s blog article closed with an expression of my deep and abiding conviction that a biblically grounded understanding of God’s self-revelation with human form and passions obligates us to acknowledge that when God formed Adam from the “dust of the earth” and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, he made the first man in his own image and after his own likeness which means that God makes himself known to us in our likeness, not that he wears our form and passions but in fact, we wear his but with creaturely limitations.

So, the correct reading of the Bible ushers us into the true and proper representation of the world we inhabit. Right thinking obligates us to embrace the world that the Bible depicts and to accept that portrayal’s presuppositions and affirmations concerning (1) God, (2) all of creation, and (3) ourselves. Without dispute, the principal character in the biblical drama is the Lord God. He is also the scriptwriter, the director, the producer of this grand drama, as well as creator and owner of the cosmic theater in which the drama plays out. The Bible lays out the storyline of this drama stretched throughout the history of God’s redemption of his creation, with the First Man and Second Man, each with his significant role at creation and consummation, respectively. Integral to this history of redemption are progressive sequences of God’s revelation that reach completion and fulfillment in the disclosure of God’s Last Adam, Jesus Christ. Throughout this drama in the Old Testament God, the principal protagonist, conceals his glory with human similitude, revealing himself to us with the qualities which he has bestowed upon us—speech, action, emotion, self-reflection. The New Testament features God as the principal character in the drama whose glory more than inhabits human spoken word; now God’s spoken word inhabits human flesh (John 1:1-2, 14). Yet, “God with Us” begins with God’s acts of creation, not with his acts of “new creation” which commence with the advent of God’s Son, the Word, come in the flesh (2 Corinthians 5:17).

As it was with the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, with which Adam shared the earth, the Creator formed the first man from the “dust of the ground.” The Hebrew text vividly underscores the fact that God made humans from the earth and for the earth, that humans are earthly creatures by employing a play on the Hebrew word for the ground. God formed Adam from the Adamah, the ground. Thus, Scripture’s narrative sharply distinguishes the human from God: “In the beginning, God created,” but the human was formed from the “dust of the ground” by God. God is the creator; the human is the creature formed by the Creator to bear the maker’s image and likeness.

Did Creator, who entrusted his authorized account of his creative acts to Moses who recorded them for posterity, in Genesis 1-2, encase kernels of truth within husks of human errors as insisted by many who identify as Evangelicals? Did God accommodate his revelatory speech concerning his acts of creation to the errant beliefs of the ancient Israelites so that their creation story is in concert with the accounts of creation recorded by ancient Egyptians and Babylonians? When God authorized the account of his creative and formative acts (Genesis 1-2), did he convey an infallible truth (that God created) encased within a fallible vehicle (how God created)? Is it as Denis Lamoureux and other “evolutionary creationists” of BioLogos contend, that “the Creator planned the Big Bang and preloaded t with the ability for the universe and life to self-assemble over 13.8 billion years, with humans emerging as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process” (Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes!, 119)?

Though accepted and advocated by many highly educated biblical scholars, this modern belief that God’s Holy Word accommodates erroneous and false beliefs stands antithetically opposed to what Scripture affirms and what the best Christian theologians since the early church have meant when they speak of God’s condescension to humans to reveal himself and his actions to us. The concept of Divine Condescension, also identified as Divine Accommodation, is simple. God alone can span the Creator-creature chasm that entails a gap of not only being (ontological disparities) but also knowing (noetic differences). Apart from God making himself known to us by forming us as his earthly analogs, we would be insentient beings. Because the Creator made us after his own likeness, he makes himself known to us by way of those qualities and attributes that he has bequeathed to us. Thus, God reveals himself to us by using human words and shows himself in human forms throughout the Holy Scriptures. Thus, regardless of how obscure the passage may be, it is due to God’s condescension to speak like a human. Herman Bavinck captures this well:

And inasmuch as the revelation of God in nature and in Scripture is specifically addressed to humanity, it is a human language in which God speaks to us of himself. For that reason the words he employs are human words; for the same reason he manifests himself in human forms. From this it follows that Scripture does not just contain a few scattered anthropomorphisms but is anthropomorphic through and through (Reformed Dogmatics, 2.99).

