None of us sat somewhere before being born and said, “Yes, Romania sounds good. I like this family. This seems like a good time in history to be born. I want to look like this, have this personality, and I’ll choose these people as my parents.”
We chose none of those things.
At some point, we simply became conscious enough to realise that we were here and that life was already happening.
Then, as we grow up, all sorts of questions begin to appear, questions that most of us probably have in one form or another. What am I going to do with my life? What will I study? What kind of job will I have? Who will I marry? Where will I live? Will I succeed? Will I have enough money? Will I be happy? Will I actually get where I want to go?
Those are completely normal questions, and they matter.
But I think we need to go a little further back, because before I ask, “What am I going to do with my life?”, there is a more important question:
Why does my life exist in the first place?
To answer that, we need to go back before the starting line.
We need to go to the beginning.
The Bible begins with a sentence most of us have probably heard many times:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
I love the fact that the Bible does not begin with us. It does not begin with humanity, with our problems, our needs, our plans or what we want from life.
It begins very simply:
“In the beginning, God.”
Before I existed, God was there. Before you existed, God was there. Before our plans, before our questions and before all the things that feel so important to us right now, God was there.
And then creation begins.
God speaks and there is light. The sky, the earth, the seas, vegetation, the sun, the moon, the stars, the fish, the birds and the animals all appear.
If you read Genesis 1 in one sitting, you begin to notice a rhythm: God speaks, something happens, and God sees that it is good.
Then it happens again.
Until we reach verse 26, where the wording seems to change slightly:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…’”
It is no longer simply “Let there be”.
It is “Let us make mankind”, followed by this remarkable phrase:
“In our image, in our likeness.”
I think it is worth stopping there for a moment, because before human beings do anything, before the first breath, before any achievement or result, the text already shows intention.
Humanity does not simply appear at the end of creation as one more item added to everything that already exists.
God creates human beings intentionally and says something about them from the very beginning.
Think about an ordinary object whose purpose is obvious, a bottle for example. We know what it was designed for, but that does not mean it cannot be used for other things.
You could put flowers in it, keep pens in it, use it as a small weight or, if there were nothing else around, probably even try to hit something or someone with it.
Some of those uses would actually work. Pens would stay inside it and flowers would fit in it.
But the fact that something can be used in a certain way does not mean that is what it was created for.
If we really want to know why an object was made, the most reliable place to look is the person who designed it, because the designer knows why it was made and what purpose was in mind.
There is a huge difference between saying “I exist” and saying “I was created”.
If I simply exist and that is all there is to it, then ultimately I have to build meaning for myself. I have to find something I enjoy, something I am good at, something that makes me happy or gives me the feeling that my life matters, and then say, “I suppose this is what I am here for.”
But if I was created, another possibility opens up.
Perhaps the meaning of my life is not something I have to invent from scratch, but something I need to discover.
Because if there is a Creator, then there is Someone who knows why He created me.
“God, what did You create this life for?”
Sometimes we treat life in exactly the same way as that object.
We discover something that works and assume we have discovered our purpose.
I find something I am good at and say, “This is who I am.”
I discover something that makes money and say, “This is what I am supposed to do.”
I find something that earns people’s approval and begin building a large part of my life around it.
That thing may be perfectly good.
The point is simply that the fact that something works, or that I enjoy it, does not necessarily answer the question of what I was created for.
Genesis begins to give us an answer, because God does not simply say, “Let us make mankind.”
He says:
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”
This is unique in the creation account.
Human beings are described as being created in the image of God.
That does not mean that God physically looks like us. The idea is much deeper. Humanity is given a particular place within creation and is made to represent God in the world He has created.
Human beings are capable of relationship, love, creativity, responsibility and moral choices, and they are entrusted with part of God’s creation to care for.
In other words, humanity is not simply another part of creation.
There is something about human beings that is meant to point towards the Creator.
And that changes the way we look at other people.
The person we admire bears the image of God.
The person who annoys us bears the image of God.
The person we disagree with bears the image of God.
The person we ignore because we think they have nothing to offer us bears the image of God.
The person we have already decided we do not like bears the image of God.
Their value is not determined by how much we like them, how useful they are to us, how intelligent they are, what they look like or what they can do for us.
God says something about human beings before they have had the opportunity to prove anything at all:
“In our image.”
If we genuinely took that seriously, I think it would change not only the way we see ourselves, but also the way we see everyone around us.
Suddenly Genesis 1 is no longer simply an account of something that happened a very long time ago.
It begins to affect the way I look at the people I meet tomorrow morning.
There is something else here that I think is very important.
