The Image of God
Genesis: Foundations of Our Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Do you truly know yourself? What does it mean to be human? Our passage today is a massive foundation stone for our faith, and for all of life. We said last week that God’s word gives us meaning and purpose. In our passage today, God says He has created us in His image and likeness. What does that mean, and what is God’s purpose for us? Do our lives align with that?
C.S. Lewis said, “You come from the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.” (Prince Caspian) We all know deep down that we were made for glory, and we aren’t as we should be. We’ll dig deeper today and see that we bear a marred image and likeness of God, but it is restored in Jesus, and in Him we are new creation and bear good fruit.
Know Your Self
Know Your Self
What does it mean to be human? We are created in God’s image and likeness. Let’s put that in context. In Genesis 1:24, God commands the land to bring forth animals, and they have נֶ֫פֶשׁ, “breath/soul”. These are the “living creatures” coming out of the land, according to their kinds. God creates humans in a much more personal way. In verse 26, God says,
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.”
“Let us make” tells us that God is using a different process than He did with the animals. He is creating humans personally. Chapter 2 tells us more. It describes God “forming” the human (adam) of dust from the ground (adamah), shaping and molding the human.
then the Lord God formed the human of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature.
God gave us His personal touch. He got really intimate and breathed His very breath into the human’s nostrils, the נְשָׁמָה, another word for “breath” that’s only used for God’s gift to humans. The human is a living creature like others, but with something extra, what we might call “spirit”.
Thus says God, the Lord,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people on it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
We are a complex unity of an inner, spiritual nature with an outer, physical nature. Genesis 1:26-27 uses the word image
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.
An image is an idol or statue, a replica made of wood, metal, or stone. We are a creature made of dirt, dependent on God for our life and breath, and all things. But an image has meaning and purpose.
A temple to the glory of any god would have an image of the God in it. Our meaning and purpose is to direct worship to the Creator God. The Hebrew word for image (tselem) is also used for royal images a king would construct in various places throughout his kingdom to remind the people of his authority. Tremper Longman says, "In this sense the image of God may be taken to mean that human beings are God’s representations in the creation. In other words, rather than thinking that the image of God points to a unique attribute or feature of humanity in relationship to other animals, it refers to our status in creation. We reflect the divine glory in the world.” Longman, Tremper. How to Read Genesis (How to Read Series) (pp. 99-100). You could say, we are created to be a kingdom of priests.
God also uses the word “likeness” (1:26) - resemblance, model after, like a son with his father.
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.
We are creatures made of dirt, but we are more than the other creatures. Being in the likeness of God means that any time you encounter yourself in the mirror or another human person, you are having a face to face encounter with a child of our heavenly Father. Our loving heavenly Father intended us to live fruitful lives of partnership in His kingdom.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Imagine a world in which every human flourished, all our work bore fruit, our relationships and our families multiplying the shalom of God’s kingdom everywhere. Why don’t we see this? We thought we could do better. We all choose our own will over God’s will, we create our own identity, and we mar His image in us. In our sinful rebellion against God, we can no longer see the resemblance. Who are we? We are the image of God fallen into decay and corruption. But we can be restored.
Be Restored to Your True Self in Christ
Be Restored to Your True Self in Christ
Here are four critical areas in which we need restoration right now.
We need to correct misconceptions about what the image of God is. The image of God is not your physical characteristics, such as walking on two legs. It is not even your intellectual or emotional characteristics. It is your very being. Even people without the capacities for physical or mental wholeness bear God’s image in their being. Every human life has value from conception to natural death. Because we live in a broken world, not every human is flourishing. But every human person is worthy of our love.
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Every human life, from conception to natural death, has equal value in their diverse reflections of His glory. If we love God, we will love our neighbor who bears His image. Our statement of faith says, “God commands us to love Him supremely and others sacrificially, and to live out our faith with care for one another, compassion toward the poor and justice for the oppressed.” When we see anyone who is not flourishing in their humanity, our response should be compassion.
2. Creation care needs to be restored. God intends that humans will partner in His kingdom over the earth. He says this twice, in verse 26
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.”
and again in verse 28,
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Verse 28 adds the word “subdue”, a strong word for subjugation. But this is immediately followed by an explanation that every seed bearing plant and tree is there for food, so we’d better take care of them.
And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
We believe we need to be stewards of the natural resources God gave us. God gave them to nourish life. This point is made in a deeper way in chapter 2, in which God puts the human in the garden to “serve and guard” it. This was the role of priests in the temple or stewards in a household. God calls us to care for creation.
3. Humans are first and foremost defined by our relationship with God. “Let us make adam in our image, after our likeness”. Adam is created out of a conversation within the complex unity of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This means we were created from relationship in God, in relationship to God, and for relationship with God. Humans first and foremost find our identity in God.
