God created everything through His spoken word. But, on the sixth day, He made man very differently.
He reached His hands into dust of the ground and formed the body of man. When He spoke everything else into existence, He did so from a distance, but, when it came to His crowning creation, man, it wasn’t enough to speak him into being; He couldn’t stay at a distance when He formed us. He had to put His hands on us, like a potter handles his clay. He had to reach and take of the dust of the earth and had to lovingly form and frame us. He had to be there, personally. He had to get His hands dirty with us.
If you ever struggle with any kind of identity issues, any insecurities or self-worth issues, know this — that you are hand-made by God.
But, there’s more!
Because the next thing He did was that He drew our dusty face close to Himself, brought us face to face and breathed into our nostrils, into our countenance, the breath of Life. Life came into us when He poured His whole heart into us through face to face encounter. He kissed us with Life. This was our first interaction with God — His beautiful face joined to our dusty face, making our first interaction with Him messy. In a sense, His lips got dirty when He kissed us. And, in this same way, today, He’s not afraid to get messy with you. He’s not afraid to “get on your level“, where you are, because that’s how He brings us to His level.
This is how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit made us in Their image and likeness, to be just like Them (Gen 1:26-27). After creating everything else, He said it was “good”, but when He made us, His masterpiece, He said it was “very good” (Gen 1:31).
Then, with this Life of His within us, within this body He personally fashioned, He “blessed” us with “certain authority” and said, “‘Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, and subjugate it [putting it under your power]; and rule over (dominate) the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing that moves upon the earth… Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to all the animals on the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that moves on the ground—to everything in which there is the breath of life—I have given every green plant for food’; and it was so…” (Gen 2:28-30 AMP).
Notice, before He gave us authority, power, and rule, before He gave us our purpose, He took great care to make us unlike anything in creation, to make us just like Him by shaping us with His own hands and breathing into us His Life through a face to face embrace. Why? Because only then would we be able to transmit His Life and goodness into everything we touch and into everything we do. He reproduced Himself in us so that we could be extensions of Him in the earth, capable of transmitting His will and Kingdom, through our daily lives and daily work, into the world, “on earth as it is in Heaven.”
“The crown of God’s creation is a new creature, a creature that can sound the heartbeat of its Creator. That creature, made male and female, reflects God’s own relational richness. The human family is to join God in the ongoing work of creation. The earth below and the sky above with all their inhabitants are too beautiful and too good to be left alone. They need the tender care and close attention that only God’s favored creature can give.” Commentary of Genesis 1:29-31 from The Voice translation
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