“What is man, that Thou dost take thought of him? And the son of man, that Thou dost care for him? Yet Thou hast made him a little lower than God (Elohim); thou dost crown him with glory and majesty! Thou dost make him to rule over the works of Thy hands;”
”(Psalms 8:4-6).
Man, as well as the Son of Man, is a simple container, just like a coffee cup. Our humanity is the cup and Christ is the coffee. These two are one cup of coffee. Look at how the New Testament describes our humanity: we are called temples, not the deity (I Corinthians 6:19-20); vessels, not the contents, (Romans 9:22-23); branches, not the vine (John 15:1), (Romans 6:21-22); bodies, not the head (Ephesian 1:22-23 & Colossians 1:18); slaves, not the master (Romans 6:17-18); and wives, not the husband (Romans 7:2-4). Let us examine what the function of these illustrations: temples are His dwelling place; vessels offer the liquid they contain; branches reproduce the life and fruit of the vine; bodies are operated by the head; slaves do the work of their owner; Wives receive the seed of their husbands.
The problem comes when we confuse the function of the two. We think we, the temple, should act like the deity: we should produce fruit apart from the vine. we then resemble Ichobod Crane’s headless horseman, a body acting apart from the "head." We believe we have independent freedom from God to "do my own thing," and then we think we should produce children apart from the seed of my Husband.
These are the lies that permeate us and pose as the truth. The truth is this: the human has no ability in himself to perform righteousness. Yet, we Christians spend years trying to be good and please God by our self-effort. No wonder we are so powerless! (2 Cor 12:9)
If only we could catch a glimpse of the truth of “What is Man?” we would then see the real truth of our precious humanity and the veil covering our eyes would be removed. We are God's glorious creation, created in His very own image. The Pharisees took up stones to stone Jesus when he testified of man's glory. But Jesus unequivocally declared that even their own law witnessed of the fact that man was really a god: “Ye are gods!” (Psalms 82).
What does this verse mean? We Christians are so afraid of our humanity. We think, and are taught that it is either evil in itself, in that we have sinful flesh, or that humanity is good (or God) by itself, which would be what the New Age Philosophy teaches. Because we have been so inundated with lies, we throw the baby (“Ye are gods”) out with the bath water. Don't we understand that Satan can only pervert the truth. He cannot create anything new, for he is not the creator. “Ye are gods,” is God’s truth. Yet Satan perverts this truth by duping us humans into believing that we, of ourselves, are, or should be, the content in the cup. Therefore we (the cup) should try to be good, or, if we sin, we (the cup) should have the power to keep ourselves from sin. We are either proud and self-righteous for doing good, or condemming and blaming ourselves for falling short. These are both lies. The human is neither evil nor good in himself. For like the temple and the vessel, the human is a neutral being and has no independent nature of its own.
We were evil in our unsaved days only because we were indwelt by Satan who caused us to express his evil nature (Ephesians 2:2-3 and John 8:44). The cross of Christ has set us free from that evil nature by replacing it with Christ's own nature of holiness. That is why Paul declares in Colossians 1:28, “We preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.” It isn't good enough to know that we have a perfect Christ in us. We must know that man was made perfect as well.
Don't be afraid of the truth, for the truth will set you free. When Jesus said, “Ye are gods,” He did not mean that we are the Divine Creator Himself or the content of the cup. What He does mean is that we are created little gods, as a derivative of God our Father, as Paul declares in Act 17:29, “the offspring of God,” or simply His means of expressing His diety nature.
God so greatly loves his human creation that it cannot be measured, for He declared it “very good.” He did not create any two things alike, for God loves variety. That is evident in nature. He loves our bodily forms, all so different in shape, color, and size. He loves our various kinds of personalities: some sweet, others hard; some passive, some with tempers; some shy, some bold; and all others in between. For God cannot express His personhood through nature. A tree cannot express His other-love nature. Only God's top creation and crowning glory, Man, can unite with His divine Spirit and express His other-love nature.
Satan has stolen God's creation away to make unto himself a kingdom of servants, expressing his perverted nature of self-for-self. The rebellious satanic “I will” that first perverted Lucifer, infected mankind in the Garden and is the same “I will” that Paul struggled with, by trying not to covet in Romans Seven. It is the same, “not my will, but Thine,” that Jesus relinquished in the Garden of Gethsemane. This satanic “I will” is thankfully the same “I” that was crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20) on the cross two thousand years ago defeating the satanic rule in mankind.
Through the cross, Jesus, our High Priest, has gained our freedom by paying the ultimate price of His own life. “If the son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed (John 8:36).” He not only represented us as sin, dying to it and replacing it with His righteousness (II Corinthians 5:17), but He gained freedom for our humanity as well. Romans 6:6 says, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, in order that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.”
There are two deliverances proclaimed in this verse. The first is an exchange of natures (Spirits), the old sinful nature out and Christ, the new nature, in. Then secondly (and, by the way, the point of the verse) “that the body of sin might be destroyed.” What is the “body of sin?” It is our misused humanity expressing all forms of sin. This misuse was done away with at the cross of Christ, and postionally delivering us from every form of bodily addiction. If a person is a Christian, from God’s point of view, he is already delivered from alcoholism, co-dependency, sex addiction, and every form of perversion. As Christians we really are free and have a great liberating inheritance in Christ. Yet most of us live as bound up prisoners waiting for the ‘Second Coming,’ thinking that only then can we be free.
It is not good enough that God knows we are already positionally delivered, we must know it too. Unless we know our freedom in the present tense, it’s as if it doesn’t even exist. God may be satisfied by the blood of Christ, but we are not satisfied until we know our total deliverance. Otherwise, we live life like someone having millions of dollars in the bank but living only on pennies. Our problem is tied up in the misunderstanding of our precious humanity. We, the cup, think we should be more victorious, instead of seeing our only function is that of a helpless container of Someone else who has already won the battle. That Someone else is the power of the universe and the great “I Am.”
The Man of God
When God wants to fill a man, and skill a man, and drill a man, when God wants to mold a man to play the noblest part, when He yearns with all his heart to create so great and bold a man that all the world will be amazed.
Watch his methods, watch his ways! How he ruthlessly perfects whom he royally elects, how he hammers him and hurts him, with mighty blows converts him into trial shapes of clay which only God understands, till his tortured heart is crying and he lifts beseeching hands. How He bends but never breaks when his good he undertakes, then how He uses whom He chooses, and with every purpose fuses him, by every act induces him to try his splendor out; God knows what He's about."
Author Unknown
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