Live Bonus Episode - Made in the Image of God.

This is a bonus 'Between the Seasons' episode of a talk I gave at 'Lighthouse' lunch club earlier this year....

I hope you enjoy it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hi, it's Jeremy here. Just a quick introduction to today's episode. As you will know, we've just finished working through the book of Ephesians, and I'm about to launch off in a lengthy series that will take us through one and two chronicles. Now I always take a couple of days out in which to prepare the groundwork and map out the journey ahead in the following book. And during that time, I post a few bonus episodes so that we're ready to go at the beginning of the week following the end of the last series. So this time we actually did finish on a Friday, so I'm going to be posting five extra episodes over the week. Stuff that's appeared elsewhere. Extracts, single episodes from my other podcasts, which if you find interesting, you can sign up and follow those. Or as indeed what follows today is a recording of a live presentation I made at a lunch club in the Townstruck village of Anstal, not far from where I live, where I was asked to speak about the image of God. So I hope you find it interesting and helpful, and I'll see you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in about a week's time where we launch off on one and two chronicles together. I hope you enjoy this episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

He's always different. So oh who's listened to a podcast? Well, you've got a market there to tell them about your podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, well, I put the cards out. The Mean Podcast is the Bible Project Daily Podcast. Lord, just thank you for this opportunity to come together and to uh to think about you, to dwell on you and who you are and who you are in Christ. And on I pray that only you would be glorified and only you would be heard in Jesus' name. Amen. So my journey in podcasting began. Well, actually, I did it for a little while in 2004 when a guy from America called Rod Teasan. I was I was recording Bible studies with Dick Coates. Who remembers Dick Coates? We were recording Bible studies together in the 1990s, and we were copying endless tapes and sending them out to people, and it was very laborious. And it was a guy called Rod Teasan who was from America at St. Anne's Baptist who said, You want to try this new thing? Someone I went to college with called podcasting, and I did. And now, a million and a half downloads later, I'm here and it's what I do full time. So I launched my main podcast, the Bible Project, in 2019, but then reconfigured it after the pandemic to be to try and be less of a replacement church service for people who couldn't get to church and more of a Bible study. And we've been working through the Bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse, ever since. We're 1,300 episodes in. And as I said, it's listened to in 212 countries around the world now. But after the first hundred episodes, I surveyed the community and said, what's been your favorite episode so far? And the one they chose was the last one I expected because it was a really quite a tech difficult one, but people said you made a difficult subject and made it sound really understandable. So I'm going to do a version of that. The original podcast was well over an hour long, so we've we've reduced it down, and I'm hoping to take a complicated idea and make it understandable. And if you don't understand it, blame all the people who voted for it and said it was the best episode. You'll be the judge of how successful I am in that. But the the podcast today is What Makes Someone a Person. That's the that was the episode that originally was done in back in 2021. Now, most of us, I would suspect, know a person when we see one, don't we? I mean, I'm standing here talking to you now. So you probably can assume that I'm a person. Well, at least I hope you can assume that. But was I always a person? And what about historical figures? Was Beethoven a person? Is he still a person? Because you can talk about him, think about him, know what he was like to a degree? More recently, what about Martin Luther King or Elvis Presley? But then it can get even stranger. What about a nine-month-old baby? Is that a person? What about a fetus? Is that a person? Or what about these fictional and literary figures like Mr. Darcy or Spider-Man or CP3O? Alexa, do you speak to your Alexa? Is she a person? Or Cortana or Siri? Or your current favorite new AI personal assistant? Well, race yourself. They maybe aren't real. Now imagine people today, if I was to put this on the internet, uh, as a podcast episode, a version of this talk, and the people discovered that I wasn't real, that this was all a fake. I was an avatar with a nice Irish accent, I hope, but no actual body. Now, some of you may already look at me and think, well, that explains a lot. But the point is the word person is not really as simple as it sounds, is it, when you think about it? Now, to a biologist, the answer to that question is fairly easy. If you've got human DNA, then they say you're a person. But to philosophers, and more importantly, to Christians, the