Lord’s Day 3
Q6. Did God create us wicked and perverse?
No, on the contrary, God created us good and in his image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that we might truly know God our Creator, heartily love him, and live with him in eternal blessedness, praising and glorifying him.
Scripture Proofs — King James Version
Genesis 1:31
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
Genesis 1:26–27
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Ephesians 4:24
“And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
Colossians 3:10
“And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.”
Modernized Commentary — Zacharias Ursinus (1616)
Having established that human nature is depraved and sinful, we must now ask: did God create humanity this way? If not, what kind of nature did He give us, and where does this depravity come from? The creation of humanity, and specifically the image of God in humanity, therefore belongs naturally to this discussion.
It is also fitting that we contrast human misery with humanity's original excellence, for two reasons: first, so that once we understand the cause and origin of our misery, we will not blame God for it; and second, so that the full weight of our misery becomes more clearly visible. The more clearly we see this contrast, the more apparent humanity's original dignity becomes, just as the value of a rescue becomes more precious in direct proportion to how fully we grasp the severity of what we were rescued from.
Of the Creation of Man