The Biblical Race

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him: male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27).

God created mankind in His moral likeness. He also created humanity as male and female, just as He created animal life. According to the Bible, any gender other than male and female (or confusion of gender) is the result of man’s fallen, sinful nature, not God’s work of creation.

Considered the father of evolution, though evolutionist theories pre-date him by several centuries, Charles Darwin taught that humanity was divided into many different races of people based on the color of one’s skin.

While those seeking some kind of a false political or religious progress continue to divide people by skin color today, the Bible teaches that we are all descendants of Adam and Eve. Humanity’s first and only parents were created in the beginning by God. If you don’t accept this fundamental truth, you can’t say you believe the Bible. If you separate, elevate, or denigrate others on the externality of skin-pigmentation, you’re no different than Darwin and other racists.

If you believe the Bible to be the truth, there is only one race: the human race.

Heaven is a Place of Labor

Many people picture Heaven as a place where people have halos and wings, and float around on clouds while playing harps. This popular image has led many to believe that Heaven is a place without any enjoyment or work. That’s not the picture we gain from Scripture.

When God created Adam and Eve and set them in the Garden of Eden, He immediately put the couple to work tending His creation. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it (Genesis 2:15). Man was created by God to work. Work is part of God’s design for humanity.

The Bible also reveals God as One who continually works. The Book of Genesis begins with God at work creating this universe and all it contains. We were made in His image, so if God is a worker, He made us to work too.

Genesis also says that when God finished the work of creation in six days, He rested. The word rest doesn’t imply God took a nap or ended His work and left everything to itself. Rather, it means God’s work of creation, including all of its elements – was finished (Genesis 2:1-3).

Jesus told the Jewish religious leaders that He was busy doing what the Father was busy doing. My Father has been working until now, and I have been working (John 5:17). He also said in John 4:34, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. Fulfilling the will of God the Father was like food to Jesus, keeping Him going and nourished with something material food couldn’t provide.

God’s people will be busy throughout eternity as we do in this world, but our labor will be different. Scripture describes believers as kings and priests to the Father (Revelation 1:6). Exactly what this labor as kings and priests entails, God doesn’t say. We do know that we won’t dread the work, labor without adequate reward, detest our boss or work conditions, or be treated unfairly. Our labor will be wholly from a heart of love and to the glory of God alone.

No one can work their way into Heaven; but Heaven will be a place of glad service to the King.

If the World was Your Oyster

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 1:27, 31; 3:8)

The English saying, The world is my oyster, dates back to the 1600s and the poet William Shakespeare. The phrase means that a person has an easy life with everything necessary for success.

In our minds rests a fantasy common to all: A life without hardship and adversity would make it easier to follow after God. It’s a fantasy because it isn’t true, and Adam and Eve are the proof.

God created the universe and looked upon the work of His hand and declared it all to be very good (Genesis 1:31). The phrase means that creation was more than pretty, it was inherently good. There was nothing evil nor sinful about it. And into the paradise of God, the First Couple was set.

In the midst of the Garden of Eden was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). To this point, Adam and Eve knew nothing but “good”. Eating from the tree gave Adam and Eve a first-hand “knowledge”, a personal intimacy, with good and evil. In that “perfect” world without cares, fears, disappointments, thorns and thistles, sickness or death, the Man and Woman still chose to know evil by experience.

A perfect world doesn’t mean you’d choose to follow or obey God any more than Adam and Eve had done. Don’t fool yourself. If you don’t live for Him now, you wouldn’t live for Him even if the world was your oyster.

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Settled by God

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:27).

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man (Genesis 2:19, 22).

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).

And Jesus answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4-6).

As the Creator, God settled the issue in the beginning. Deviation is not a virtue nor justice. It is not an option nor an alternative. God calls it sin.

Blurred Images

Jesus said, Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). So God created mankind in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:27).

Jesus took the Creation story seriously as fact. God created mankind in His own moral likeness: male and female. No confusion. No fluidity. No ambiguity. No blur. Not of man’s whimsy. Either God is right … or mankind is right.

When something created is corrupted from its original state it has become perverted. The definition of perverted is: having been corrupted or distorted from its original course, meaning, or state. 

The One who created with specificity called His work very good (Genesis 1:31).

Celebrated corruption. Honored perversion. Certain judgment.