Then 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 birds of the heavens and over the livestock and 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 ESV)
God’s Image — What Is It?
God created the world, and everything in it—birds, fish, animals, and last of all, human beings. He distinguished humankind from all his other creatures by creating them, both the man and the woman, in his image.
The words “in God’s image” have always been mysterious to me. I remember, way back in Bible college, seeing a list on a blackboard summarizing what, supposedly, it meant to be made in God’s image. In God’s image was in big block letters with a four-point ordered list beneath. I recall only two of the four points: Being an image bearer included the ability to make judgments and exercise dominion over the earth. You’ve may have seen similar lists that included the same items or different ones.
Since my college days, I’ve read enough on the subject to know that throughout history, there has been much discussion and lots of disagreement about how to define the image of God. This is not surprising, because scripture doesn’t lay out exactly what “image of God” means. It certainly doesn’t give us a list of attributes that make up the image of God in human beings.
While listing ways we are like God to describe the image of God in us isn’t wrong, it doesn’t necessarily get to the heart of the matter, either. The bottom line is that human beings were created with a particular compatibility with God.1 God could put the first human, Adam, in the garden of Eden with instructions to “work it and keep it” and Adam could understand what God intended for him to do (Genesis 2:15). The first couple were created with the capacity to rule the earth on God’s behalf. They, and all human beings after them, can know God in a way no other creatures can. God can speak to us and we can respond to him. And most importantly, the Son of God could be incarnated as a human being. He could become one of us.
God’s Image After the Fall
But if you know the whole story of the beginning of the world, you know Adam and Eve didn’t remain as they were created. They disobeyed God, and nothing was the same afterward. Their natures and abilities became corrupted, and all their descendents—every living person, past, present, and future—inherited their corruption.2
Are we still image-bearers, then? Scripture says we are. Even after the fall, God refers to us as “made in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). We know the likeness is marred or defaced because the New Testament tells us Christ’s redemptive work is needed to restore it. But it’s not eradicated. We continue to have special significance to God. We have a status and value above all his other creatures, “crowned,” the psalmist David writes, “with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5 ESV).
Because We Are Image Bearers
That every person is made in the likeness of God is the foundation for God’s instructions about how to treat other people. God forbids murder because every human being is made in his image (Genesis 9:6). Killing another person is destroying a reflection of God himself. The Apostle James (speaking for God, of course) takes this principle further. He writes that it is hypocritical for us to bless God and then turn around and curse another person (James 3:9-10). Every person is made in God’s likeness, so to curse them is, in a real sense, to curse God. When we curse an image brearers, it casts doubt on the sincerity of our praise for God. If we love God, we will love our neighbours because they bear his image.
What’s more, as his image bearers, we were made to represent God in the world. We are agents of his providential care for his creation. Or to use Luther’s language of vocation, we wear the mask of God as we labor in the world. God cares for the things he has made—plants, animals, people, everything—through our work. We work for him, whether we are aware of it or not.
Remade in His Image
And as we will learn in more detail later in this series, in those who believe, the image of God that was corrupted by the fall is being recreated into the image of Christ, who is the true image of God. Although this work will not be complete in this life, we are being changed day by day to reflect God more fully.
1Systematic Theology by Robert Letham
2More on this next week.
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