word person is what we call a moral word. It is a person who deserves to belong to a community, a moral community. Someone who deserves has a right to expect dignity, moral consideration, and indeed care if they're suffering. And that's helpful when you add that into your understanding of a person, but it also is where things get complicated. Because some people out there believe that that animals deserve moral consideration. Some Christians also believe that some people by their actions forfeit their right to personhood, which is part of the debate in some parts of the world around capital punishment. In fact, most of our society's big debates, whether it be abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, racial justice, black lives matter, are really underneath arguments about person or personhood. So if we want to understand ourselves and we want to understand our neighbours and our friends, and what scripture says about what it really means to be a person and to be made in the image of God, then I would suggest we really need to think about personhood. I'm just going to get my drink. So here's a question for you. Is Superman a person? Now let's just try this as a little fun thought experiment. Imagine he really existed, that there was this guy who wandered around doing amazing things, and you met him in the street, and you'd think, hmm, is he a person? I don't you'd say, is this flying man? You'd meet him and you and he's there in his blue tights. Uh but you probably wouldn't think about whether he was a person or not. You would relate to him. You'd maybe ask for a selfie if you were that type of person. But technically, in the story of Superman, he's not even human. He's from a place called Krypton, and he doesn't have human DNA. He's affected by things that don't affect us, this imaginary thing called kryptonite, and he doesn't seem to be affected by gravity, does he? The thing that affects every other human being, because he can fly. But we tend to relate to him. If he existed and we met him in real life, we'd relate to him and we'd speak to him as a person, wouldn't we? We'd speak to him because he thinks, he talks, he loves, he makes moral choices, and he has personality. He has relationships. In the story, he has an adopted mum and dad who love him, and he's got Lois Lane. But that's a sort of does she, don't, doesn't she, does she, on and off sort of relationship. But she seems interested in him sometimes on the day she's not uh arguing with him. In fact, in the original stories, Superman is probably the most human person in the stories. And interestingly, some of the human beings that he fights with in those stories, uh, well, they're the human beings who are the bad guys, so we instinctively root for the good guy, for Superman, and we give him moral personality because we have empathy for him, because of his character, not his DNA or a biology, because he's from another planet. So this is where it's getting complicated is what about animals? What about robots? What about cartoon characters? And Superman isn't the only tricky case. You've got Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey, he sounds like a person. And then there's Woody and Buzzy, Buzz Lightyear, if you're a bit longer. We love them, we love their characters, we love their personalities. And then there are the great apes, we've been seeing David Attenborough relating to those recently, the chimpanzees of the gorillas, they show real intelligence, emotion, and we now know they show grief when one of their troop dies. Some argue that intelligence or emotional capacity determines what is called personhood, but if that's true, then under that definition, a fetus is not a person. It might be human, but it's not yet a person. And someone who's in a persistent and vegetative state. They might be recognized as human, but they're still no longer a person. So at what age do we begin or lose our ability to be a person? Some even say that people lose their personhood. So the big question all comes down to this. What must someone have or be to belong to our community? What quality does someone need to have to receive our love and respect and our moral consideration? And that's the question that sits beside absolutely every big debate, every ethical debate in the world today. And as Christians, people who believe every human being is made in the image of God, it really matters, really matters deeply about what we think about this. Now, this is where it gets a little bit technical, but I hope I'm putting it in a way you can understand. There are five views out there in the world, five main views on what personhood is, and I'm going to try and explain them to you without you needing some sort of degree. We're going to look at the five way, the five ways the secular world tries to define personhood. And some of these views you will immediately recognize clash head on with the Christian worldview. Others are a bit more subtle, but all of them help us to see why this topic is not only complicated, but why some people believe the things they do. It's no good just going to people and saying you're wrong if you can understand why they believe the things they believe, then you can begin to answer their