Fear No Fear

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

“Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.“
Genesis 2:7

We are the crowning achievement of God’s creation. God will never forget how He created us. God also will never forget what we are made of (Psalm 103:14). We will never have the pressure of pretending to be something we’re not, or behaving like we are better than we are. We were created a step below Himself, in His image and likeness (Psalm 8:5; Hebrews 2:7-9), and here in chapter two to the beginning of chapter 3, that is what humanity is. In their proper place. Once they rebelled, however, they fell from that position to what we are now. It is in and through Jesus that we regain the authority and dominion of our original position. Outside of Jesus, we are nothing (John 15:1-7).

God did not call us forth from water or from earth. God participated in our formation. God used His hands to create us (Psalm 119:73). The Hebrew word for ‘formed’ is yatsar (yaw-tsar) meaning to mould into a shape, ESPECIALLY as a potter (Isaiah 64:8). He fashioned us, formed us, and framed us. He gave us purpose (2 Timothy 1:9). This was UNIQUE and not how any other living thing had been created before humanity.

Since He was right there, holding our form in His hands, His entire face eclipsed what man (plural, both parts – male and female) could see. God personally breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. ‘breathed’ in Hebrew is naphach (naw-fakh’), meaning to kindle or to puff. He kindled life within us with the breath of life. Or the breath of LIVES (as one literal translation puts it. The word for life here is plural). Freshness. Strength. Appetite. Not just the life of that one man, but LIFE. The lives of all men breathed into that body and through procreation fruiting and filling the Earth since that time. God hadn’t done this for any other living thing. In breathing Himself into us, He enabled us to BE in His likeness. It gave us our intelligence and wisdom. It gave us the seeds of understanding and language. It was right here, in this very moment, holding our form, face to face, that God blessed us. The words of Genesis 1:28 were the first sounds humanity heard and we got to hear them up close and VERY personal.

With this God-breath in our God-formed bodies, we became living. We became unique. We are the ONLY living being on Earth to have free will, which is why we are living beings and NOT living creatures. Only we were created to exercise our free will. Also, we were directly connected to the eternal Spirit of God Himself. We ALSO were now eternal spirits. We had the same nature (likeness) and the same basic element of life (image). As the sage Steinsaltz puts it: ‘the breath of life within man is not just an abstract entity or form of sanctity concealed inside him; rather, it radiates outward from within him.’ We were LIKE God, but lacking something of Himself – the thing that made HIM divine, while WE were merely eternal.