The Devil’s Deception
& the Power of God: Dominion, Domination & Deliverance
“And he said: Let us make man to our
image and likeness, and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and
the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping
creature that moves upon the earth. And God
created man to his own
image; to the image of God he created him; male
and female he created
them.” (Gen. 1:26-27)
God created Man in His image and likeness. And because of we are made in God’s image and
likeness, Man is different from every other creature in all creation, explained
Bishop Nicholas Samra on Sunday Nov. 13th in his talk entitled The Devil’s Deception
& the Power of God: Dominion, Domination & Deliverance. What does it mean to be created
in God’s image and likeness? While we
normally think of image and likeness being the same thing, Bishop Samra made a
distinction between the two. To be in God’s image means that we look like God;
we have reason and are able to make choices.
To be created in the likeness of God means that we can be creative and
dynamic and relate to people. In other words, we can act like God and exercise
personhood.
God created Man to be perfect, but Man’s creation
is incomplete. That is why Saint Basil
could say “we are still being created.”
As we grow in perfection and ultimately closer to God, the image of God
grows in us. We were also created with
three basic tasks. First God made us
stewards of creation. We are to care for
it according to the rules laid out by God.
Second, we were created as prophets to discern the will of God in and
for creation. Finally, according to Bishop Samra, we were created as priests to
live in a sacramental way using creation in the way that God intended.
The failure of Adam and Eve was that they desired
to be like God immediately and as a result they failed to fulfill their three
basic tasks. They failed as steward
because they desired to use creation for their own purpose. They failed as
prophets because they did not discern what God wanted when the followed the
voice of the serpent. And finally, they
failed as priests because they misused the holy things of creation.
Adam and Eve sinned and threw chaos into
creation. Humanity became
scattered and separated, “trying to live our own way apart from the clan of
God,” as Bishop Samra noted. We still are
in the image of God, but now that image is blurred and distorted. The distortion comes about through the misuse
of our nature, and this is called sin. Each sin is a rebellion against the Lord
and an abuse of the nature that was created in His image.
After the fall of Adam and Eve, God had a new plan for
creation, to send His Son, the second person of the blessed Trinity, to restore
all creation to its natural goodness and harmony. “The Word of God became one of us. He takes
our broken human nature and heals it. He becomes the new Adam and brings us
back in line with the original plan God had intended.”
St Nicholas Cabsilas said, “God is not content to remain
where he is and to summon like a slave the one he loves so dearly. He comes
down and seeks for himself; the Almighty stoops to the lowliness of our poor
nature …he takes on himself all these humiliations and dies. This is what we
call the incarnation…the high point of God's plan for creation.” Bishop Samra ended
by exhorting his listeners to “radiate the divine nature in which God has
chosen us to share.”
Submitted by James Blankenship
Submitted by James Blankenship