worldview and their questions and those things, some of which we find abhorrent. So we're going to look at those whys. Now, the first view of what grants someone personhood makes them a person is what's called the genetic view. It is that person has human DNA and that makes them a person. This view came about from the legal discussions around euthanasia and abortion, and it was formulated by an American legal scholar called John Noonan. And it's very simple. Under that definition, if you've got human DNA, you're a person. You're in the club, and if you don't, you're not. It's simple, but it's really ridiculous when you drill down into it. You see, I've got a scab on my arm because I recently had some cryptic, you know when they freeze a thing off, what's it called? Crinotherapy. Crinotherapy. So I've got a rather nice scab on my arm. Now, under that definition, if I pick that scab off my arm and put it here, don't worry, I'm not going to do that. That technically, under that definition, is a person because it's got human DNA. Is it a person? Should we give it a name? Should we baptize it and ask it to join the church? Probably not. What do you think, Rick? No. That view also, by the way, would tell you that a corpse is a person. Think about that. Or if you've been to the dentist and he extracts a tooth from your mouth and sets it on that little table beside where you sit in the dentist, that is a person as well. Now, the virtue of that view is it's simple, isn't it? It's easy to grasp hold of. You've got DNA, you're a human, you're a person. But most Christians, well, at the very least, we'd want to back away from what that can really mean sometimes. The second view is what's called the cognitive view, which says you're a person if you can think, communicate, and be self-aware. Now, this came up in the 1970s with a philosopher called Mary Alan Warren, and she came up with this. She suggested a person must have these things under the cognitive view. They must be conscious, they must have self-motivation, the ability to act, the ability to communicate, and be self-aware. Now, these are important qualities. The problem is, though, we don't have all those qualities all the time, do we? Under this view, fetuses are no longer people. Newborns are not persons yet, because science now tells us that children do not become aware until the age of 18 months. It says some people in coma are no longer a person. Some of us before our first cup of coffee in the morning would probably struggle to be defined as persons under this definition. And I think there again, definition two, most Christians would struggle with the idea because we know at heart that this excludes a lot of people. We instinctively know that our newborns and our children and our grandchildren are definitely persons, and we ourselves still maintain our personhood when we become old or incapacitated. Oh, view number three, the social view. You are allowed to be a person if someone cares about you. This view says you're a person when society recognises you as one or when someone loves you. Now that sounds lovely, doesn't it? It's nice and warm. It would look good in a Valentine card. I love you because you're you, and because I love you, you're a person. But think again about the implications of that. If no one cares about you, then you're not a person. If society changes its mind about your personhood, then it's something that can come and go. So personhood, in a way, is a sort of personal uh a popularity contest. And Christians also struggle with this because we know that the Bible says that every single person is loved by God, that we're loved by whether or not that person is loved by other people, under that definition, it kind of becomes like the public vote, doesn't it? Well, God doesn't wait for the public vote before he decides on whether you're a person or not. Now, this next view is the sentient view, which says you're a person if you can feel pain. And this came up with Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who argues that personhood is about sentience, meaning the ability to feel or experience pleasure or pain. He is the uh the main inspiration became behind what surprisingly arose out of that, which is the animal rights movement, because that view says if you can suffer, then you're a person, and if you can't suffer, you don't. So that means most animals are now given personhood, which is why people become so animated and want to focus their ideas and their thinking on animals' rights. Now, at the same time, under that view, a fetus under 23 weeks is not a person, and people in comas can no longer be persons. In fact, a lobster would outrank a human suffering from leprosy who can't currently feel pain in their extremities. Now, Christians often find this troubling because, of course, this disconnects people's personhood from being even human and ties it to sort of whether you've got functioning nerve endings. And then finally, the fifth view is what's called the gradient view, the most recent, that says personhood is actually like a dimmer switch. It's not an on-off switch, it's not suddenly granted and suddenly lost. This says it comes to us in degrees, it grows gradually as we improve in what's called