Made in God's Image
This is a sermon that I preached at Emmanuel Baptist Church of Snohomish on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.
Our text for this morning is found in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, verses 26 and 27. If you have a copy of God’s Word with you this morning, please turn there with me as I read it aloud.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” And 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)
What I want us to see this morning is that because human beings are uniquely formed in God’s image, sin against God is infinitely serious—and only God Himself can save us from it.
Now, it’s a dangerous thing to jump right in the midst of a chapter, pull out a verse and start talking about what it means. Every verse is written with a particular context mind, and the risk of doing damage to the text and indeed to God’s reputation is greatly magnified when we ignore that context. Time will not permit an exhaustive exposition of the entire chapter, so a cursory overview of verses 1 – 25 will have to do for now.
As I’m sure many of you are aware, Genesis 1 presents to us an overview of the creation week—seven typical earth days of approximate 24-hour duration during which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit created all that is in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rules or authorities (Colossians 1:16). In the first five days, and for part of the 6th day, God created by divine fiat—which is to say that He spoke things into existence. Let me summarize the pattern we see across the first five days…
Day 1 (1:3)— Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light
Day 2 (1:6) — Then God said, “Let there be an expanse”
Day 3 (1:9)
(1:9) — Then God said, “Let the waters…be gathered…and let the dry land appear”
(1:11)— Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, etc.”
Day 4 (1:15) — Then God said, “Let there be lights”
Day 5 (1:20) — Then God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly”
Day 6 started off similar to the previous five days:
Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures…and it was so.” (1:24)
Here again, we have God creating via divine fiat, but after creating the land animals, God’s approach to creation takes a sudden turn in verse 26 which, if you blink, you might miss it, so pay attention:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to our likeness…” (1:26)
Did you catch it? “Let us make.” Here, God does not speak to his nascent creation as in each of the previous days. He speaks, rather, to someone with Him. Suddenly, the creative act becomes cooperative, personal, relational…“let us.” Us? Us who?
Some have suggested that here God is talking to the angelic host, but frankly that’s a stretch since nowhere in Scripture are angels even suggested to have the same image or likeness as God. In fact, God says quite the opposite about Himself:
“To whom then will you liken me that I would be his equal?” says the Holy One. (Isaiah 40:25)
The doctrine of the trinity is a deep and glorious rabbit hole—one that we unfortunately cannot venture into this morning—and it would be a bit of a stretch to say that trinitarian doctrine is taught in this chapter. Moses is not teaching the Trinity here, but the language certainly allows for it, and later Scripture confirms it. If we allow ourselves to import a little knowledge of the New Testament, it’s not hard to see that when God says, “Let Us,” both the speaker and the audience are God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and that they are pausing to confer with one another regarding what they’re about to do. This is a huge clue that their next creation is a really, really big deal.
Now note what they say amongst themselves…and note also what they do not say: “Let us make.” (1:26) Not “let there be,” but “let us make man.” “Let there be” is clearly different than “let us make,” but what is the significance of this? Since the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible, let’s look for clues in the next chapter.
In Genesis 2, Moses zooms in on the 6th day and offers more detail (it is not a competing creation account as some imagine). We see in verse 7:
Then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground… (2:7a)
That same verb (“formed”) also appears at the end of the next verse (2:8). The original language suggests the image of a potter taking a lump of clay and forming it into a vessel suitable to his own purposes…an image that we see invoked by the Apostle Paul in Romans 9 as he quotes Isaiah:
On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? WILL THE THING MOLDED SAY TO THE MOLDER, “WHY DID YOU MAKE ME LIKE THIS”? Or does not the potter have authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Romans 9:20, 21)
We might rightly say that on Day 6, God creates man and He does so with great intention and deliberation. He didn’t command the dirt to produce man as He did with the land animals in verse 24 (“Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind”), rather He quite literally took a bunch of dirt and sculpted man. We might even say that man is the only thing God created “by hand” and then He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life in 2:7—making man the most intimate creation of God by far.
This intimacy in creation was not simply a one-off. It’s not as if God hand-crafted Adam from the dirt, gave him CPR, knocked him out, fashioned a woman from one of his ribs, woke him up, introduced them, and said, “Okay, kids…you take it from here!” God was just as involved in your conception and formation as he was in Adam and Eve’s. Keep your finger here in Genesis, but turn to Psalm 139:13–16:
For You created my innermost parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, because I am awesomely and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, and skillfully formed in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my formless substance; and in Your book were written all the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.
Not only does God form us, but he has known us intimately before we draw our first breath, before our birth, and even before our conception.
Okay, so God “formed” man (and forms us!), but into what form and according to what pattern did He shape this new creature? Go back to Genesis 1:26—“Let Us make man in Our image, according to our likeness.”
