Anthropology

The Dignity of Being Human

By Ed Vasicek Tue, 02/28/2012 - 1:00am

The other day I was driving in downtown Kokomo and saw a comical sight—comical for me, at least. A man in pickup truck was backing into a parking space, tapped the streetlight pole with his truck’s bumper, and—boom! Down she went. Although he did not hit the pole hard, one weighty tap was all it took.

We, too, are fragile. In Psalm 103:13-14, the psalmist reminds us that, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (ESV).

The fact that we are vulnerable does not mean we are not valuable. God’s compassion is showered upon us like the compassion of a loving father. He values us so intently that He did not spare his own Son for us (Rom. 8:32).

Our human dignity comes from God. Understanding human dignity is a theological point, but that does not preclude it from being an important issue in daily life. It is a crucial matter that affects the life and death decisions we make.

In Genesis 2:7, we are told that mankind originated from the dust: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”read more

Survey: How Many of Us Are Going to Hell?

By Greg Linscott Wed, 06/21/2006 - 9:54pm

Details at MSNBC.com

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Reflections on the Imago Dei and Procreation

By M. Osborne Fri, 05/05/2006 - 7:09am

Discuss this article.

Being omnipotent, our Creator had options. He could have done it otherwise. That Jehovah God passed over so many potentialities for this world, and that He called this world—the one that He had in fact made—“very good” infuses our world with significance, joy, and awful wonder. Because God had such meticulous intentions for our world, we who fear Him can profit from reflecting on His ways in creation.
One particularly significant aspect of creation is man’s being made in the image of God. Ask any well-trained Sunday school class what that means, and you will get a pretty standard textbook answer: man has intellect, emotions, will, and a sense of morality. Francis Schaeffer said that being in the image of God means being as like to God as a creature can be. Studying a little further, we find that man is like God not just in nature, but also in function: he relates, he creates (though not ex nihilo), he procreates. Human life (by “life” I mean alive-ness) in its strength, its sexuality, its virility, also reflects something about God. At the beginning of our Bibles, in two or three short verses, are ideas so big that sometimes they blend into the background of our experience. But God—through Moses’ elongated description of the sixth day—placed these ideas front and center in our Bibles. Maleness. Femaleness. Procreation. We are either male or female, and were born through procreation. And the very first command given to the Image Bearers was to have babies. Why, God? Why this way?
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