Who Is Man?

Today, man hopes to be able in the future create a robot with artificial intelligence; but can you imagine if the robots in future start creating stuffs by themselves with absolutely no input from anybody (as in, you get home and a robot cooks for you without your programming it to do so). Of course you know that a robot can’t create by itself let alone do things by itself, without a man first creating the robot. Same way with everything in nature; the very beauty and essence of every living (plants, animals, bacteria etc.) and non-living (air, ocean, land, planets, stars, galaxies, the universe) thing points to the fact that intelligence was involved in their creation and existence.

Take this into consideration as an example, if the gravitational force that exists on earth today were to increase by just a tiny bit, then every single man will be crushed into the earth, and if the force were to decrease, we will all float away into the empty, airless and vacuum blue sky. So is the very good and conducive gravity which we experience a thing of chance? As humans on this planet with free will and the ability to choose what we want and how we want to live, did this happen just by-the-way and coincidentally? Did man come into existence by the order of the survival and selection of the fittest? Our ability to talk, reason, understand, manufacture, empathise, study, rule and dominate, did it just happen to be or is it all part of a plan? I know you will have an answer, mine is illustrated in an analogy: ‘for man not to have come into existence via an intelligent Being will also mean the Lego toys that you played with while younger simply metamorphosed from the thermostat raw material plastic with no contribution from the intelligent makers –humans’. So who exactly is man, what is our source and origin?

So who is man?...

Where you come from, your upbringing and your past experiences will influence your answer to the question above. A man with a scientific upbringing will easily say man is an evolutionary by-product of primates (apes), someone with a free-moral upbringing may say: ‘I don’t care who man is’ or ‘I don’t know’. An atheist will easily quote philosophies to justify his/her opinion; an individual with a religious background will say man was created by a deity. Today, kindly consider the intelligence, the conscience and consciousness of man, the creativity and love which we are capable of expressing. Then you understand that man came from an intelligent source. The best answer for this question will however come from the source of man.

You see, man was made and created by God!!! Are you surprised or do you feel scornful? Well you can’t change this truth, just like a BMW vehicle can’t change its mind to say it was made by a KFC food company. Genesis 1:27 says God created man! The idea of man’s existence came from God, the execution is from God and the continuity of man today is also due to God. Before man was created, God had a plan for man; vs.26 of this Scripture says God’s intent was for man to:

·         Exist in the image and semblance of God.

·         Rule over the earth and everything on the earth.

So who is man, well God’s answer is this: man is a creature (in fact, the only creature) made in God’s image. When man came into existence, man was shaped and fashioned to look like God. This is very interesting because we therefore have to look further, not to man but to God to see and know who man is! The answer to the question of who man is therefore leads to the question: ‘Who is God?

Jesus Christ actually answered this question very fundamentally in John 4:24. You see, God is a spirit, i.e. God is a Spiritual Being/Entity. Therefore, it follows that man also is a spirit, why? Simply because man was created in the image of God, even to look like God. So God is a spirit and He created man as a spirit, but that ain’t all, there is still more information to be gleaned. So we know, God is a spirit and man is a spirit; but Psalm 104:4 and Hebrews 1:7 also introduce us to another class of beings: angels too are spirits. God made angels to be spirits. Hebrews1:14 gives further clarification on what category of spirit all angels are, they are made by God to be ministering spirits. So what sort of spirit is God? For whatever category of Spirit God is, the same applies to man (as man was made in the likeness of God!!!)

Psalm 62:11 explains that God owns all power, Romans 13:1 reinforces this by saying all authority belongs to God and Jeremiah 32:27 proclaims the Lordship of God over all. So Dear Reader, God is a Domineering Spirit i.e an Authoritative Spirit. Daniel 2:21 further expatiates that God is a Ruling Spirit. Therefore we are not surprised to see in Genesis 1:26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 that God made man to be a spirit that: dominates, subdues and rules. This is what it means to be made in the image of God! So God fashioned man to be the only creatures in the very class and status of God – Domineering Spirits!!! (by the way this status of man changed after man fell, but we will talk on this in the future topics). Psalm 24:1 and Psalm 115:16 explain that God gave man the earth for man to dominate on it (… so this ought to begin answering your question on why bad things happen on earth; but we will also talk more on this subject hopefully in the near future). This is the way God made the first man.

Living in an age where people were still trying to understand who God is, Elihu, a friend of Job declared that there is a spirit located inside man (Job 32:8). However, with the better illumination provided by the spirit of God, now that Christ has died, resurrected and ascended (Romans 8:34 and John 14:26), we know that the spirit is not just in man, rather that man is that spirit and man has a soul while we live in this body as a tent and covering for the spirit to function in (Hebrews 4:12). Our next discuss on this matter will be to look at who God is and how man mirror’s His image.