Much ink has been spilt and many keys have been stroked in an attempt to precisely define what it means to be made in the image of God. But isn’t it interesting that God, in His sovereign, infinite wisdom chose not to present us a bullet list of all the ways in which we “image” Him? Why doesn’t God here mention things like our ability to create, or think, or our innate sense of morality or our ability to recognize beauty?
In his Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem offers the following insight:
Such an explanation is unnecessary, not only because the terms (“image” and “likeness”) had clear meanings, but also because no such list could do justice to the subject: the text only needs to affirm that man is like God, and the rest of Scripture fills in more details to explain this. In fact, as we read the rest of Scripture, we realize that a full understanding of man’s likeness to God would require a full understanding of who God is in His being and in his actions and a full understanding of who man is and what he does. The more we know about God and man the more similarities we will recognize, and the more fully we will understand what Scripture means when it says that man is in the image of God. The expression refers to every way in which man is like God. (Grudem, 443, 444)
Basically, God is too big to squeeze into a bullet list.
(By the way, lest you think that this includes physical characteristics[1], remember Jesus’ words in John 4:24 “God is spirit” and in Luke 24:39, “a spirit does not have flesh and bones.”)
The Hebrew word for “image” is derived from a root that means “to carve” or “to cut,” and the Hebrew word for “likeness” comes from a root that means “to be like.” Both words refer to something that is similar, but not identical to the thing it represents or of which it is an “image.” The word ‘image’ can also be used of something that represents something else. (Grudem 443)
“But Dan,” you might object. “Though man was originally made in the image of God, didn’t that all change in Genesis 3 when Adam sinned? Wasn’t that original image destroyed at the fall?” I won’t ask you to turn there now, but you can look later at Genesis 9:6 where God says to Noah and his sons: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” If the image of God in man were completely destroyed at the fall, then God’s reason for instituting capital punishment after the flood is nonsensical. We also see the image of God intact in James 3:9, wherein he says about the tongue, “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God.” You’ll note there that it says, “we curse men” and not “we curse our brothers in Christ”—he is talking about all men, not just the redeemed of the Lord. Things definitely changed at the fall, but the image of God in man was not destroyed—it was marred, stained, distorted, and perverted—but it is still there. Therefore, how we treat others—and how we treat God—suddenly becomes a matter of infinite seriousness.
So, let’s recap what we’ve seen thus far so that we can move on to application:
God is the sovereign creator of all that is seen and unseen (Gen. 1:1; Col 1:16, 17)
Prior to man, God created everything by simply speaking it into existence
Man is a special creation of God:
He stopped to confer with Himself before doing so (1:26)
He directly shaped and formed man just as potter does clay (2:7, 8)
He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (2:7)
He made man to be like Him and to represent Him (1:26)
He is still intimately involved in the formation of every child in the womb.
Do you see now why murder is such an affront to God? Humanly speaking, God took great pains to deliberately hand-sculpt a lump of clay and quickened it with His own breath so that it would live to bear His image and represent Him on earth. How would you feel if someone defaced or destroyed your best work? We don’t have to wonder how God feels about it because He tells us in Proverbs 6:16, 17:
There are six things which Yahweh hates,
Even seven which are an abomination to Him:
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
And hands that shed innocent blood,
I cannot resist again quoting Grudem here:
Even though men are sinful, there is still enough likeness to God remaining in them that to murder another person…is to attack the part of creation that most resembles God, and it betrays an attempt or desire (if one were able) to attack God himself. (Grudem 444)
So, when a creature who bears the image and breath of God robs another man of his life, God takes it personally.
But the problem goes deeper than the act of murder—the same rebellion lives in every human heart. No one is immune from it, and we cannot save ourselves from it or its consequences no matter how hard we try—we are dead in our trespasses and sins, and headed for hell by default. “Good deeds” won’t save us—they’re as filthy rags in God’s sight. Going to church every week won’t save us any more than shopping at Costco gives us the right to use the employee lounge. Being less sinful than the guy next to you won’t help either because he is not the standard of holiness—God is.
That’s the bad news; and if that were the end of the story, we would be without hope.
But the good news is that even though there is nothing we can do to save ourselves; God is in the business of replacing hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. He did all the work necessary to redeem sinful man through His Son, Christ Jesus, who is the perfect image of God. He took on human flesh, lived a perfectly sinless life, and voluntarily gave Himself up to be tortured and murdered by His own creation. He endured the wrath of God due us for our sins on a splintery, blood-soaked, Roman cross, dying just as the Scriptures said He would. But He didn’t stay in the grave—on the third day, He rose again from the dead according to the Scriptures, thereby defeating death and giving us hope of a resurrection of our own in the future.
If you have never done so, I urge you to repent of (turn away from) your sins right now. Stop using the gifts that God has given you to crawl up into God’s lap to spit in His face. Don’t wait for tomorrow because tomorrow may never come; today is the acceptable day of salvation. Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, so that you might be saved…by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone.
[1] Such is what is found in the Mormon scriptures: “The Father [God] has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s…” (D&C 130:22)