Passage:

God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like ourselves” (Genesis 1:26).

Difficulty: Why does God refer to himself as “us”?

Explanation: Some people suggest that God, being a Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), is actually speaking among the three persons of the Godhead and therefore refers to himself as us. We know, for example, that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, was at creation for it says in Genesis 1 that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the water” (verse 2). Scripture also states that Jesus was at creation. “Through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth…He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together” (Colossians 1:15-17).

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Teenagers are a piece of work, didn’t you know? They are shallow, self-absorbed little beasts who eat their parents’ food, snicker at old ladies, and drop out of school every nine seconds. They break into grandpa’s liquor cabinet and sell drugs out of their ninth grade backpacks in the bathroom behind the baseball field. Teens destroy things. They sometimes torture cats. 

If this is what you think of young adults, come hang out with me for a few days. I see things differently.

It might help to know why I care so much. I started living in Teen Land at age thirteen, and never really left. I went from high school, then to college, and right back to high school having earned a secondary teaching credential at the tender age of 21. Since then, I’ve taught public high school in the rural Ozark Mountains of Missouri, the material world of Orange County, and a middle class suburb of California’s Central Valley. Twenty-five years later, I’ve earned the right to love them. 

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Words change.

They become archaic. They change meaning. They lose the power to describe what they originally were used for.

Words evolve.

At one time the highest form of love was called “charity” (Check out a 1611 version of 1 Corinthians 13)

In genuine acts, people showing this kind of love, often gave money, time and energy to those who could not pay them back. So much so that eventually the meaning of charity morphed into a synonym for aid assistance and compassionate giving and not the sweeping all-inclusive God-type love which it was originally used to mean.

Words can be high jacked.

Saying a person is “young and gay” does not carry the same meaning it did a hundred years ago. Nobody I know of uses that word to describe being carefree or joyous. The word is dead to its original use.

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The Bible says we have all sinned (Romans 3:23) and are in need of forgiveness. But why did Jesus need to die to enable us to be forgiven by God? Isn’t that an extreme measure for God to use in order to forgive people for making some bad choices?

 

Sin’s Role To understand why Jesus had to die we must understand a little of what sin is and the nature of God. We will summarize these two issues to place this question within a proper context.

 

God is a relational God who is by nature perfectly holy (Isaiah 54:5 and Revelation 4:8) and absolutely just (Revelation 16:5). Scripture says, “He is the Rock; his deeds are perfect. Everything he does is just and fair” (Deuteronomy 32:4). Doing holy and just things isn’t something God decides to do, it is something he is. He by nature is holy and just.

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Once a person dies, really dies, and is buried, there is no coming back. People just don’t rise from the dead naturally. It is impossible without miraculous intervention. So is there proof that a miracle took place—that Jesus was dead and then was bodily resurrected?

 

There is an abundance of evidence to support Jesus’ resurrection. Many good resources are available on the subject. However, there are also a number of alternative theories that try to explain the absence of Jesus’ body from his tomb. They include the “stolen-body theory,” “the relocated body theory,” “the hallucination theory,” “the spiritual resurrection theory,” and others. Each of these theories attempts to explain facts about which there is little debate. The question is not whether those facts are true, but which theory best explains them. We will consider three of those facts.

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Bryan Crawford Loritts is the Lead Pastor of Fellowship Memphis, a multicultural church ministering to the evolving community of urban Memphis. This Guest Voices post originally appeared on Bryan's blog as a response to Douglas Wilson's controversial book on race, Black and Tan. The blog ignited a firestorm of response from both sides of this important and ongoing debate on the history of slavery and the ongoing conversations about race in America. Bryan is the author of A Cross Shaped Gospel (Moody Press).

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Every human culture known to man has had a moral law. We find it in the records of past cultures as well as in all present societies. And the morality of all these societies is surprisingly similar, no matter how widely separated by time, geography, cultural development, or religious belief. The morality defined in the Jewish Ten Commandments, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, the Chinese Tao, and the Christian New Testament differs in detail and emphasis but not in essence.

For example, some societies allow individuals to kill to avenge a wrong, while others insist that all execution is the prerogative of the state. Some societies allow freedom in premarital sexual relationships or permit men to take more than one wife, while others forbid such behavior. But all have rules that say people cannot kill others at will or engage in sex with just anyone they want. These laws protect human life. They are rules that govern marriage and family relationships, condemn stealing, and encourage doing good to others.

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This week the NYTimes posted an article about the impending demise of the traditional university. According to columnist Thomas L. Friedman, “massive open online courses” (MOOC) are the future,. The article cites how millions of students are now taking coursework once reserved for a handful of privileged elites. Students stifled by autism, remote locations, lack of funds, social awkwardness, or snob-deficit can now jump on the college degree train. The brick-and-mortar campus, speculates Friedman, should be already preparing its fossil record in advance of its extinction.

The now-legendary Kahn Academy looks downright rustic compared to the MOOC movement. Advocates say that the skeptics will eventually join the ranks of past naysayers who were also suspicious of the printing press, commercial flight, or the Roomba. All people deserve an education, one that can lift them from poverty and bring them into the modern world, say all the innovators, so step aside and let the revolutionaries do their magic.  

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From the moment we begin walking and talking we are taught not to interrupt adults. It’s just rude.

And so, as we grow up into adults, we learn to not tolerate interruptions from anyone or anything.

Just last week I was working out at home on my elliptical. I had my headphones on and a book in my hand. I was in the middle of my 30 min ‘me time’ workout. My brother-in-law came into the room where I was engrossed in my workout, my music and my book and he began to talk to me. “I’m clearly busy now. Can’t you just wait to talk to me until I’m done?” Immediately I thought of Stephanie Tanner’s famous saying, “How rude!”

And then, almost immediately, two stories in the Gospels about interruptions came to mind. Thanks a lot God!

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What if I told you I owned a brand-new Lamborghini and it was sitting in my garage right now? If you knew me you would probably say I couldn’t afford such a high-priced car on a high-school teacher’s salary. Of course, you’d be right. But all you would have to do is call my hand and say, “Show me the Lamborghini.” And if I couldn’t produce the goods, I would be a fraud.

It’s a little different when it comes to producing “the goods” on God. We just can’t pray a prayer or snap our fingers and presto!—God appears and dispels any question about his existence. To be truthful, even that might not persuade some people to believe in him. But the fact is, God in a real sense remains hidden to us as a material being. The Scripture says, “God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth” ( John 4:24). And as a spirit, God is invisible to us (see 1 Timothy 1:17). You see, he is on another plane of existence than we humans. We are not meant to see him in all his awesome power and might. He told Moses, “You may not look directly at my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20).

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