When God says that Adam is made in His image, what had Adam achieved at that point?
Practically nothing.
He had not cultivated the garden, built anything, solved a problem or won anything.
He had no degree, no grades, no salary, no business, no Instagram, no followers, not even a bad CV.
Adam had done nothing to prove to God that he deserved the value he had been given.
Yet that value was already there, because it did not come from what Adam could produce.
It came from the One who had created him and from the fact that he had been created in God’s image.
I think this is genuinely difficult for us to grasp because we live in a world where almost everything is measured.
From childhood we become used to grades, averages, rankings, scores, kilograms, centimetres, times, money, likes, followers and all kinds of results that tell us how well we are doing.
And there is nothing necessarily wrong with measuring results. Wanting to improve is healthy. Competition can be good. Excellence matters.
The problem begins when a result stops telling me simply how I performed and starts telling me how much I am worth.
Those are two completely different things.
If I receive an excellent grade, that result says something real about what I did and I can be pleased with it, but it has not made me a more valuable human being.
If I fail an exam, perhaps I did something badly, perhaps I need to study more or correct something, but that result does not have the authority to determine my value as a person.
The same is true if I win or lose, if I am chosen or rejected, if somebody likes me or does not like me.
All of those things can matter.
They can hurt, encourage me or show me something real about myself, but none of them existed when God said:
“Let us make mankind in our image.”
This is the order we so easily lose:
Value comes before performance.
Sometimes we become exhausted because we spend our lives trying to earn through performance something that God placed before the starting line.
But this does not mean that the message of Genesis is, “I am valuable, therefore life is all about me and I can do whatever I want with it.”
Quite the opposite.
If I am created, then my existence has a Creator, and if I have a Creator, it makes sense that He has something to say about how I live the life I have received.
Genesis 2:15 says that the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
Again, the order matters.
God creates Adam, gives him an identity and then gives him responsibility.
He does not say, “Here is the garden. Work hard for a few years, prove that you are capable, and then perhaps I will say that you bear My image.”
The image was already there.
Responsibility came afterwards.
Adam does not work in order to become valuable.
He works because God has created him, given him a place within creation and entrusted something to him.
That changes the question, “What do I want to do with my life?”
I do not think it is a bad question, but it is incomplete if it is the only question I ask.
Perhaps I should also ask:
What has God entrusted to me?
What abilities have I been given? What resources? What people has He placed around me? What opportunities?
What can I build?
What can I care for?
Where can I do good?
How can I represent Him in the place where He has put me?
The purpose of my life has to be bigger than my profession.
I may become a doctor, a programmer, a teacher, an athlete, an entrepreneur or something entirely different.
Those things matter and can be very clear callings, but they are also contexts in which I live my life.
No title on a business card is big enough to explain why a human being created in the image of God exists.
Think again about the object from earlier.
Using that object according to the purpose for which it was designed does not suddenly make it more valuable. It does not become more important because it is being used correctly.
It simply functions in accordance with the design for which it was made.
Perhaps we sometimes ask God the wrong question.
We ask:
“What do I have to do to become somebody?”
When perhaps we should begin with the fact that He has already created us and ask instead:
“How do I live in accordance with what You created me to be?”
At the end of Genesis 1, after God has completed creation, verse 31 says:
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
Throughout the chapter, God creates and sees that it is good. He creates again and it is good.
Then, at the end of the whole creation account, God looks at everything He has made and sees that it is very good.
Perhaps each of us has somewhere we look in order to find out who we are.
For some of us it may be our appearance.
For others it is the people around us and their reactions: whether they like us, accept us, look for us or choose us.
For others it is achievement, and we begin to feel that when we succeed we are somebody, while when we fail we are no longer quite sure what to think about ourselves.
It may be our parents, our friends, the person we want to impress, our results at school, our career, sport, money or simply numbers on a screen.
Without even noticing it, we begin asking all of these things the same question:
“Tell me who I am.”
But before any of those things existed, the Creator had already said something about humanity:
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”
Our existence does not begin with what we manage to achieve, but with God.
Human value is not produced by performance, but is there before performance.
And if we were intentionally created, then our lives are not something to which we have to assign a random meaning, but something for which it is worth turning towards the Creator and asking what He intended.
Our story does not begin with the first thing we did well, nor with the first thing we did badly.
It does not begin with our CV, our results or somebody else’s opinion of us.
It begins long before any of those things.
“In the beginning, God…”
And when God comes to humanity, He says:
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”
Before performance, before achievement and before all the things we use to define ourselves, it all began with a Creator and with human beings made in His image.
It all began with a perfect Image.
