Mankind at large

I remember it only too well. It was a Jersey policeman who told me years ago. He said that he had instructed another person to “Go forth and multiply.” At that time (at first blush, as it were) it took me a few seconds to realise that the policeman was not being benevolent.....

But (see bold above “Be fruitful and multiply...”) there’s no doubt about the benevolence of the God above in his first recorded instruction to the “man” whom he had made. It’s from the book of Genesis originally preserved by Israel as part of its national archives and now included in Christian Bibles as the first book in the Old Testament.

Why is there no doubt about God’s benevolence towards man? So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The creative arts are given that adjective (“creative”) because the artist is creating something which becomes extremely special to him or her. That’s wonderful. But there’s much more than that in the picture painted in the words in bold above - much more than an artist fabricating a likeness of something.

Here the artist is saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” The artist is creating another artist who is the image of himself or herself……. What’s not to love?  Artist is bound to love his living replica…..

Picture a male sculptor fashioning a life-sized man out of marble. The work is nearly completed. As he chisels the final toe, the marble lives. A man, a living man is alive and living just like the artist who fashioned him.

Will the creator love those he created? Will he wish them to be truly fruitful? And to multiply? He’ll do much more. “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

And he’ll do yet more again. “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”

That’s the picture presented in this ancient book. Not only that, it’s the picture we see all around us today in Jersey and elsewhere. Mankind is in command of all birds, animals and livestock (and is slowly wiping them out). Mankind is in charge of every plant and every tree and every fruit.

At this point in the Genesis history of mankind, human beings were instructed to be vegetarian. Animals also. Later the LORD God permitted meat-eating – in response to mankind’s behavior.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

What’s gone wrong? You may often here people speak about “the public at large”. The meaning of “at large” is simply that the public is not in prison. The people referred to are “at large”.

The humans whom God made were, without any doubt, “at large” because the Lord God made them “in his image”. The LORD God was not constrained. Neither were those whom he created in his image. What have they done?