By default, Christians tend to think that one God created one human. In a sense, that’s true. In another sense it’s not.
Genesis 1:26-27 says…
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Notice it says “Let US make mankind.” So the community of God counseled together and had a big idea. In Hebrew, the actual word used for mankind is not gender-specific. It’s doesn’t mean one male. It means “humanity.” The word is communal.
These verses are saying that a communal God made a community of people. There may have been one body there initially, but there was a community inside of that body.
God then split that one body into two – male and female. Then He told those two to become one and then to multiply.
In the thought of God, he created a whole race, not just one human. His plan or intention was that this race would be His image – a many-in-one community.
You were in the adam and the Christ
Think about this question – why do you sin? The Christian answer would be that you have a sin nature (Romans 7:18). You were born into it. The next question would be – why do you have a sin nature? The Christian answer would be because the first human sinned.
The third question would be – why is that your responsibility? You’re not them. The Christian answer is that you were in the adam – the humanity that God created in the beginning.
Also, you were made alive in Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:22 puts it plainly…
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
In fact, you were in Christ from before creation…
…He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world… (Ephesians 1:4)
We receive both Adam’s consequence and Christ’s consequence for the choices they made. You can see how inextricably intertwined every human is.
God might have made one physical body in the beginning, but inside of that one body was a many; just like God is one God, but a many as well.
How to be the image of God
Nowhere in Scripture is any one individual human called the image of God, except for one time. The beginning of Genesis says humanity was made in the image of God. Then Colossians 1:15 says…
He (Jesus Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
Christ is the image of God. Individuals humans were made in Him and express a part of Him (1 Cor. 12:27). To image God requires a many in one. That’s God’s purpose.
Peter wrote about this idea…
…He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature…
The reason that God created humanity is so that it could partake in the same nature that God has.
Many Christians are constantly focused on answering the question “what is God’s plan for my life?” But God doesn’t think in individual terms. He thinks in terms of community. If we’re going to think like God, we have to think in terms of community.
This mindset shift changes even the questions that we ask. No longer do we ask God about ourselves individually first and foremost. You start asking God about what He wants from His communities of people that you’re a part of and how you fit in imaging God.
Divine community expansion
In the book The Community Life of God, author Milt Rodriguez talks about God’s purpose…
God’s purpose was to have a corporate image. God wanted to have a visible expression of Himself. God wanted an expression and expansion of Himself. He wanted to be magnified, to be made bigger, if you will.
When you magnify something, you make it bigger for the purpose of clarification. This is so that His many-sided wisdom, truth, and riches can be seen through the church (Eph. 3:8-10). This process of expansion (magnification) and expression (manifestation) is called glorification. God’s glory is His expansion and expression.
His bigness and His greatness and His splendor are all expressed through the communal man. In the physical body of Jesus, both God and man were brought into one. This is the Seed, the Firstborn of a new creation.
In a nutshell, God’s purpose was to take His community and make it bigger. The first humans failed, but then along comes Jesus. He becomes the adam that the first adam was not.
The first adam did not live by the divine nature, but Jesus did. Finally, we had a human where man and God were one and the image of God was now on the earth.
But remember the many-to-one pattern throughout the Bible. God creates one, splits it into many, tells them to become one so that they can multiply and be many, and then picks one family through which His promise will come and tells them to become many so they can bless all nations.
Then Jesus comes in one body and says he has to go away so His people can do greater things. How? He leaves His one body and enters many with the purpose of them being one. At the end of the Bible, you see God being all in all within His expanded many-but-one community.
Since God’s commission to the first humans to live by this many-but-one divine nature and purpose, nothing has changed.
If the source of a church’s life together is God’s Life (acting and treating each other the way the Persons in God treat one another), it ends up fulfilling God’s purpose of being His image. When we don’t do that, we display something else.
Mankind comes up with all sorts of ideas of how to do life together. They come up with all sorts of models, structures, administrations, etc. But when Paul says that the foundation he lays is Christ, what he meant was that everything is rooted in this way of treating one another. If it’s not, it’s not a Christian concept.
God’s kind of life
Being a healthy church is all about how to have Godly relationships.
The flow of God’s life is found in the types of relationships you see within the Persons of God. Their Love is their flow of Life.
The creation of mankind gives us insight into the nature and purpose of God, and therefore humanity. He created a whole human race that was in one body. To image God, you need to have a many-in-one community that acts like God. If we’re not rooted and grounded in this, we express a different kind of life than God’s life.
Michael Fleming
Mike Fleming is the creator of Finding Healthy Church. Over 20 years ago, he was sparked by the frustration of failing to experience what the biblical story claimed a healthy church was like. He caught a vision and passion for seeing local churches be what they were designed by God to be. He shares what he's learning along the way so the health of local churches around the world are improved. He’s currently working on an eye-opening book that will help better understand what it means for a church to be healthy.