Before exploring the question of who we are as children of God, it is very important that we have a clear understanding of the nature of human beings. What we understand human beings to be will largely determine how we treat them and what we believe about a lot of other things. Professor J. S. Whale, in his book Christian Doctrine, wrote:

Ideologies, to use the ugly modern jargon, are really anthropologies. That is, they concern the doctrine of man...This is the ultimate question behind the vast debate, the desperate struggles of our time.

There has been a long-standing debate about where our superiority to animals lies. Keith Thomas collected a number of quaint suggestions in his book Man and the Natural World (1984). He points out that a human being was described by Aristotle as a political animal, by Thomas Willis as a laughing animal, by Benjamin Franklin as a tool-making animal, by Edmund Burke as a religious animal, and by James Boswell as a cooking animal. Aristotle added the peculiarity that only human beings were able to wiggle their ears. But are humans something more than just superior animals, a little higher along on the evolutionary scale?

The Bible responds with a very clear, "Yes!" According to Scripture, humans are not only the highest of God's acts of creation, they are created in the "likeness" or "image" of God. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness'...So God created man in his own image...male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26, 27). The rest of the Bible gives us many clues as to what this "likeness to God" is meant to imply. The Anglican scholar and writer, John Stott, speaking at a National Prayer Breakfast at Westminster, summed this up well.

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First, he said, there is our self-conscious rationality. We are able to think and reason, to stand outside ourselves, look at ourselves and evaluate ourselves. It is true that, in terms of the vastness of the universe, we are infinitely small, and yet we are the ones who possess the intelligence to study the universe, its workings and formation.

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Secondly, there is our ability to make moral choices. We have a built in moral conscience, even if, sadly, we may fail to heed it. We have an inward urge to do what we perceive to be right and a sense of guilt if we do what we believe to be wrong.

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Thirdly, as our God is a creative God, there are our powers of artistic creativity. In consequence, we draw and we paint, we build and we sculpt, we dream and we dance, we write poetry and we make music. We are able to appreciate what is beautiful to the eye, the ear and the touch.

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Fourthly, as our God is a God who exists as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, persons who have always existed together in love relationships, so there is our capacity for relationships of love (1). He gave us the capacity to love and to be loved. Our greatest joys in life come from loving relationships, just as our greatest sorrows come through spoiled relationships. We are relational beings. It is not an accident that the first and greatest commandments are to love God and our neighbour.

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Fifthly, there is our insatiable thirst for God. Neither the secularism and gross materialism of the West, nor the failed communistic philosophy of the East can satisfy the longings of the human spirit. The human "spirit" is constantly mentioned in the Bible (e.g. Zechariah 12:1 and often in the New Testament). Whereas the term "soul" or "life" is used of animals (Hebrew-Genesis 1:21, Greek-Revelation 16:3), "spirit" never is. God is spirit and we were created for fellowship with him.

In considering the relationship of humans to animals, we could use the analogy of the relationship between a jet plane and a motor car. They have many similarities. Both have wheels, are made of metal, can transport people, and possess engines that propel them forward on the ground. However, when one studies the shape of the jet plane, its engines and the shape of its wings, one gets the impression that it was made to fly. Similarly, though possessing many qualities in common with animals, we were created for something far greater than they. G. K. Chesterton put it like this:

Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing merely in the earth: but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars.

Alexander Pope, the humanist poet of the Enlightenment, summed up the goal of Western civilisation when he wrote:

Know then thyself,

Presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.

However, if it is God who planned our existence before the creation of the universe and who loved us into being, we are going to be stuck in a dead end if we leave him out of the picture. Eugene Peterson, in Run with the Horses, says:

Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the centre from which all life develops. If we use our ego as the centre from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically.

John Calvin, in his classic work Institutes of the Christian Religion, said: "It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face."

John Stott sums up our uniqueness as humans well in The Contemporary Christian:

Our greatest claim to nobility is our created capacity to know God, to be in personal relationship with him, to love him and to worship him. Indeed, we are most truly human when we are on our knees before our Creator.

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(1) I have explored this theme further in the booklet Understanding the Trinity.