Without exhausting details on the causes of what happened at the beginning, humanity remains embroiled in mysteries. To effectively illustrate differences between Man’s creation and Adam’s formation a digestive postulate is summarized in the following thirteen-point analysis:
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God’s image is Spiritual. Anything that is physical, as in physical human beings, is the opposite of God’s spiritual nature.
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Adam’s physical form (Gen. 2:7) is not God’s image, as described in 1:26–27. Adam’s loneliness depicts the inferiority of the formation whose outcome is from the dust, not God’s image. The Thomson Chain-reference NIV Bible, 1982 edition footnote shows Adam being not synonymous with the created man (Gen. 1:26–27). Moreover, Genesis 4:15-16 suggests that Adam may not have been the first human ever to be formed.
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If the goodness in Genesis 1:31 includes the “Man” created in God’s image, this excludes Adam, found to be in state of vulnerability to Satan’s deception (Gen. 2:7). As God had not said “let us create Adam in our image” (Gen. 1:26) the configuration of Adam only shadows the reality characterised in the created Man of Genesis 1:27.
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God categorically confirmed Adam’s corporeal condition: “…for dust you are, and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19 NIV). Dust is another product of God’s creation; the land (Gen. 1:9–13), inferior to the Man of God’s image. The declaration “Dust you are” is intended for the physical Adam, inferior to God’s image.
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When the gospel books portray Jesus as “Son of Man”, the referred “Man” is of God’s image (Gen. 1:26–27), not the man of the dust as known today. The identity of the ‘Man’ in God’s image, whose term encompasses both genders, is in Jesus.
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Paul, furthermore, agrees: “Those who are of the earth are like the man who was from the earth: and those who are of heaven are like the one from heaven. And in the same way as we have taken on us the image of the man from the earth, so we will take on us the image of the one from heaven” (1 Corinthians. 15:48-49 BBE). Of the two attributes; only one portrays God’s image. Clearly, the one from heaven portrays the ‘Man’ of Genesis 1:26-27.
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Scientifically, physical things are not designed to last for eternity. The old order of things eventually passes away (Rev. 21:1–4), with longevity, determined by the existing timing order or simply by God’s prerogative. What is spiritual is permanent, as Paul confirms: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18 NIV). Adam is of the dust (temporary) while the Man of God’s image is spirit (permanent).
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A corpse is described as “the body of so and so”. The one owning the body is the character created in God’s image; valued so much by Christ as to be liberated from that state of physical prison-hood. By allowing His body to be lacerated mercilessly by sinful characters, Christ demonstrated how different God’s image was, against physical nature.
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Christ declared: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it in three days” (John 2:19, 21). If Christ’s body was His Temple, it logically follows that Christ was not the Temple. Crucifying Jesus’ body, they supposed they were destroying the actual being. Figuratively, they behaved like brute animals, delighting in sensational trample on a garment whose owner has long escaped.
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To Jeremiah God declared: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5 NIV). The determination of Jeremiah’s assignment was concluded for him after Man’s creation (Gen. 1:26–27). Before Jeremiah’s body formation, God set him apart, appointing him as a prophet to the nations, possibly even before Adam. God’s nature is outside time and space. What was known by God before Jeremiah’s formation is what was created in God’s image.
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The status of being male and female, needing food for sustenance (Gen. 1:28-29), suggests that the created ‘Man’ is physical. In my view, such utterance was inspired in the projection of what came to be, after Adam’s formation (Gen. 2:7). What is sustained by food as in genealogy of Adam is from the dust, not a real reflection of God’s image. Genesis 9:6 also seems to infer that shedding blood is a crime against God’s image. Nonetheless, this depicts spiritual significance as the corpse, being a product of the Earth, cannot be God’s image.
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When obsessed with survival in physical nature, it is not possible to entertain spiritual reality. After death, an unconverted person does not consciously imagine being associated with godly nature. The physical nature perishes in wickedness that does not identify with God, whose image the individual was originally created. This reveals the mystery of physical phenomenon, inherent with humanity, yet with the original spiritual attribute of Godly image.
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Jesus’ mission restores Man’s status of Godly image. Throughout the Old Testament in the genealogy of Adam there is no character living to reflect God’s image. Individuals with tenacious obedience to God’s Word were there, but not associated with God’s express image, attributed only to Jesus (2 Cor. 4:4b, Col. 1:15 and Heb. 1:3).
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