God Given Dignity

Let’s go back to Psalm 8:5-8 where we find God’s Image.

“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”

Here we find God given dignity…not man earned, or man supplied dignity, but God given dignity. It is beyond what we might expect…the word for “heavenly beings” is actually Elohim…David says, “Yet you have made him a little lower than God.” He looks up to God’s glory in verses 1-2, then he looks to God’s creation and back to the Fall in verses 3-4, but here he will take us beyond the Fall and back to Genesis 1 where God created us in His image.

Our dignity is wrapped up in this—we were created as image bearers of God…we were created in His image. God has given man a dignity that is second only to His own glory.

Angels are ministering spirits with no earthly bodies,

animals have bodies but no spirit,

but man has both spirit and body. We are the crown jewel of God’s creation—the apex of all that He made—look at what David said, “and crowned him with glory and honor.” These are words used of God and yet God shares that with us.

Now you must see Jesus here…in Hebrews 2:6-8 the writer quotes Psalm 8:4-6 and applies it to Jesus and then says at the end of verse 8 and verse 9, “At present, we do not see everything in subjection to Him. But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.” These verses in our Psalm apply to us before the Fall, but they are fulfilled in Jesus in the Incarnation.

Plummer said, “There is no greater gulf than that which separates the created and the uncreated, the finite and the infinite, man and God,” but this verse shows us how fallen man is restored—Jesus suffered in our place so we could be declared righteous. That’s the dignity we were given but notice verses 6-8 and you’ll also see God given dominion. We should never worship the creation—the Creator gave us dominion over it.

We looked at the God given dominion yesterday, but I wanted to come back to this because I am convinced we will never be caretakers of this earth if we do not see the dignity in which we were made.

There are those who seem to worship the earth. I’m not sure the Church has adequately been as active in caring for the environment as we should be…in fact I am quite sure we have not and when I saw we I include me! The difference I think in caring for the world God has given us and in many environmentalists today is that they are striving for what is going to come only after Jesus returns…a New Heaven and a New Earth is coming, but until that day we should care for those made in God’s image, but also for the Creation which yearns with us for the Creator’s redemption.