Published 2001-09
Bud Powell
Trinity Covenant RCUS, Colorado Springs
Food, Beauty,
Godlikeness.
“Ye
shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” Satan
to Eve in Genesis 3
It
is the glory of man that he wants to be like God. He was created for this
purpose, to be the image of God. Even after the fall of Adam, something
of the image of God remains, according to Genesis 6:6, 1Cor. 11:6; James
3:9. Man ought to strive to be like God for the elect have been
predestinated to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ
[Rom. 8:29], who is the image of the invisible God [Col. 1:15].
It
is also the shame of man that he wants to be like God, for he does not seek God
in Jesus Christ. Because of this he imagines that he can be like God in
his own right. He therefore seeks the gifts of God without seeking the
God of the gifts. It was so in the temptation of Adam and is so until
this day.
Adam
saw that the Tree in the midst of the Garden of Eden was good for food.
But this was not the cause of the temptation. Adam was not hungry.
God had filled the Garden with an abundance of wonderful things. It was
not sinful for Adam to desire to eat good things, but it was sinful for
him to eat what God had forbidden him to eat.
Neither
was it sinful for Adam to enjoy beautiful things. The fruit of the
forbidden tree was pleasing to the eye, but God had filled the earth with
beautiful things and had given Adam a heart and eye to appreciate them.
It was not sinful for Adam to desire beauty, but it was sinful for him
to desire the fruit that had been forbidden.
Neither
was it sinful for Adam to want to be like God. He had been created for
this. We might say that creation is a “visibilization”
of the invisible, for the invisible things of God are
displayed in creation, according to Paul in Romans 1, so that they are clearly
seen by men who are without excuse.
Men
bear in their own nature the desire to be like God. This is good, and the
gift of God. But man desires to be like God in his own right. He is
not content to be an image, but strives to be his own God, to decide matters in
his own right and to evaluate good and evil on his own, not as the image of
God. This is his shame, for instead of worshipping the true, living,
immutable, invisible, and infinite God, he imagines a God in his own image to
his own confusion.
