Reflecting The Image Of God?

For most of my life, I have assumed I knew what Christians meant when they said human beings were made “in the image of God".

After all, it sounded almost self-explanatory. We are different from the animal kingdom. We think, reason, create, make moral choices, ask questions about the universe, and occasionally spend entire afternoons arguing about theology on the internet. Presumably, somewhere among all those abilities was the image of God.

Perhaps it was our intelligence. Maybe our conscience. Maybe our ability to love, create art, understand right and wrong or recognise that there might be something beyond ourselves. Christians have suggested all of those things at different points in history, and there may well be truth in several of them.

But recently, while reading the opening chapters of Genesis again, I noticed something rather strange.

Genesis never actually says any of them.

It tells us that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, but it never pauses to explain precisely what that image is. There is no sentence saying, “By image, God means the ability to reason,” or “God’s likeness is humanity’s moral awareness.” The text simply makes the claim and moves on.

Which means that if we want to understand what the writer meant, perhaps we need to pay more attention to what happens around it. And when we do, one of the most familiar descriptions of humanity in the entire Bible becomes considerably more interesting.

The Image Was Once Royal Language

The famous words appear near the climax of the creation story. God says:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion…”

Most of us naturally focus on the words image and likeness. But the ancient world in which Genesis was written would have heard something else as well.

The Hebrew word translated as image could refer to an actual representation. Images and statues represented rulers, governors and gods. A king might place an image of himself somewhere to represent his authority, particularly in places where the king himself was not physically present.

There was also a longstanding idea in parts of the ancient Near East that a king could represent a god. The ruler stood in a special relationship to the divine and exercised authority on the god’s behalf. That makes Genesis 1 rather remarkable, because Genesis does not say that one special king bears the image of God. It says humanity does.

In the surrounding world, a king might bear the image of a god. Genesis gives that dignity to everybody.

That may be one of the most radical things hidden inside the creation story. Royal language is taken away from palaces and thrones and spread across the human race. Humanity is not created merely to occupy the earth but to represent God within it.

The Image Comes With a Job

This also explains why the next part of the sentence matters. God says:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion…”

The image is immediately connected with a task. Human beings are told to fill the earth and exercise responsibility and authority within it. That does not necessarily mean that ruling creation is the complete definition of the image. Genesis never says that directly either, but the connection is difficult to ignore.

Being made in God’s image appears to involve a vocation. Human beings represent the Creator within creation.

I find that much more interesting than simply saying humans are intelligent. It also makes the word dominion more challenging than it first appears.

The word can sound uncomfortable today because human beings have not always been particularly good at ruling creation. We have destroyed habitats, exploited resources and treated much of the natural world as though it exists solely for our consumption. But if humanity rules as the image of God, then the question cannot simply be whether we possess power.

It becomes what kind of power we are supposed to represent.

If our authority is borrowed, then we do not get to define it however we like. We are supposed to reflect the character of the one whose image we bear, and that changes the way the command sounds.

And Everyone Bears It

Then Genesis makes another point that is easy to read past because the words are so familiar:

“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Against the background of royal image language, that becomes extraordinary. The image does not belong more fully to kings than servants, and it does not belong more fully to men than women. It is not restricted to priests, warriors, rulers, intellectuals or unusually religious people. Humanity bears it.

The text goes out of its way to include both male and female within the declaration and the calling that follows. That matters because it means the image cannot be something awarded according to importance. You do not become more image-bearing because you are powerful, wealthy, educated or useful.

A person with extraordinary intellectual ability is not more deeply made in God’s image than someone with significant learning difficulties. A successful business owner does not possess more of it than someone unable to work. The image is not a reward for human achievement. It comes with being human.

The implications of that become even clearer as Genesis continues.

A Strange Clue Hidden in a Family Tree

Genesis 5 contains one of those details that looks insignificant until you notice the language being used.

The chapter begins by repeating the creation story:

“When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God.”

Then, only a few verses later, Adam has a son named Seth, and Genesis tells us that Seth was born:

“in his likeness, according to his image.”

The wording deliberately echoes the creation story. Humanity is made in God’s likeness and image, while Seth is born in Adam’s likeness and image.

Whatever else the image of God means, Genesis itself uses almost identical language to describe the relationship between a father and his son. That opens another possibility. Perhaps image language is not only about representation. Perhaps it also has something to do with belonging and resemblance.

