The Ghost Inside

Friday morning, I had to rush to make a bagel run for a colleague's birthday celebration in the morning. As is often the case, when I am hurrying, I was less attentive and more careless. Always trouble these two.

I tried to put my vitamin jar back in the cabinet without completing its placement on the shelf. I watched it fall slow motion to the ground and then shatter on the hard tile floor in an explosion of pills and glass. I found glass shards 8 feet away from the point of impact. Real life colliding into theology once again.

Read this on another blog: “Whether the stone hits the jar or the jar hits the stone, it’s bad for the jar.” Same idea.

I went quickly from being ten minutes ahead to ten minutes behind. And, I felt ten minutes behind all day. I proceeded to pick up all of the glass pieces I could find and then I vacuumed the whole floor. That got me thinking about humanity being made in the "Image of God."

I have always been puzzled by what the Bible means when it writes in Genesis 1:26: "And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."

The Geneva Study Bible writes in its Commentary of Genesis 1:26, "This image and likeness of God in man is expounded in ( Ephesians 4:24 ) where it is written that man was created after God in righteousness and true holiness." I think there is even more to it than that. We are like God in the character of our eternality. God (plural, Trinitarian, our) has bestowed upon humanity an eternal soul. That is what made the Fall of Man so devastating. Shards of eternity, the image smashed.

Humanity still retains the eternal nature but now it is fragmented. What was whole is now jagged and deadly. When we walk in the Garden of this world, we now slash our feet on the evil all around, both within and without. Yet, in our depravity, there still are transcendent truths that we can express through our works; a piece that points to a past of wholeness and holiness (no fragmentation in the Godhead, a diversity though that is not dangerous).

Christ in His death became fragmented for us, that we may once again become whole in Him. The Resurrection reforges the Image of God, humanity and holiness, into the "Ghost Inside." (Check out the creepy yet cool music video from the band "Broken Bells.")

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