It is no limitation upon God for him to condescend to reveal himself analogically to us by using human speech and human forms. And for our eternal good, our Creator unobtrusively but gloriously entered his creation when the Word became one of us in the flesh (John 1:14). This pinnacle of God’s speaking to us in human form and likeness reached the climactic revelatory promise, Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23). Had God remained utterly transcendent and revealed himself univocally in deific language and without human form, we would have no knowledge of him. But our Creator bequeathed to us his likeness so that we are his earthly analogs who bear his imprinted, integral, and ineffaceable image which is the Creator’s revelatory nexus organically embedded into our very being, apart from which we would be as animals, lacking God-imaged knowledge of our Creator and of his creation. But he blessed us with innate consciousness of God and with intrinsic mindfulness of our dignity that exceeds that of every other aspect of God’s wonderful creation. Thus, John Calvin rightly observes, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God,” and “without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self” (Institutes, 1.1.1 & 1.1.2).

So, it comes as no surprise that God’s authorized account of his acts of creation in Genesis reflects his own human-oriented portrayal told not from his own divine highly exalted vantage point but from the earth-bound perspective of humans who inhabit creation itself. To express it candidly, the Creator condescended into the timeframe and space of his created order itself to bring into existence the entire creation, heaven and earth, and everything that fills them, all within the span of six earth-days (Exodus 20:11) not in the span of 13.8 billion earth-years. The eternal God reveals his creative acts, which he alone could accomplish within the span of six earth-days, as one who condescends into his creation appearing in the earthly form and likeness which he gave to Adam even as he walks the earth with his crowning creation, humans (cf. Genesis 3:8). Because God made us earth-bounded creatures, he authorizes the prophetic word to portray our dwelling place’s origin, formation, and filling which all took place in the span of six earth-days. God, who is spirit, employs human speech and categories to portray himself as entering created space and time as he depicts creation’s origin, development, and shape.

Long before modern humans developed rockets to penetrate deep into outer space, many, including those who profess Christian faith fell prey to a seductive and false humility. They have presumed to displace the Creator’s authorized account of creation in Scripture, which features the Creator’s focus upon the earth and his entrance into the habitation of humanity whom he made in his image and after his likeness. Instead of believing the Creator’s authorized account of his creative acts, many who are in our churches embrace their own audacious version of a remote God who triggered the Big Bang that set in motion the universe which has self-assembled throughout the next 13.8 billion years with the earth not only self-assembling but also self-filling with all kinds of life during the last 4.5 billion years. They prefer their account which pushes the Creator to the periphery of his creation both temporally and spatially. Their beliefs situate the Creator quite aloof from his creation by their adopting an out-in-space view of our God-ordained habitation, the earth.

Evolutionary creationists diminish both God and humanity by insisting that humans are the product of evolution not of God’s direct creative work who formed the historical Adam from the dust of the ground. The hubris of evolutionary creationism seduces many with its reputed wisdom and its false humility. Evolutionary creationists desire that we all adopt their worldview and cosmology which they believe is superior to the Bible’s perspective which they assess to be wrong because it portrays our Creator working both spatially and temporally within his creation which affirms that his creative activity is bounded by earth’s daylight hours because the Creator’s working sets the pattern to be followed by his creatures—six days of work followed by a day of rest (Exodus 20:11).

The Creator does not feature his creative work for our instruction from the vantage point of a camera focused upon the earth from millions of miles in deep darkness that shows our place of habitation as a small bluish marble in an immense sea of blackness splashed with diffused stellar light. Such a view is that of fallen humans who refuse to submit to God’s authorized accounting of his six earth-days of creative activity. It is a view that diminishes and trivializes the God-authorized perspective from which we are to ponder the earth as the place where the Creator interacts with humans who are made in his own image and after his likeness, and where the Redeemer brings about his unfolding drama of redemption in and through the Word who becomes flesh to dwell among us (John 1:14).

