[Darris McNeely] How well do you know God? I think all of us want to know God as a father, as a loving, kind creator. That is at the heart of our relationship as Christians, as disciples of Jesus Christ, as our relationship with God and the fact that we know God.

You know, in scripture, there are so many stories and statements that are made of the men and women who walked with God, were known by God, who were friends of God, who came to know God through great trial. So many different stories that help us to kind of get into the intricacies and the details of their stories to really understand how it is that we can come to know God, what it means to know God, and develop that very close, intimate relationship that strengthens our faith, strengthens our courage and our relationship with God.

There's a story that begins as all those stories do in the book of Genesis where all the beginnings are that I think is a good place to begin to come to know something about God.

It's in the story of the creation of man that we all know in the first chapter of Genesis, beginning in verse 26, where God said...and this was after creating the world that we come to know and the earth and the universe as we see. 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. And He blessed them and He said, "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air and every living thing that moves on the earth." We know that passage very well.

And again, perhaps it's the first place to go to to begin to really know God. As I was looking at this and thinking about it, here's what came to my mind. God did this. And Adam, let's just focus on Adam, became certainly the first human. Eve was created from a rib taken from the side of Adam, as we know from Chapter 2, but God didn't have to create man.

But God wanted to create man in His image, a being that has the potential and the opportunity to become a member of the family of God and to have a relationship with God, that is what He created. He didn't have to do it, but he wanted to do it, to have a relationship.

Perhaps that's the first place to begin to think about knowing God, knowing the greatness of God is to recognize that when He came to the intimacy of the creation of human life, He didn't have to do that, but He wanted to do that. And in that understanding is where we begin to know the God who wants a relationship with us, who loves us, who is our father.

That's "BT Daily." Join us next time.