Answer: God.
The Bible teaches us that God created you and me and every other person who has ever been or ever will be born. Some people believe that God created humans and then just left them to reproduce like rabbits; they say that God steps back and lets humanity do its own thing, so that He isn’t intimately involved in each and every one of us. These kinds of people are called ‘Deists,’ and they are wrong. The Bible teaches not only that God created mankind – men, women, children, and babies all! – but that He is intimately involved in the creation of every one of us! Look what King David said in Psalm 139:
For you formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them. [Psalm 139:13-16]
In this psalm of David we learn a lot. We learn that God is involved in building us inside our mother’s bellies. For nine months a baby grows in her mommy’s tummy, and during that time God is skillfully knitting the baby together! God knits the baby together the way He sees fit, because we also learn that God has a plan for each baby He makes. Even before a baby begins growing in her mommy’s belly, God has already established that baby’s entire life! From conception to first breath and to death, each day of our lives has been fashioned and determined even before we were born. This is a crazy thing to think about, and it boggles the mind, but it’s what the Bible teaches. We see it again in the prophet Jeremiah:
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. [Jeremiah 1:5]
Even before Jeremiah was born, God had a plan for his life: he was set apart for a specific task and appointed to be a prophet to the nations. You probably don’t have Jeremiah’s mission in life, but God has a plan for your life nonetheless! God’s plan for your life may not be what you want it to be – Jeremiah certainly wasn’t a fan of his mission! – but we know God has a plan for you. We don’t know what God’s plan for us is; much of life is the adventure of seeing where God takes us according to His plan!
So we see that the Bible teaches not only that He made us but that He is also invested in us. He has a plan for each person on planet earth. Thus, we also know that we are special; out of all the creatures in God’s creation, only human beings are made ‘in the image of God.’ The first book of the Bible, Genesis, tells us:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. [Genesis 1:26-27]
The Bible tells us that we are made in God’s image and likeness. What does this mean?
We are made in God’s image. To be made in God’s image is to be God’s representative on the earth. In the ancient Near East, where the Bible was originally written, to be in someone’s image was to represent whoever’s image you were in; and not only that, but you carried the same authority and power as the person you were representing. In this way, a representative of an ancient king would carry that king’s authority and power. In the same way, we are made in God’s image as His representatives in the world; because of this, we have dominion over all creation.
We are made in God’s likeness. Genesis tells us that we are also made in God’s likeness; in some way, we are like Him. We know this isn’t physical similarities, because God is spirit and doesn’t have a body like us. So how are we like God? We are like God in that we reflect some of His divine qualities like reason, love, and creativity. We are made in His likeness so that we can be His representatives in creation; our identity is that of God’s image-bearers, and we are equipped for that role by being made in His likeness. We are called to have dominion over creation, and we are to live righteous, God-honoring lives as we reflect His goodness, mercy, and justice in the world.
It's good to know that we are intimately created by God, fashioned in His likeness to represent Him in creation, and we have been created with a purpose for our lives. But did you know not everyone believes this? It used to be that everyone knew we were created by God, but recently people have been teaching the lie that we are not created by God. These people say that no one created us; we are an accident of time and chance. They don’t believe God is real, and so they believe that the only thing that exists are those things you can see and touch and taste and hear. They only believe in what can be measured by scientific instruments, so they toss away anything spiritual or non-physical. Mankind, they say, evolved from microbes long ago in earth’s mythic past; they believe that life wasn’t created but came about as an accident due to time and chance: get enough rocks, rain, and lightning together, and eventually you may have a babbling baby! They believe and teach this not because they discovered it to be true but because they want it to be true. Psalm 14:1 says, ‘The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”’ Those who believe that God doesn’t exist, and therefore that He didn’t create us, are fools! Other people, recognizing that it is foolish to believe that we were not created, will say that we were created by space aliens. They say this, again, not because they have evidence for it but because they don’t want God to be real. If God is real, and He really created us, then He owns us and can tell us what to do. People generally don’t like being told what to do, and so, since God is the One who sets the rules, they say He doesn’t exist so that they can live how they please, to their own destruction.
It's sad that there are people who don’t know the truth, but we have been told the truth by God, and we are overjoyed to believe it. We celebrate with the psalmist in Psalm 100:3, 5: ‘Know that the Lord, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people the sheep of His pasture… For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures to all generations.’
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