Far from accommodating ancient Egyptian and Babylonian accounts that paganize God’s creative works, God’s authorized account written by Moses presents God with us. The account marks the transcendent distinction between the Creator and the creation, between God and humans, while at the same time it features the Creator’s immanence, his working within his creation, but never succumbing to pantheism, the pagan belief that identifies deity with creation itself as if creation embodies deity. God, our Creator, thoroughly integrated his acts of creation recorded in the Bible’s account of creation (Genesis 1-2) with the remainder of the biblical storyline that entails the historical First Man, Adam, who with his wife Eve falls prey to the cunning of the serpent to rebel against their Creator which begins the protracted story of redemption that eventually culminates in the New Creation brought about by the Second Man who crushes the head of that old serpent (cf. Revelation 20:1-2). If we fail to embrace the Bible’s account of creation as it is and accommodate it to cultural currents, we will err at other critical points throughout the biblical storyline, and misappropriate the Scriptures to the detriment of ourselves and of others. Severe injury is done to the Second Man, our Lord Jesus Christ, by everyone who rejects Adam’s historicity because the good news as it is in Jesus Christ requires that we acknowledge that Jesus is the bloodline descendant of Adam, the First Man. To deny this is to dispute God’s Word. Likewise, everyone who temporally and spatially distances the Creator from his creation beyond what God is pleased to reveal to us in his Word tends in one of two directions, either devaluing or inflating God’s created order evident in several aberrations whether sinful indulgences of creation or sinful detachments from creation.

So, the Bible’s portrayal of the origin, development, and shape of the whole of creation is right without either surrendering to or contradicting a cosmology that affirms that our earth, like other planets, travels through space as it revolves around the sun. Indeed, that God condescended to reveal himself and his acts to humans on earth explains how the Bible portrays reality truthfully and fittingly for ancient and modern earth-dwelling humans, for everyone who is made in the image of the Creator. “The highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to mankind” (Ps. 115:16).

Earth’s importance is not due to where God placed it in the vast universe but because this is where God formed humans mad in his likeness and sent his Son, who is the image of God who is invisible and in whom all things consist (Col. 1:17), that he might “reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven” (Col. 1:20). God reveals himself to us on the human scale, from within the earthly temporal and spatial frame of reference, and most significantly through his Son who became human, and this revelation is sufficient.

Therefore, I am not at all ashamed to affirm the truthfulness of the Bible’s account of God’s creative acts. God, who could have created everything in one singular act, took six earth-days of twenty-four hours each to form the universe and to fill the sky with lights and the earth with vegetation, with animals, and with Adam and Eve from whom the entire human race descends.

Thus, “God with Us” neither begins with Mary’s holy conception of Jesus (Luke 1:26-38) nor awaits the loud voice of conquest from the throne: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God” (Revelation 21:3). “God with Us” begins at the beginning, for indeed, God customarily walked in the presence of Adam and Eve, his creatures made after his own likeness (Genesis 3:8). Consequently, the entire biblical story entails the drama of the restoration of “God with Us” by way of God’s redemption of us and of creation itself.

Select Bibliography

Caneday, Ardel B. “Genesis, Interpretation of Chapters 1 and 2 – Factual View,” Dictionary of Christianity and Science (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 320-324.
____________. “The Language of God and Adam’s Genesis & Historicity in Paul’s Gospel,” SBJT 15.1 (2011): 26-59.
____________. Review of Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes! Books at a Glance.
____________. “Veiled Glory: God’s Self-Revelation in Human Likeness–A Biblical Theology of God’s Anthropomorphic Self-Disclosure,” Beyond the Bounds (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 149-199.


See “God with Us” (Part 1)