When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4, ESV)
“The Christian view alone does justice to man’s greatness and misery.” – James Orr.
It is hard to imagine someone around the game of golf not recognizing Rory and Scottie.
At the 2012 PGA Championship, the security detail insisted on seeing Rory’s credentials. He eventually had to call a PGA official to verify his identity. Good thing, too. He notched the “W!”
Twelve years later, Scottie was outside the gates of the 2024 PGA Championship. In the wee hours of the morning, Scottie drove past a police officer directing traffic. In the middle of the mayhem, the police arrested Scottie and took him to jail.
In both cases, the implicit question posed was “Who are you?” When the Psalmist asked a similar question—“What is man?”—he was calling us to reflect on “Who are you?”
It is critically important to note that although David asked this question while surveying the sun, moon, and stars, he did not get his answer from the Cosmos, as Carl Sagan did, or from biology, as Richard Dawkins does; rather, he answered it from Genesis 1:26-28.
Just as David derived his understanding of what it means to be human from Scripture, so too the view that has undergirded the processes of education, jurisprudence, medical science, ethics, and every other arena in the West for centuries was the biblical view—mankind is the creaturely image of God!
Tragically, we have taken the biblical answer for granted for so long that we have failed to recognize that barbarians have slipped past the gates, bringing their ideas about human identity into mainstream thinking.
We have mistakenly assumed that the answer to this question is a matter of “Common Sense.” What seems like a straightforward question with an equally straightforward answer has become a baffling spectrum of contradictory perspectives.
What most of us in the West have rightly assumed for millennia—the idea that human beings are the special creation of God, his “image bearers”— is now contested by competing worldviews (pagan, secular, and religious), each vying for control of the cultural narrative. This worldview question goes to the heart of Western culture’s future.
As J. Gresham Machen rightly argues, “False ideas are the greatest obstacle to the reception of the gospel… What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”
What follows is but a small sampling of these false ideas wreaking havoc in Western culture:
Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “Man is a useless passion.” According to him, when we awaken to ‘reality’ and find no transcendent God, humanity’s irrepressible desire for a meaningful life in a meaningful universe will be unmasked as a fool’s errand.
Richard Dawkins, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism,’ writes, “[humans] are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Ironically, he now laments the loss of England’s Christian culture.
Yuval Noah Harari, a man of broad influence, argues that Homo Sapiens are a combination of biological organisms driven by evolutionary forces, psychological systems shaped by natural selection, and storytelling creatures who construct meaning.
These voices, along with many more, want to gag God’s voice on the vitally important matter of human identity; the sheer volume of hostile voices will unsettle you.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Christians have conceded the battle over what it means to be human to Christ-hating forces intent on destroying our Western Christian heritage.
Contrary to all this, the biblical and true answer to David’s question is this: humanity is the image of God.
While we are not, nor will ever be, divine, we reflect God’s characteristics in creaturely form: rational, relational, spiritual, moral, volitional, and self-conscious beings with derivative dignity.
Created by God as vice-regents destined to rule the world in righteousness and under his authority, humanity has gone terribly astray. The next two devotionals will address the problem and the solution.
Prayer: Lord, empower us to recover and restore human dignity to the public square!