So God created man in his own image

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. Genesis 1:26-27

Lately I’ve been contemplating man being created in the image of God. At first I was thinking in terms of what a friend of mine called “personality traits” and how they / if they reflect the image of God. For example, some people are very organized and orderly, some people have a very established routine for everything, others are creative etc. I began by wondering if these traits are a reflection of God in some way and how they might have been corrupted by sin.

As I thought about this I realized anew how foundational this is for a proper understanding of the Bible and how sad it is that you don’t hear much about this these days. I know you can’t preach on this every week and I’m aware that while I taught this I probably didn’t emphasize it as I should have, but I believe there are other reasons this is not mentioned much today. One is there is not really much teaching of the Bible these days. Oh, there is preaching every week and they often use the Bible, but there is not much depth to it. Another is that so many evangelicals are now proponents of evolution. They deny the literalness and historicity of Genesis. How can they declare verses 1-25 are purely symbolic and have no or very little relation to reality and then stop at this verse and say this is literally true? By accepting evolution they are saying we are really the image and likeness of a monkey and only secondarily the image of God. Such people have an ongoing problem with the Bible because Paul reflects a literal and historical Genesis in his epistles! But I digress.

As I meditated on this I settled on three questions about the image of God in man:
    What is the image of God?
    Was it effaced in any way by the fall?
    Does the Gospel address this and offer a remedy?

So I searched for “image” in the Bible and then I researched both Jewish thought and early Christian thought on the image of God. I discovered some neat things. But first, the Bible. And what I offer is just a summary of the teaching on the image of God.

What is the image of God?
There is a tension throughout the Scriptures between physical and spiritual image. I mean, the very word image is physical and is often used for the images the heathen made of their gods. The Jews were often tempted to make an image of God. Then in the New Testament, Jesus is said to be “the image of the invisible God.” That is, you cannot see God so he became visible to us in Jesus Christ. But surely there more to the image of God than some physical resemblance. And that is also evident in Jesus who said, If ye have seen me ye have seen the Father.” But that being said, there is no clear cut answer provided by the Scriptures, “the image of God in man is…” I don’t think it is that hard to define, but then, there has been a lot of disagreement over the years! Even so, there is something about man that reflects God. My friend suggested that this is only true of mankind considered as a whole. But I believe he is wrong. Each man bears the image of Adam who was made in the image of God. But what is it about man that reflects God? His intelligence, his free will, his ability to determine his own course, his awareness of himself, his being spiritual, his creativity, his emotions, his ability to do right and to know God, his dominion. Isn’t this cool? All of creation is God’s handiwork, but mankind is the capstone of it all. We are a part of creation, yet we are unique. We are not simply upright, hairless monkeys, fortunate accidents of time and chance. No, we were created by God in his image and after his likeness.

Was the image effaced in any way by the fall?
As in the case of creation, the church is often not teaching the fall of man. Adam was a special creation of God. But then Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation and sinned. This had a deleterious effect on mankind, yea on nature itself. “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” What did this do to the image of God in man? Some have suggested that the image of God was completely lost by the fall. Genesis 9:6 seems to answer this for us. After the flood, when God commanded Noah and his sons to repopulate the earth, He instituted capital punishment (government) with these words, “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Even though the act of creation is past tense (made man), the image seems to essentially still be there. So, it has not been completely effaced or removed, but sin has had a significant impact. There is no doubt about this. Read the Bible. Watch the news. Work with me one night and meet some of the people I see every night! Something was lost. Something new was introduced. There is a corruption in man. The reflection of God is marred.

Does the Gospel address this and offer a remedy?
Yes. The Gospel restores the broken image of God in man. While the Old Testament mentions this image of God only in Genesis 1 and 9, the New Testament mentions it several times. And there is a new emphasis: Christ is the image of God. Here again we find the tension between the physical and spiritual. Christ is “the image of the invisible God” and “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” This is the incarnation. We are also told that the Son is the express image of his person. As far as the image of God in us, conversion is described as “ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (The old and new man are so often misunderstood: The old man is what we were in Adam, the old Adamic race; the new man is the new creation, the new race in Christ, all that we are in Christ.) And the the new man “is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” And “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Salvation is a restoration of the image of God, yet this is renewed and deepened. Finally, there is the promise, “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

Isn’t this amazing – the gospel is so much more than “Get saved and go to church.” There are depths to plumb, nuggets to discover. Such life! Such abundance! Such riches!

My next post will be excerpts from Irenaeus and Tertullian concerning the image of God.