The Bible is not only a book about God; it is also about man. If you took away God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the cross of Christ from the Bible, the Bible would be an empty book. Likewise, without man, there is no one for God to speak to in the Bible. Therefore, just as God and the Lord Jesus have a special place in the Bible, so does man.
In the Bible, there is more written about man than about God. If we want to know man, we must study the Bible. No other book describes man as thoroughly as the Bible. Therefore, in order to know the Bible, we must know what it says concerning man.
[Man not only possesses the highest created life, but he is also made in God’s image and after God’s likeness (Gen. 1:26-27). Besides man, no other creature resembles God in image and in likeness. Man is the highest of God’s created things, and he is created in God’s image and after God’s likeness. In God’s creation, man is the best container prepared by God for His plan. In His plan God ordained that man would possess His life in order to be the brothers of His Son; therefore, in His creation, He caused man to have His image and likeness.
Image refers to the inward parts, such as the mind, emotion, and will. Man’s mind, emotion, and will, which constitute the intangible man, were created in God’s image. Therefore, human functions of thought, opinion, and love resemble those of God.
The image of God also refers to the characteristics of His attributes. The most prominent of God’s attributes manifested in man are love, light, holiness, and righteousness. When God created man, He created him in His image, according to the attributes of His virtues, so that man can express Him through these virtues. Thus, man has the desire to have love, light, holiness, and righteousness, and these virtues are sometimes expressed in his behavior. What man has, however, is only the image and not the reality. Man must receive God as his life and content and then God’s love, light, holiness, and righteousness will fill up and enrich the human virtues of love, light, holiness, and righteousness to become the reality.
Likeness refers to the outward body which constitutes the tangible man. Man’s outward body was created after the likeness of God. God has His likeness. Before God was incarnated to be a man, He appeared frequently to people in the Old Testament in the form of a man (Gen. 18:2, 16-17; Judg. 13:9-10, 17-19). The form of man is the form of God, for man was created after the likeness of God.]
The main purpose of God’s creation of man, a corporate man, is to express God (Gen. 1:26-27). [God did not create many men. God created mankind collectively in one person, Adam.] [Therefore, in Genesis 1:26 God said, “Let them”—one man, but the pronoun is them. This proves that this man is a corporate man.] [God created such a corporate man in His own image and after His likeness so that man might express God Himself.]
[God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion.” God created a corporate man to exercise His dominion (Gen. 1:26-28). The word dominion includes more than just authority. Dominion means having a kingdom as a sphere in which to exercise authority.] This corporate man is to use God’s authority to deal with His enemy, to recover the earth by conquering it, and to bring in the kingdom of God to the earth (Gen. 1:26-28; 3:1; Rev. 12:9).
[After God created man, He did not put the divine life into man. Instead, He gave man a free will; He wanted man to exercise the free will to choose, to take in His life. Therefore, He placed man in front of the tree of life.
In order to give man an opportunity to choose, God put the tree of knowledge of good and evil beside the tree of life. The tree of life denotes God as the source of life; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil signifies Satan as the source of death. These two trees signify the two sources in the universe.] Because God is great, He allowed man to choose. [It was according to such a principle that, in the garden of Eden, God put Adam in front of two trees; He wanted man to choose Him, to take Him as life.]