Two weeks ago, I talked about what it means to have faith as a Christian. To sum it up, to have Christian faith is to trust and rely on God. Today, I want to continue exploring this topic of faith by beginning to look at the next and bigger question of, “given this definition of faith, how should a Christian live in faithfulness?”

And I think a good place to start answering this question is with the creation narrative at the beginning of Genesis. What we see over the course of those three chapters is the story of how first God made all things and said they were good. Then for a while, we see this to be true in how God walked among his creation with humanity. But then came the fall where sin entered the world and following it is the whole rest of scripture which is in essence the story of how God has been hard at work ever since setting things back to to how they were supposed to be. I think this is where you need to start in any attempt to explain what it means to live in faithfulness, because if all scripture tells the story of God trying to set things right again, if you don’t have faith that God got things right in the first place, then its kind of hard to have trust that he has been doing anything right at any point after that either.

Now, something I have found valuable to say upfront when looking at the creation narratives of Genesis is that the theological points that these chapters are making, do not depend on you believing that these accounts are to be taken literally or figuratively. Often when the first three chapters of Genesis come up people get so hung up on specifics of how creation happened that they do not pay attention to the deeper truthes that come like a torrent if we only look for them for even a moment. To me, that’s like if you’re driving and you miss what a sign tells you to do because you are preoccupied with wondering how it was installed in the first place. When you look at these three chapters, you shouldn’t be reading it first and foremost like a text book, but instead you should be trying to suss out the deeper theological truths that it holds. And when you do that, from Genesis 1 alone, we are told just so many things.

In that chapter, we are told that all that is, is loved by the God that made it. As I said before, “It is good,” is the line we hear God say over and over again. We see that the Lord is powerful to the point that to create everything, all he does is simply speak. We see there is an increasing complexity as creation goes on. And for the sake of answering our question of “how should a Christian live in faithfulness”, we are told that when finally the day comes that human beings burst onto the scene, that we are made in the often misunderstood, “image of God.”

In Genesis 1:26-27 we read, “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

In those two verses is everything you need to get the core understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God. Often we think of being in God’s image as simply being a matter appearance, but from these two verses we find that image is much more about function and relationship.

To be made in God’s image is to be from the moment of our beginning, firsly in a relationship with God. This is seen clearly in these two verses as God creates us, and he does so in a way that is bound to him. We are in his image, after all. And we can see that there is a relationship between humanity and God right from the creation by how in Genesis 2 we walk with him in the garden, as you would your best friend.

The second thing to take from these verses is that by nature of being made in the image of God, we are also in a relationship with all of as well creation. “To rule over it,” is what is said in verse 26, and from seeing that rule played out in Genesis 2 we can see that means that we are to be, essentially, creations good shepherds. Caring for it, working to expand it for the glory of God. We are to care for the world around us, care for its wellbeing.

And thirdly from these verses we are shown that to be made in the image of God is to be made in relationship with other people as well. After all, Male and Female together we are made in God’s image we read in verse 27, so by extrapolation given that this is the relationship that literally all people have come from over the years, we were made to be in a relationship with all other people.

And so, if faith is all about trusting in God, and faithfulness is what we call living that trust out, and from the Bible we trust that God did create us rightly, then for now, what I will say, is that when it comes to what it means to live in faithfulness to our Lord, to live out our trust and reliance in him…that has to be bound up in how we best relate to God, best relate to each other, and best relate to all of the rest of creation as well.

When it comes to answering our question of how we are to live in faithfulness to God, this is the first lesson we learn from scripture. That to live in faithfulness is bound up in our living in good relationships to everything else.

Now, for the sake of length, I am going to leave this post there, but know more is on the way.