Biggness, Smallness, and the Image of God – Reflections on God as Creator, part 1

When we consider how incredibly vast the universe really is, we become confronted by two realities simultaneously: our smallness, and God’s bigness.  In comparison to the size of everything that God has caused into existence (my life, my story…your life, your story) is very, very small.  On the flip-side, if we consider that the size of our gigantic universe is merely microscopic compared to the size of the Creator of it all, we soon realize that God is very, very big.  One of the writers in the book of Psalms wrestled with this dichotomy in the following way:

3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? 5 You have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor. 6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: 7 all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, 8 the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. 9 Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!  Psalm 8.3-9

What is the passage essentially saying?  That both the small things and the big things demonstrate the majestic nature of God!  From our perspective in our smallness, it makes sense that God has larger more important things to think about in this universe that you or me.  But from God’s perspective he thinks the world of you!  Of course he loves the whole creation project, which fills us with awe and wonder.  Of course he is the one who holds it all together.  But within all of his activity throughout the endless reaches of outer space; he longs to know you and interact with you.  This mystery ought to make your head hurt.  Because the truth of the matter is that we don’t really have mental categories to comprehend this dichotomy of God’s bigness and our smallness.  But maybe that is exactly the point.

Maybe we are not designed to fully understand such things, but simply to trust God as our source of life and to live according to what he has made known to us.  What we will find time and time again is that he accommodates for our “lack of knowing” to speak to us just as we are; just as he created us to be, a small reflection of him.  In His Bigness He Finds Us in the Smallness.  Psalm 8 alludes to this idea of reflecting him to the rest of the creation when it states starting in verse 6:

You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: 7 all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, 8 the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.  Psalm 8.6

What do these few verses in this Psalm have in mind?  The climatic moment in Genesis 1 when God created humanity to bear his divine image.  We will get to the exact passage in Genesis 1 that is being echoed by Psalm 8 in just a moment, but lets begin by looking at the whole of the first chapter of the Bible.

First thing that we need to keep in mind any time we come to Genesis chapter 1 is its genre.  Genesis one is written as an ancient expression of Hebrew poetry and is influenced by ancient understandings of science.  It’s written in such a way to express truths about God and his creation project, but now necessarily to dictate how it all happened.  Genesis one is less about scientific fact and more about poetically expressing that God is in truth the creator of all things.  In other words, God communicated his perfect truth about the fact that he is the loving creator of the universe, while accommodating to the scientific worldview of the ancient world.  In God’s bigness, he chose to meet the ancient people in their smallness.  He communicated truth in a language they would understand.

He used imperfect common knowledge of an ancient people group, to communicate the perfect message that God: created everything, believes creation to be ‘very good,’ and has given you and I the task of reflecting his image into the world.  So, when we come to this famous text we need to keep in the front of our minds that it’s about the WHO of creation and not about the HOW.

And it’s indeed a beautiful piece of Holy Spirit inspired poetry with a rhythm to it.

“And God said Let…”

“And God saw that it was good…”

“And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

“And God said Let…”

“And God saw that it was good…”

“And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.”

But then we get to the 6^th day where God creates humanity and instead of everything being “good,” God’s image-bearers make it “Very good!”  Maybe a question for us is how are we making God’s world flourish by bearing his image?

MORE TO COME…