True humanity

Your mission (cue music), should you choose to accept it, is to help me solve a riddle. I've been given the task of preaching as part of my church's doctrine series, on the topic of 'Mankind'. Easy enough, I know you're thinking – we are created by God, but we are sinful, we cannot understand ourselves without knowing our creatureliness, our fallenness and Jesus as the ultimate man.

The problem is, I can't really talk about creation as that was last Sunday. I can't really talk about sin and suffering, that's the following week. I can't really talk about Jesus, we'll cover him over two weeks under 'The Person of Jesus' and 'The Work of Jesus'. So what should I do?

It is, essentially a sermon on the role of mankind from Genesis 1-2. The question is, why is it important to know the way we were created?

Now my conviction is I don't think you can understand humanity without understanding sin. I don't think you can understand humanity without understanding Jesus as true humanity. But the easy thing to do would be to say, "Well, who cares about what we're doing these other weeks, I'll just say what I need to". That, I think, would be to waste the opportunity. It is fundamental to our understanding of this world which can appear to be chaotic, and disordered, and ravaged by the effects of sin, that we do see God's good disposition to his creation and the associated value that gives us, and the role that gives us within the world.

So my three relationships which help us to understand mankind are:
1. Mankind in relationship to God
2. Mankind in relationship to each other
3. Mankind in relationship to creation

Visually it might be represented a little bit like this...

As for where I go from there, if I had to go to only one place (which with a 22 minute limit looks likely) I will probably go to Mt 28 where Jesus says all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples.

The line of thought being that the true reflection of our created selves is to be a follower of Jesus which enables us to relate rightly in the three relationships of points 1-3. In terms of role (our gardening) that commission is fulfilled still through the bearing of children, but the bearing of spiritual children as we make more disciples to also help with our gardening i.e. making following of Jesus.

If I had longer I would take the long view (which I'm not entirely convinced of being the best way to get to Jesus)

• Jesus was true mankind (e.g. Heb 4:15 lived without sin, made like us in every way), which enables us to return to God (approach the throne of God with confidence (4:16))
• We now restored to relationship with God express our true humanity, truly restored (Maybe 2 Cor 3:18 where we are transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory). Big idea is we take his benefit for ourselves.
• So Jesus ultimately fulfilled his role as true man (Mt 28:18-20 - having used his rule correctly, he was given all authority in heaven and earth). Jesus was the true image of God in this world and his application was therefore go and make disciples of all nations.
• We express living under God by being restored to him through Jesus. We express our restored relationship to each other as men and women and to wider world in the rest of creation by preaching the gospel. We garden and we fill and subdue through the true expression of humanity – making disciples of Jesus (Col 1:28 we proclaim Jesus, to present everyone mature in Christ.)

Another potentially simpler route is via Psalm 8, which examines man as the pinnacle of creation, and then the Son of Man as especially blessed.

Any advice? Is it just confusing? Is there a still more excellent way?