Begin at the beginning

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? These are the basic questions we all ask at some time – and so many people are frustrated because they don’t get the answers they need. So did Jesus tell us the true answers to these and our other key questions about life, death, God and the universe? Let’s see.

Jesus laid the foundation to it all when, questioned about the ethics of divorce, he referred to his Father, God, as the Creator “who made them from the beginning…” (Matthew 19.4). We need read no further for the moment: right there we have a vital clue to understanding who we are. The key truth we are to grab hold of here is that God made man and woman. God is our Creator, and Jesus adds, “he made them male and female”.

This means, first of all, we are not here by chance. The human species has not been “thrown up” by some fluke accident that made life possible, and we are not the result of an extremely long process of upward improvement in species. We need to put out of our minds that root of despair that sees humankind as either an animal or a machine; it is these philosophical visions that have brought upon our secular age the desperate confusion about our human reality. 

No! When human beings appeared on the earth they were there because God had fashioned them in his creative genius. It is not an exaggeration to say that we humans are God’s chef d’œuvre. Professor Brian Cox informs us that the human brain is the most complex thing in the entire universe. I, for one, find it impossible to believe that such a brilliant entity could have come about by chance processes. Rather, when God created the first man and woman, he endowed them with his greatest and most complex gift: our human brain. You have one, and you’re using it right now. It has never seen the light of day, since it is carefully encapsulated within the safe confines of your skull. But is it an absolute wonder. It gives us rationality so we can discuss these very personal issues we are preoccupied with, and it enables us to reason and to grasp truth. No animal has that capacity.

This is the reason why we have such value; we are not mere machines – we are persons. Jesus’ words in Matthew 19 make reference to the first book of the Bible, and he actually quotes with the full approval of his own authority some words from Genesis chapters one and two. In those chapters we have a wonderful key to our human value: “God said, Let us make man in our own image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1.26). This is part of Jesus’ biblical worldview; in the New Testament his younger brother James wrote, “people… have been made in the likeness of God” (James 3.9). 

We will have to fill this out with its deeper meaning, but at least what is clear is that humankind, man and woman, have glorious value because they partake of the likeness of God. This does not mean that God has a body; Jesus said “God is spirit” – but he is personal as well as infinite. We are not infinite, but we are constituted with the personal faculties – like God’s – of emotion, intellect, will, conscience and the faculty of speech. All these and what issues from them are valorised in this Christian understanding of man created by God in his image. You are not a fluke accident; you are highly valued!

Clive Every-Clayton