Bearing the Image

It was such a simple sentence: "Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Luke 20:25, ESV)

The Jewish religious leaders set a trap for Jesus and that was His answer. They asked Him if it were lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. On one hand, if He said yes, then He might lose some of His popularity with the average Isralite, for they held Him in high esteem. However, Rome taxed Israel heavily and unceasingly, so most Israelites might find a positive answer reason enough to reject Jesus.

 If Jesus said no, then the Jewish religious leaders could charge Him with treason against the Roman Empire before Pilate. That answer would suit these leaders even better. Crucifixion was the penalty for treason. Death would absolutely resolve the possibility that Jesus would take their power and wealth away from them.

 Jesus, however, was smarter then these crafty men. He asked them to bring Him a Roman coin, a denarius. In my imagination, I can see Him taking the coin and turning it over in His hand as He looked down at it. Then holding it up for His questioners to see He said, "Whose image is on it?" Caesar's, they replied. "Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

For these Jewish religious leaders, who were also knowledgeable about the Jewish Torah – their version of the Old Testament – they recognized what Jesus was saying. The Romans stamped their denarius with the image of Caesar. The religious rulers knew that Genesis 1:27 (ESV) says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him..." While Jesus acknowledged Caesar's right to levy taxes, He also threw down God's claim for the hearts and souls for humanity; God made us in His image. The religious leaders did not want to hear that answer. They were more interested in political power and gathering wealth than in responding to God's constraints.

Do we respond to God's declaration of this fact as the Jewish religious leaders did? We also, must recognize that we, who were created in His image, belong to Him. When Jesus told the Jews "to render," He was saying to return or to yield the taxes to Caesar and likewise to return or to yield ourselves to God.

The apostle Paul expanded on this idea when he said (in Romans 12:1, ESV), "…present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" and (in Ephesians 4:24, ESV) "…put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." What was true for these Jewish religious leaders is even truer for us.

The next time you see me trying to get my own way, would you remind me of this? And the next time you don't want to obey God, pull out a quarter and look at it. Remember that God has a much higher, prior claim to our lives than anything else in this world, because He made us in His image.

God the Creator Continues to Create

Last time, I told you how God used two blogs to confirm the topic for the article I posted. The Holy Spirit has continued to supply my "writing prompts." The latest came from a book that good friends, Steve and Charlotte, gave me several years ago: Sparkling Gems from the Greek by Rick Renner. The devotion for January 15 uses Ephesians 2:10, which states, "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus…"

According to Rick Renner, the Greek wording in Ephesians 2:10 expresses that God uses His most creative powers to fashion us in Christ Jesus. That activity didn't take place when the world was created. We ought to know, we were there when God did this work.

We can compare that to 2 Corinthians 5:17: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." One of God's latest creations is you – and me! We were in the presence of God while he was creating and we didn't even know it. Therefore, every time we pray for someone to be saved, we are asking God to create. When someone accepts Jesus as their Savior because we shared the message of God's love, we are midwives at a new birth. God is joyously creating new sons and daughters every day.

The creation of new sons and daughters is an on-going process, but God created something else after Genesis, according to Ephesians 2:14-16. It says, "For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross…"

Here, Apostle Paul tells us that Jesus took the Jews, (who had been separated out from the other people groups by God beginning with Abraham) and the Gentiles – that is everyone else - and created one new man. He did this in order to bring peace to all humanity when they are reconciled to God through His sacrifice on the cross. This is the marvelous story of the way we Gentiles were grafted into God's family.

Finally, God continues to create into the future. We have these glorious words in Revelations 21:1-5, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." And he who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new.""

God who created the universe as recounted in Genesis, continues to create, today, tomorrow, and as far into the future as He allows us to see. My prayer is that He will continue to create in me the desire to love Him with all that I am and to obey Him in all I do. That is definitely not too much to ask of God, the Creator.

The Post-Creation Creation

Yesterday, I had one of my favorite "God-at-work" experiences. I follow several blogs and two of my favorites are Lynn Mosher's Heading Home and Nicole O'Dell's blog. They were to play key roles in my experience.

In my daily Bible study, I've been considering the middle chapters of Isaiah. Yesterday I read this section: Isaiah 48:6b&7, "From this time forth I announce to you new things, hidden things that you have not known. They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, lest you should say, 'Behold, I knew them.' " (ESV)

Verse 7 gave me a shock. "They are created now, not long ago." I thought that God did all of His creating on six days in the beginning. Genesis 2:1&2 states: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done." (ESV)

I wanted to write about this idea that God had created something after the six days of creation, but I wanted confirmation first. With the help of Nicole and Lynn, I got it. Nicole used Ecclesiastes 1:9, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." (ESV) and Lynn used Isaiah 43:19 "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (ESV). (I'll let you link to these ladies' excellent articles to see their contexts for the scripture verses they quoted.) The scriptures used in their blogs set brackets around my topic; I had my confirmation.

Now came the interesting part. How could I reconcile the verses in Genesis and Ecclesiastes with the verses in Isaiah? What did God create? Does He continue to create today?

Right here, I want to stop and confess a terrible habit. I sometimes read a passage in the Bible and assume a meaning without thinking about what it's really trying to say. Take Genesis 2:1&2, for instance. When I re-read that, I recognized that God wasn't necessarily saying what I thought He was. I thought He was saying, "Well, that looks good. I'm through creating forever." He was probably saying, "There, that job's done. It looks good, so I'll take a break."

What about the verse that says "there is nothing new under the sun?" Ecclesiastes was written in the time of King Solomon's reign; in fact, King Solomon may have written it. He may have come to this conclusion from his study of history and his personal experience. Without God's intervention, this passage is always true, humanity repeats the same sinful lives.

Isaiah wrote his prophecies about 300 years after the words in Ecclesiastes. In that time, God created a process to free the Israelites from captivity in Babylon and farther in the future, to free them from slavery to sin through Jesus. Isaiah proclaimed both these newsworthy items about God's creation of new things sometimes around 700 B.C.

This leads to my final question: in the 2700 years since Isaiah spoke of God creating new things has God continue to create new things? According to the New Testament, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" Next time, we'll look at some of the things He is creating now.