our cognition, our ability to interpret and understand the world, and it fades gradually as abilities decline. How do you feel hearing that with an average age, I would imagine, of 70 in the room? Because that's telling you a 26-year-old fetus has some personhood, a 34-year-old fetus and has a little bit more, a newborn more still, a toddler even more, and hopefully then you get this three-score years and 10 where you're granted personhood. But at the end, your right to be a person is slowly dimmed and turned off again. People who like this view claim it is compassionate and use it to argue the debate about end-of-life care and allowing people to choose their own ends. But it also leads us to the uncomfortable idea that there are some people out there that it's been codified that they have less personhood than other people. It sounds a little bit to me, it sounds exactly to me, like George Orwell in Animal Farm, doesn't it, with that famous quote, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. But why do these views matter? Well, the ideas are difficult to talk about, but they matter deeply because they shape everything we think about in culture. All the big issues of the current day abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, animal rights, human rights, medical efforts, ethics, and even really importantly now, artificial intelligence. It's shaping what we think about ourselves and others. Now, that's the world. Let's turn to the Christian view of personhood. But let's just, before we go there, let's just take a breath. We've walked through some very difficult, different, and sometimes strange ways the world looks at people. Now I were ready to ask, and only now, what does Scripture say? What does the Bible say? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? And how does that and can that shape your view of what it means to be a human and to be a person? Well, the first thing I'd say we have to start in the right place. When we look at those secular ideas of personhood, the Christian way is totally different because we don't even start with us, we start with what it means to be, we don't start with what it means to be human, we start with God and who God is. Before we even ask the question, what is a person? we ask, what is God like? Now the first thing I'm going to say about God, it's so simple, it almost feels embarrassing to say it out loud, but two-thirds of the world do not believe this. Two thirds of people of faith in the world do not believe this. But the statement is, and it's a hugely important one, so I'm going to say it God is a person. He's not a vague force, he's not a power, he's not even a higher power, and he isn't just the embodiment of the universe. He is a person. The Bible never talks about God as an it, he talks about him as a he, and he is some a person who thinks, who speaks, who feels, who makes decisions, he loves, and sometimes he even judges people. God thinks and wills and writes from the very first verse of our Bible, Genesis 1, verse 1, says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And creation requires a mind, and creation requires a will. And God chose and God decides, and then God acted on that, and by doing so he created. And a couple of verses later it says, Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply on all the earth and subdue it. So God speaks, he gives instructions, he blesses people. This is not how a power behaves, this is not how electricity behaves, this is how a person behaves. Then we see something later, very soon, a few chapters later, we know that God thinks and speaks, but we find out he also feels. He says, The Lord saw how wicked the wickedness of the human race had become, and the Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So God looks upon human evil, and he doesn't just struggle and say, Oh, well, that's chaos theory for you. I created it, it's gonna run. He says, That, well, he says, it's a a lovely quote I read years ago. He said, it was a catastrophic convulsion in the heart of God. God looks at it and says, His heart's broken. Now, many people imagine God as some distant force, cold and emotional, at best like some eternal headmaster in the sky. But the Bible shows us a God who can be grieved. He can be offended. Sometimes he's even moved to anger, isn't he? But he's always moved, even in his anger, underpinned by compassion. He is a God whose heart can be broken, but also a God whose heart can overflow with love and mercy towards us. So what we can say about God is he has a mind, he thinks and he knows, he has a will, he chooses and he acts and creates, and he has emotions, he feels and responds. And that, my friend, is the definition, very definition of personhood: mind, emotion, and will. So, in other words, God is a person. God is not an it, God is a person. Now that might sound basic, but I've hammered it home because it's actually really important and a huge dividing line. Because two-thirds of the religious population of the world don't even believe God is a person or the creator. Many believe in something they call the divine, they don't believe that God is a personal, relatable being. In some New Age thinking and part of the environmental movement, you'll