From the Heights to the Depths (Genesis 1:26–31; Lord’s Day 3)
"Know thyself" was the great dictum of the ancient philosophers, and Calvin agreed: without self-knowledge we walk through life blindfolded. Preaching from Genesis 1:26–31 and Lord's Day 3, Dr. Daniel Hyde traces the two-part story that answers where our corrupt nature came from. First, the heights: Psalm 8 crowns him with glory and honor — the crown of creation wearing a crown of glory — created in true righteousness and holiness to know God, love him, and live with him in eternal happiness, all for God's praise and glory. Then the depths: our corruption comes from the fall of Adam and Eve, which so poisoned our nature that we are all conceived and born in sin. But the sermon does not leave us in the abyss: the same logic of representation carries us to the second Adam, whose one act of righteousness brings justification and life.
Let’s turn to the Heidelberg Catechism tonight. We’re at Lord’s Day 3, questions and answers 6–8. Let’s joyfully read them responsively:
Q.6. Did God create man so wicked and perverse?
A. No. God created man good and in his own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might truly know God his creator, love him with all his heart, and live with God in eternal happiness, for his praise and glory.
Q.7. Then where does man’s corrupt nature come from?
A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise. This fall has so poisoned our nature that we are all conceived and born in sin.
Q.8. But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil?
A. Yes, unless we are born again by the Spirit of God.
“Know thyself.” This was one of the great dictums of the ancient philosophers. John Calvin concurred, saying, if we don’t know ourselves we will walk about life with a blindfold on (Institutes, 2.1.1).
If you don’t know how great your sin and misery are (Q&A 2), you’ll be blind in this life. As we saw last Lord’s Day, the Holy Spirit uses the law to give us a spiritual CAT scan, searching for a perfect love of God and neighbor, but revealing that we are “inclinedbynature to hate God and…neighbor” (Q&A 3–5). How did we get this inclination by nature to hate? Did God make us this way?
Tonight, we’ll focus on the truth expressed in questions 6–7, which answer by telling us the story of our creation and fall as a human race.
The Heights of Glory
This story opens with a bang at the height of glory (Ursinus spoke of dignitatis fastigio, the “height of dignity.” Corpus doctrinae Orthodoxae sive Catecheticarum Explicationum D. Zachariae Ursini [Heidelbergae: Jonae Rhodii, 1612, 30].
God made everything out of nothing in the beginning. And if you pay careful attention to everything God made before man and woman, we read “God said…and it was so.” He simply spoke and everything came to be. But when he made man and woman he paused, had a conversation, and used his own hands to mold a body and breathe into it a soul (Gen. 2). The glory of humanity’s creation is being made in the image of God, reflecting God himself.
Psalm 8 poetically expresses this. It begins and ends with the refrain, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth” (vv. 1a, 9). The majesty of the Lord’s name is in all the earth and his glory is above the heavens. This is called a “merism”—a literary device that is meant to show how all-encompassing something is by using polar opposites. There is no place he’s not praised for his majesty and glory.
As David contemplates the heavens he is moved by the sheer vastness and grandeur of God’s creation to ask, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” Notice the antithetical parallelism. As David looks up he ponders what is below; as he looks at the moon and stars, he contemplates man. Who are we when measured against what the Lord created with his fingers? Yet the glory of God is shown most of all precisely in man! Despite our lowliness and seeming insignificance, the Lord made us “a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (v. 5). What is man? He is the crown of creation wearing a crown of glory and honor.
This is another way of explaining what Genesis 1:26–27 describes as the image and likeness of God. Did God create man so wicked and perverse? Not according to Moses; not according to David. God created man good and in his own image. Notice that the same glory that is “above the heavens” is found in man—crowned with glory. This is why the Catechismgoes on to explain what this image of God is: that is, in true righteousness and holiness.These phrases come from Paul’s description of our re-creation in Christ in Ephesians 4. Paul tells us not to walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds:
They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:18–24)
What is being renewed in us in terms of true righteousness and holiness, Adam had. What a height! Created in the image of God to have a relationship with his Creator and reflect his Creator’s praise. This is the what of our creation. At the same time we were created with a for what, a goal (Ursinus, Commentary, 29). Notice the clauses in question 6, which end for his praise and glory. This was the ultimate purpose of Adam’s being made in the image of God (Ursinus, Commentary, 28). One old writer said God made everything for us, but he made us for himself (Bastingius, 10 col. 1). And the way he glorified his God was by continuing in his capacity to truly know God his creator, love him with all his heart, and live with God in eternal happiness. Man is a reflection of God in his mind, will, and affections (Ursinus, 28, 30).
The Depths of Depravity
But, just as we’re about to close the cover on this story something drastic happens. As David praises the Lord for man’s creation in Psalm 8, it’s as if we’re so caught up in the story of Genesis 1–2 that we can easily forget about Genesis 3 or the Psalms immediately surrounding Psalm 8. As we stand at this height, we need to look down and remember how far down we fell. Ursinus called this “the bottomless abyss of misery” (profundum miseriae voraginem in Corpus doctrinae, 30). Last year I took Caiden on a speaking trip to San Francisco and we went up the Coit Tower. Looking down we could see places we had been and streets we had driven down.
Question 7 asks, Then where does man’s corrupt nature come from? It’s blasphemy to say God created us this way. Instead, as Genesis 3 goes on to teach, our depraved nature, which is prone to hate God and neighbor, comes from the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise. Have you ever wondered why we describe Adam and Eve’s sin as the fall? It’s because of the biblical imagery from places like Psalm 8, which describe man’s height.
And this fall has so poisoned our nature that we are all conceived and born in sin. Adam went from being created in the image of God, in which he loved God and neighbor, into himself creating children who were conceived in the image of Satan and sin, hating God and neighbor (Ursinus, Commentary, 31).
“But Adam sinned! Why are we born sinners? Isn’t that unfair?” If you turn over to Romans 5:12 you learn that Adam was our representative: “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” [in Adam]. What he did, he did in our place as our representative: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men…For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom. 5:18, 19, 20). What he would have done would have been what we did as well.
We’re going to come back to question 8 next week, but I don’t want to leave you in the depths. Our fall in Adam as representative head leads us to Jesus, the second, successful Adam. Just as what Adam did has consequences for us, what Jesus did has consequences: “so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men…so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:18, 19).
Brothers and sisters, we have to know ourselves to be sinners to know ourselves as sinners saved by the grace of the Savior, Jesus Christ. As the main author of our Catechism, Zacharias Ursinus said, “…the benefit of deliverance becomes the more precious in the same proportion in which we are brought to apprehend the magnitude of the evil from which we have been rescued” (Ursinus, Commentary, 27).