Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.“
Genesis 1:27

All the other living creatures (those with a soul: mind, heart, emotions) were made after THEIR type. Humanity was made after God. We are HIS type. We are in HIS image – even though there is a dimension we lack that makes God FAR superior and COMPLETELY unique. We are nonetheless an image, a reflection of Him. We are the mirror that is meant to reflect all that He is into Creation. We resemble Him and bring His image into His physical creation to represent Him. It is therefore our task to perfect our intelligence (that which enables us to understand God) by acquiring the knowledge and insights provided by the Word and turning it into behaviour that is righteous (in thought, word, AND deed). We have the capacity and freedom to expand and alter our surroundings in a way no other species has been given. It is a fundamental difference between us.

God called forth the other living creatures from the water and from the earth, but He personally got involved in making us with His own hands (Psalm 139:5). We were made from the dirt of this world (Psalm 103:14). And He named us after it: ‘adam’ or ‘man’ is from ‘adamah’ or ‘ground’ and ‘dam’ which means ‘blood’ – adam is also an acronym of efer (ash), dam (blood), and marah (bile). Often in scripture we are referred to as ‘Benei Adam’ which is ‘human beings’ or ‘humankind’.

Male (zachar – remembrance) and Female (nekeivah – distinction) we were created. God is not who named woman ‘woman’. That was Adam (Genesis 3:20). Up until then, God called man and woman ‘adam’: “He created them male and female, and blessed them. On the day they were created, he named them Adam” (Genesis 5:2). They were the SAME in His eyes. In fact, the sages teach that the original human had two faces (much like the living creatures have four – Ezekiel 10:14) [more on that in Genesis 2]. They were a single organism at the start, and then later two organisms joined in soul to be as one. They were perfect for each other, perfect partners, complete equals, and there was NO submission of ANY kind between them BECAUSE they were perfect equals working together as one. It is hard to understand because all of our relations toward each other are AFTER the fall, not in the perfect before. But they started PERFECT and in TOTAL unison.

When God uses ‘man’ or ‘humankind’ here, in Hebrew it lacks the definite article. It is a blanket term for the whole. God doesn’t use definite articles until AFTER He forms both man and woman. In God’s thinking as shown by His word choice, humanity is a class of being made in His image. Later, there is division into the two sexual categories. Humanity comes first as our identifier and only within that identifier do we have a sexual identity. Man didn’t come before Woman. We were co-created into a unit. A balance of goodness and gender into a whole that performed the required tasks and purposes in full and equal cooperation – humanity. Only when we are divided into sexual groupings relevant for fertility and an organizational flowchart of stewardship is there a change in language.