hear ideas like everything is God and God is everything, or that God is the energy of the universe is something you hear a lot today. But that, my friends, is not the God of the Bible. That's more like a spiritual version of gravity. Useful for some people, they think, perhaps, but you can't have a conversation with gravity, can you? You can't have a conversation with electricity. The Bible says God is not part of creation, God is distinct from it, he is above it, over it, over it. He is the creator, the personal being who stands behind it and in Christ his son upholds it to this day. And that matters because God is a person, because if God is just a force, as some believe, then you can't know him, can you? If God isn't a person, you can't know him, you can't pray, you can't have a relationship with him, and there's no one to trust. There's no one to love you back if you love him, no one to answer you when you turn to him or pray. But if God is a person, then anyone, anywhere, can speak to him. We can trust him, we can choose to love him and be loved by him. See, Christianity at heart is not really a religion at all, because religions about are about rules and rituals. It's not even an idea or a philosophy, it's a relationship with a personal God. And this is where it all links back to this debate about personhood. If God is a person and we are made in the image of God, then personhood is not these ethical and philosophical puzzles that these people are battling over. We are a reflection of who God is. And when we remember that God is a person, then every single human being who walks through earth is created in his image, and all that stuff about rules and religion can fall away. And life becomes less about that and more like the natural way you can relate to other people and relate to God, because we all together bear the likeness of a loving God. So that's the first big, big thing about God. He's a person. But the Bible also tells us something else about God, doesn't it? It tells us God is spirit. So let's think about that for a moment. Because if God is a spirit, that changes everything. Now, saying that God is a spirit, that can sound a bit mysterious, a bit woolly, but it's actually in reality wonderfully practical. If God is a spirit, it means that you are not limited in any way when it comes to meeting and talking with him. He isn't tied to a body, he doesn't need to be in this building in a chair, he doesn't need a lift to go from one floor to another. Because God is a spirit, yes, that means he's physically invisible, but it means he can be worshipped anywhere, and that's the big point, which means he can be worshipped anywhere. Not just in Israel, not just in Mecca, not even within a church building, even this church building, God can be met anywhere. Some people treat God almost like an object, an object that sits or lives in one special space. You go there and you get the blessing, but scripture tells us something much better than that, which is you can meet with God anywhere. And God can be worshipped anywhere, and God can be spoken to and prayed to anywhere. He's not handcuffed to a pulpit, not even this pulpit. He's not handcuffed to any priest, minister, or any postcode. Because God is spirit, you can talk to him in your kitchen, in your car, in your garden, when you're out for a walk or a run, you can even talk to him in the middle of the night where sleep really isn't cooperating with your mind. And one thing else about God, something simple but enormous, and that is God is eternal. So God is a person, God is a spirit, and God is eternal. Moses said, the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Paul in the New Testament said, To the King, eternal, immortal, and visible, be honor and glory forever. Now, let's be clear, there are two types of eternal beings. There are those that are created and then can live eternally, which is you and I. Yes, we are eternal in that sense. But there are also created the uncreated eternal beginnings. We have a beginning and an end, but that then can be granted eternal life by accepting Jesus. But God is the uncreated eternal being. God has no beginning and no end ever. Everyone in this room has a birthday, but God doesn't. And this matters because if God is eternal, then our relationship with Him, once we're adopted and in His family, can also be eternal. It cannot be broken by time, it cannot be taken away by age or illness or distance, and the big one is it doesn't end at death. The Bible tells us that human relationships can fracture, but God's relationship that you have with him, if you accept him and hand your life over to him, can never be broken. Never be broken, and that's the foundation of our Christian hope. So what does this mean for your personhood? Well, if God is a person and you are made in his image, and you are a person, then that personhood that is granted to you is not fragile, temporary, and it's not even open for debate. Your worth does not depend on your age, your ability, your IQ, your memory, your productivity, your health, or whether or not society thinks you're valuable or not. Your worth is anchored because your image is the one you bear of God within you. Every human conflict, every area of