Matt Chandler - Man's Redemption

Well, how are we doing? Well, excellent! If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them. We’re going to start in Ezekiel 37. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardcover black one under your seat or around you, so go ahead and grab that. It’s always of utmost importance that you see that the things we say here aren’t really my ideas or something I’ve come up with, but rather something we’re reading straight from the Word of God. So, if you’ll grab that, we’ll get going.

Just as a refresher, if you’re a guest with us, maybe this is your first time here; we’re in the middle of our fall series. We’ve called that series «A Beautiful Design,» and what we’re looking at is, when it comes to humanity, specifically regarding manhood and womanhood, how God, as our Creator, designed us in terms of origin, purpose, and design. We’ve covered origin and the purpose of man, but we haven’t gotten to women yet. We will turn the corner here in the next couple of weeks. Whereas the last three weeks we’ve focused on manhood, we’ll start to discuss and look at what the Word of God has to say about womanhood.

What we’ve already laid down is that, yes, in some ways, my biology makes me male; there is something else that has to be present for me to be a man, agreed? Because you have to agree if you have sons; otherwise, you’d have to call my 8-year-old boy a man, and I wouldn’t do it. I know him, and I wouldn’t do it! And there are little girls and there are women, so something is taking place that moves males to manhood and females to womanhood. This is what we’ve been digging into.

We started out talking about God as Creator. If our God is Creator, that means He alone has the authority to determine design and function. So it’s God, the Creator’s role, to say, «Here’s how it works best.» He is the designer of the machine, if you will. If you remember the C.S. Lewis quote, he’s the one that designed the machine. He’s the one who knows how it works best, and when we take matters into our own hands and say, «No, no, I know how to use the machine best,» we’re like someone telling the Creator how it is supposed to be used.

We covered that and got into the Imago Dei, what it means to be made in the image of God. You and I have an elevated position among the rest of the created order. I kind of made the joke for two weeks in a row that if the budget got tight and I had to decide between the horse, the dog, my wife, or my kids, it’s kind of a no-brainer on who has to go. Right? It’s not my wife! That decision isn’t a mathematical one. I don’t look at the budget and say, «Money’s tight; who’s costing me the most money? She’s got to go.» That’s a no-brainer; no one would argue that. Why? Because my wife, made in the image of God, has an elevated worth over any animal in the world.

In fact, I use sweet Darren over here. Hey, Darren, how are you doing, boss? You doing all right? He just shined. Yeah, so my boy Darren here is worth far more than Secretariat. I mean, literally, the most amazing horse that’s ever been on the planet Earth, just blowing by fools, just a movie made about him, kind of horse. A million-dollar horse is not even in the same ballpark as my friend Darren, not even close. Why? Because Darren’s been made in the image of God. Secretariat was a horse, and God was pleased with the horse. I mean, repeatedly in the Bible, He’s like, «I nailed that; that thing’s awesome!»

In Job, how magnificent is the horse with its snorting? It makes men feel terror, like God feels He nailed it! And yet, it’s an animal and is not in any way a human being’s equal, because all humans, male and female, bear the image of the Creator and have an elevated value and worth over the rest of creation. We are stewards of creation, which is why, despite our elevated position, any type of abuse or neglect of the created order is wicked and not in accordance with our design. When we act as image bearers, we will then cause humanity and really the created order to flourish.

So that was being made in the image of God. It becomes imperative for a thousand reasons. When the Imago Dei is understood, almost all that we call wicked starts to vanish. See, pornography is an Imago Dei issue, prostitution is an Imago Dei issue, abortion is an Imago Dei issue, genocide is an Imago Dei issue, racism is an Imago Dei issue, discrimination is an Imago Dei issue. Really, all the horrors of humanity can be traced back to a failure to understand that all mankind has been created in the image of God. In His image, He created them male and female; He created them, and then from the Imago Dei, we moved into…