January 16 – LD 3, Day 2: Man’s Creation: Body, Soul and Spirit
by Prof Herman Hanko
Read: Genesis 2.
Lord’s Day three tells of
man’s creation.
God himself tells us how
he made man on the sixth day of the creation week. In Genesis 2:7, God says,
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
When the Bible gives us
this information about man’s creation, it does not mean to say that God took
several handfuls of dirt, formed a lifeless likeness of man and then made it
alive by breathing on it. When the Bible tells us that God formed man from the
dust of the earth, it means that God formed man just as he formed the animals
(Gen. 1:24). Although even in this act of God, God used special care in forming
man from the ground.
That
all means that, first, God made man, just as the animals, so that they could
live in this earthly creation. They were a part of it, dependent on it,
related to it, and unable to live anywhere else, even in heaven, than here in
the world.
But it also means that
God gave man a soul that was higher than the animals. It was a soul that
possessed a mind and a will, so that man was a rational and moral creature, who
could think, understand, figure things out, remember and “subdue the earth.”
That God breathed into
man the breath of life means that the kind of soul God made for man was also a
soul that made it possible for man to live in relation to God. The animals
could not do this; man can. He can know God through the singing of the birds
and the animals whom he names. For the names he gave them were names that fit them: names that expressed the way
in which God’s glory was revealed through them. Thus he could glorify God and
serve God in all he did.
The Bible often mentions
the spirit of man. See such texts as Ecclesiastes 12:7, I Thessalonians 5:23;
Christ committed his spirit to God (Luke 23:46). (It would be profitable for
you to take a good concordance and look up all the times the spirit of man is
mentioned).
The HC describes man in
detail because it wants us to know what wonderful creatures God made us. We
must remember that, after the fall we are not only sinners, but our bodies and
souls are very weak. Adam never got sick; his powers of mind were far, far
stronger than ours are; he could see perfectly and hear perfectly. He was a
wonderful creation. Actually, since sin has come, our bodies and souls are
wrecks of what they once were.
That helps us understand
our misery.