A child bears something of the parent. Not merely physical characteristics, although those may be present. There is a family connection, an identity, a continuity. Seth belongs to Adam’s family and carries something of Adam into the next generation.

Perhaps Genesis wants us to hear something similar in the way humanity relates to God. We represent God, we belong to God, and somehow we are intended to resemble God.

Suddenly, the image becomes much richer than a particular ability hidden somewhere inside the human brain. It describes who we are in relation to the one who created us.

But What Happens When the Image Behaves Terribly?

There is an obvious problem with all this.

If humans are supposed to represent God, Genesis very quickly gives us plenty of evidence that we are not particularly good at it. Cain murders Abel. Violence spreads. Human beings become increasingly destructive. Eventually, the flood story describes a world so corrupted that violence seems to have become normal.

If the image of God means humanity representing God, then surely somewhere along the way, we lost it.

Except Genesis never says that.

In fact, after the flood, God says something that suggests precisely the opposite. Genesis 9 warns against taking human life and gives this reason:

“for in the image of God has God made mankind.”

Notice when this happens. Humanity has already fallen, murder has already happened, and violence has already spread across the earth. Yet God still describes human beings as bearing his image.

Whatever sin has done to humanity, it has not made human life disposable. That is an enormously important distinction, because the image of God does not appear to be something we keep only while behaving well.

Human dignity is not based upon moral success.

A cruel person still bears the image. So does a criminal, so does someone who hates God, and so does someone whose life appears unproductive by the standards society usually uses to measure success.

The biblical claim about human worth appears to reach underneath everything we do and say something about what we are.

James Makes It Uncomfortably Practical

Centuries later, the Letter of James takes this ancient idea and applies it in a surprisingly ordinary way.

James is talking about the human tongue and the damage our words can cause. He writes:

“With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.”

Then he adds:

“From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.”

James seems almost astonished by the contradiction. We praise God and then attack someone bearing God’s likeness. It is as though he is saying that we cannot honour the original while treating the image with contempt.

That makes the image of God suddenly very difficult to keep safely inside a theology book, because it affects how we speak about people. Not merely people we admire, agree with or find easy to love, but the people whose politics infuriate us, whose theology we think is hopelessly wrong, whose behaviour we dislike or whose presence simply gets on our nerves.

James does not say dignity depends upon agreement. He points back to creation. They bear God’s likeness, and that ought to change something about the way we see every single person.

Then the New Testament Does Something Unexpected

The story could stop there. Human beings are made in God’s image; therefore, human life has extraordinary dignity, and humanity has a responsibility to represent God well within creation.

But the New Testament takes the idea somewhere further.

Paul describes Jesus as:

“the image of the invisible God.”

That is a remarkable expression, because suddenly the question changes. We began by asking what the image of God means. The New Testament gives us another way of approaching it: What does the image of God look like when it is perfectly expressed?

And Christianity points to Jesus.

Jesus shows compassion towards people others avoid. He crosses boundaries that others defend, forgives, serves, tells the truth and repeatedly uses power for the benefit of others rather than himself. He welcomes those pushed towards the edges and refuses to measure human value by wealth, status or usefulness.

Ultimately, he gives himself away.

If Christ is the image of the invisible God, then perhaps this also helps us understand humanity’s original calling. We were never simply created to possess some mysterious divine quality. We were created to make something of God visible.

Something We Possess and Something We Become

This is where the New Testament seems to hold two ideas together.

Human beings already bear God’s image. Genesis 9 and James make that difficult to avoid. Our dignity is not waiting to be earned, and it does not disappear because we have failed to live as we should.

Yet Christians are also described as being renewed in God’s image and becoming increasingly like Christ. That suggests there is both a gift and a calling within this strange biblical idea.

The image is something we already possess because we are human, but faithfully reflecting that image is something we grow into. We do not become more valuable by becoming more Christlike, but perhaps we become more fully what humanity was always intended to be.

That distinction matters because otherwise we could turn the image of God into yet another measure of human worth. The Bible appears to do the opposite. It gives worth first and then asks what we will do with the calling that follows.

Which brings us back to the question we started with.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Perhaps Genesis deliberately refuses to give us one neat definition because the answer is bigger than that.

We represent God within creation.

We belong to God.

We carry a dignity that cannot simply be removed by weakness, failure or social status.

We are called to reflect something of God’s character into the world around us.

For Christians, the clearest picture of what that looks like is found in Jesus.

Which means the most important question may not finally be what is the image of God?

It may be something considerably more uncomfortable: how faithfully are we reflecting it?