Henri Blocher makes the point that the only distinction made between humans in Genesis 1 is gender (and we’ll see why below). “No other distinction, racial, ethnic or social, belongs to [our] essence. Mankind is the only living creature lacking the formula ‘according to their kind’.”
Here’s why that is important. Our culture is obsessed with identity labels. We want to differentiate ourselves from others. “I am a ___”, insert skin color, gender, nationality, religion, political allegiance, and vocation - all the things that separate me from you. These self-created identities give us justification to love the people who are like us and to fear and hate and label others.
How did we get here? These are symptoms of the root problem that is in all of us. Our relationships with one another are broken because our primary relationship with God is broken. We don’t know our true self in God. We want to be our own gods, so we create false selves. Now, if someone disagrees with me, I take it as an attack of my identity, and I attack back.
Test yourself in this. Listen to yourself talk some time.
no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.
Jesus says,
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Romans 5 teaches the gospel that God demonstrated His perfect love in that when we were enemies of God, Christ died for us. Do you believe that gospel? Do you label yourself a Christian? That identity is a confession that you were an enemy of God who has received mercy in Jesus Christ. The measure of the true Christian in the twenty-first century will be our love for our enemies, treating them with mercy and grace. That demonstrates that Christ is truly in us, because only He can love like that. We should be more concerned with people’s primary relationship to God more than the false lines drawn between us.
4. We are male and female. We have a genuine, God-given, complimentary difference. God uses that complimentary difference to procreate His image in children who will learn from a father and mother in a monogamous marriage how to love, forgive, reconcile, and serve. Study after study proves that the best outcomes for children come from conjugal monogamous marriage. The institution of marriage needs to be restored for humans to flourish.
There is another facet of our creation as male and female that we need to address.
Here is the extent of our rebellion against God: while we will create all kinds of false distinctions between us, our culture today wants to erase this one distinction actually created by God. We are overthrowing natural law that teaches us that gender is connected with biology, and it is destroying our children.
The following was written by a French theologian in 1979, but I found really helpful in thinking about how Genesis 1 applies today.
He says that Genesis 1 describes God using separations that draw clear lines that “drive away any confusion (light from darkness, land and sea, symbols of life and death)... the God of the Bible desires order.”
“When we study non-biblical religions, we constantly discover a fascination with intermixture and a kind of longing for a universal dissolution of differences...[ultimately] to synthesize good and evil...What lies behind this desire to cross boundaries and this vast effort to confuse everything...we should see the anarchic revolt of mankind who wishes himself to be free of all law - having neither God nor master. Liber, from which comes the word ‘liberty’, was the Roman god of chaos!”
In other words, the fact that people are seeking freedom from the boundaries of natural law is a symptom of their revolt against God’s moral law. “Together with revolt goes resentment against being, as it is given and shaped: the desperate will not to be oneself.” (Blocher, 1979)
Underlying the message that your gender might be wrong in relation to your biology is the message that you-being-you, just as you were made, are not right. You should be someone else. We have this pandemic of “the desperate will not to be oneself.”
The gospel says, God made you just as you are with meaning an purpose. You, created by God in your maleness or femaleness, your short-ness or tall-ness, your skin color, your I.Q., your abilities and inabilities, all your gifts and your limitations and weaknesses, are very good creation, beautiful just as you are. And God loves you just as you are, not as you should be.
What is wrong with you is not your being or your gender identity. What is wrong is your broken relationship with God because you want to be your own god. We liberate ourselves from God’s law and desperately want to be anyone other than who He made us to be. The image of God is broken in us. It is “nature set against itself,” humanity become inhuman. We are a shadow of ourselves. We are a witness against ourselves. When we reject His law, we bear bad fruit. We divide ourselves along man-made lines. We lack compassion and vilify people created in God’s image that bear that image differently than we do.
This is where our unfruitfulness comes from. But God’s love for us remains unchanged. And He has a plan to restore His image in us. He sent Jesus the Messiah, the human in whom...
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
The image of God is renewed in Christ. God sent His Son to save the world of lost children who had rejected our own identity. In God the Son, we become born again, born from above, sons bearing the resemblance of their Father in heaven (Romans 8:14-17; Ephesians 1:5).
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,
In Christ, we are new creation; we have already put on the new human,
and have put on the new human, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience
This is the fruit that comes when Jesus restores our true self in God. Does my life align with this?
If you are not in Christ, you are living as a false self. If you are in Christ, your true self is a bearer of God’s image, corrupted by your sin, loved by the Father, reconciled and restored in Jesus Christ. No matter your skin color or language or birthplace or economic status, and no matter your sins, the presence of Jesus Christ in your restoration to spiritual fruitfulness.