contention in the world, from racism to war to neglect, social neglect, comes from forgetting this truth that every person exists who exists in this earth carries the image of God within them. When we lose sight of that, we lose sight of each other and we lose sight of caring of other people. But when you remember something like that, I think it changes everything. Ultimately, the question that I've called personhood leads to a deeper question. It's not who are you, it is to whom do you belong? And the Christian answer, to whom you belong, is found in Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ is the true image of God arrived on earth so that we can fully understand and see what God was like in our human fallibility. And in Jesus Christ we see the personality of God displayed, the compassion of God. We even skeptic experience that suffering of God I talk about. We hear the purity and see it lived out in the teachings of God and in the life of Christ, and ultimately, at the end of the Gospel of Counts, we even see the victory of God over death itself. Jesus shows us who God is. Jesus also shows us who we are, and he shows us how and who we're made to be. And he takes us through the cross, past the empty tomb with the stone rolled away, and into the very presence of the eternal God. There is no other worldview that answers the question of identity and meaning, the answers of suffering in the world and our destiny with any approaching level of coherence in my mind and without the hope we have the future hope to come. Jesus, as he said of himself, is the way, the truth, and the life. And he understands you and he shows that God understands you. He is the one who not only gives you personality but gives meaning to your life story. So the invitation today, arising out of this, and I accept it started off as a bit of a technical discussion, but the invitation is really, really simple. It is to surrender to God by surrendering to Him, surrendering to Jesus, by trusting Him for your life, and then choosing to follow Him, serve Him, live for Him, and carry His message with you wherever you go. And you do that by simply coming to God and asking Him for forgiveness for any or all of those failings in your life, because we all do them, in the knowledge that He will forgive you, and that forgiveness is internable, is eternal, and can never ever be broken. Because the fact remains, and is always the case, that you, my friend, in all your problems and with all your complexities, your whole life experience value, perhaps even your problematic personality, all your joys and sorrows, you can bring, begin to bring and continue to bring to him and know the salvation and forgiveness that he offers. Ultimately, you are a person made in the image of God, loved by the internal God, and invited into an internal relationship with him through Jesus Christ, his only son. I trust you'll embrace it today. Okay, I'd like to just close, if that's okay, by praying. Because there's a lot to think about there, and I just want to finish by praying and say, Father, we thank you that you are not a distant force. You're not just an idea, but you're a living, loving person who came in the person of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for that, and we thank you also, Lord, that you are spirit, that you are nearer to us than our own breath. Ruach, the breath of the Holy Spirit, present with us wherever we go, and we thank you that you are our eternal refuge, always our beginning, our future, and indeed our future home. Lord, remind us again that every person we meet carries your image. Teach us to love one another, to encourage one another, to view people with the same way as you view them with your eyes and your compassion and with dignity and grace that everybody deserves. And we thank you, Jesus, that you are the image, the true image of God, and that you draw us into a new life, a new love, a new truth, and shape our hearts and steps today and from this day forwards, and guide us, Lord, by your Spirit and the purposes you have set out before us. And Holy Spirit, empower us and help us, as is promised in your word, to lead us forward, to dwell within us, to help us serve faithfully, to help us to walk in goodness and humility. And thank you that you will remain with us all the days that we live on the earth. And as we go from this place, carry that with you. And if you don't know that personal experience of God, I pray that he might reveal it to you now. And just pray the prayer where you, along with me, where you can come to him and say, Lord Jesus, I ask for your forgiveness. Thank you that you came and that you took my sins and you bore them on the cross so that I need not suffer the repercussions or the penalty of those actions. And that by that I am forgiven and acceptable to God. And I leave that with you, Lord. And I leave that in your care, in the knowledge that that is done and it cannot ever be taken from me. Thank you, God, for I belong to you now, and you are with me wherever I go, now and forever. Amen. Now, if you've prayed that prayer or anything like that today, then come and see me. Don't leave this building without telling someone. And thanks for inviting me and having me again.