Lesson 25 - Man: His Creation

Man as a Created Being

• "Discovering himself in the midst of a wonderful universe and being the highest order of its physical creatures, man would naturally seek to understand his own origin as well as the origin of all existing things. Because nature does not reveal the creation of man and tradition would not be a reliable source of information, it is reasonable to expect that God would reveal the essential facts about man’s creation in the Bible. In the early chapters of Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, the creation of man is clearly taught in Scripture."[1]

     Apart from divine revelation, man has no ability to know his origin and speculations abound. The idea of evolution through natural selection—survival of the fittest—is the most prominent and prevalent theory today. Some hold to theistic-evolution, holding that God used the evolution of natural process to create man. But this denies the biblical record which plainly states God created the whole universe in six days (Gen. 1:1-31; Ex. 20:11; 31:17; Ps. 33:6; Neh. 9:6; Acts 17:24), and created man in His image (Gen. 1:26-27; 9:6; Deut. 4:32; Isa. 45:12; Matt. 19:4; Jam. 3:9). Mankind is God’s crowning creation, which He authorized to rule over His work (Gen. 1:26; Ps. 8:3-9). God created the universe and earth in six literal days and created everything with the appearance of age.

The Nature of Man

     The creation account reveals that man was created with both material and immaterial qualities (Gen. 2:7; Eccl. 12:7; Matt. 10:28; 2 Cor. 4:16). The immaterial parts of man—soul and spirit—are sometimes used interchangeably (John 12:27 and 13:21), and sometimes distinguished (1 Thess. 5:23; Heb. 4:12).

     There are two major views of the continued creation of man: 1) the Traducian theory believes that the body and soul are passed from parent to child at conception (Gen. 5:3; Heb. 7:9-10), and 2) the Creation theory argues that our body comes from our parents, but God creates each new human soul at conception and imputes it to the biological life in the womb (Ps. 100:3; Eccl. 12:7).

     The body is the residence of the soul (Gen. 2:7), which is removed at physical death (Eccl. 12:7; 2 Cor. 5:1-8). The body is also where the sin nature resides, in both saved and unsaved persons (Rom. 7:17-20). And, the body of the Christian is also the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19).

[1] Lewis Sperry Chafer; John F. Walvoord; Major Bible Themes (Grand Rapids, Mich. Zondervan Publishing, 2010), 165.