Genesis 1:26

Genesis 1:26 blew my mind and captured my heart this week. It's just one those verses where God reveals a lot of himself.

"Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." -Gen. 1:26

These three things capture me (and are incidentally in the first 14 words of the verse):

1. Let "us"! After five days of "God creating", all of the sudden "we" create. This is the first introduction of what we will come to know as the Trinity and reveals something of the nature of God in community. Puzzling. One God. Multiple dimensions.
2. "Make man"! Two words and we get the masterful creation of the human body. There are thousands of processes happening in your body all the time, trillions of chemical reactions taking place in every cell every second, millions of electrical impulses are firing across billions of synaptic pathways and "they" just "MADE MAN"?!?!?! Are you kidding me?
3. ...in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish, birds, animals, etc. Lots of God's original intentions were revealed in the first few chapters of Genesis, and think that we need to pay attention to God's original intentions! One of them is revealed in 1:26--God intended that people rule over animals, not other people. In fact, he did not set it up for men to rule over men until after the fall...a result of sin and needed to keep order. But, it was not his original plan.

There are several others very interesting "original intentions" as I read them in Genesis 1 and 2. I will share a few more tomorrow....

Night!