People. Image. Ada’m.
Understanding words is tough. English can be a bear sometimes, especially to outsiders. Understanding other languages can be tough too. Especially when a word can mean two different things, which way is the writer meaning for the word?
The bible is, IMO(twitter talk for =In My opinion) a life long journey! It is not a read it once a year kind of thing just to say I read it! It is story of one that could be read and ‘see’ different things in the verses from day one til you die.
But it is when you really just take the story from beginning to end and dissect it, brings a written story into a full blown Bach masterpiece, in this instance, it is a full blown God masterpiece!! This is where the average christian has failed in its description of ‘following’ Christ as he has called us to do. As an example of failing, when can use the disciples as a good example, they ‘followed’ Jesus (literally) for over three years and still did not understand what God thru Jesus was trying to say.
God’s design of ‘humankind’,’people’, ‘Image’,’Adam’, was to be ‘that’ Image of himself in the world. What’s not to understand? Ha. We still have issues with this, don’t we?
Maybe if we come from a different angle than we have today we can work thru this. What if we come from the aspect of a ‘people’, the ‘image’, ‘corporate’, or ‘Ada’m'(humanity;Hebrew), it is the inclusiveness of ‘all of mankind’ that is in the wrong,that it is all of us that need to come back to God as a whole, to have the ‘humankind,people,Image,Ada’m be as a identity for God.(Could it be that this singleness of our evangelical methods have misled us?)
Could it be that our instilling a method of being a singular saving paradigm, as a moot point to achieve this, in God’s plan? We could use the model of a ‘body’ working as a complete and autonomous organ that only works if all are working together to be that such ‘body’. Has our rush to ‘go’ and ‘make disciples’ fogged our understanding of ‘His people’, ‘His Image’, ‘His Ada’m, to act as a body and not as the individuals that we have become and acted like.
A note to remember from the old testament is that the naming or calling of a person to lead the Israelites, God’s people, is the use of the person as a singular name for a plural people as his people. God used Adam,David,Joshua,Moses, Abraham as a singular object to represent a plural meaning. To counter this thought, go to the New Testament, Christ eludes that He is the new Israel, the covenant doing,believing, and righteous image of God. Christ is the Messiah that has come to be the example of the ‘image’ of God that was to be intended to be from the days of the garden of eden.
Now it is the time for ‘us’ as all God’s people to be what we were meant to be! (Do you see what this is saying? Starting with the Corporateness of Adam we must come back to this paradigm.)
Mankind as the image of God! This was God’s intent!
The Eternal Purpose 