"The Image of God"

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 1:26-27

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Here we are at week two of our grocery shopping trip in Genesis, if you remember my imagery of Stop and Shop last week.
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And as we said, the way we're approaching this book is to look at the larger narrative flow of Genesis instead of looking at the trees of the forest, we want to look at the forest.
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And sometimes in time we'll zoom in and spend more time unpacking some of the details of the text, but we want to see how the larger flow not only carries the narrative of Genesis, but actually begins to flow into the whole storyline of scripture, the whole redemptive history that we have in our
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Bible. And so this morning we are going big in terms of the big picture of biblical theology.
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And we're talking about the image of God. If we are looking at the
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Stop and Shop imagery, we are at the butcher's counter loading up the cart with T -bones.
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The image of God is huge. What we're going to do today is also going to carry us into next week, where we consider as we head into chapter two, the way that the image of God carries into this theme of dominion.
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But this morning we want to begin to discuss what does it mean to be the image of God?
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The answer to that question answers this question. What is man? It's a pretty big question.
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It's the stuff of philosophy. It's the stuff of human origins. It's the existential matters of life.
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What happens when a culture sees humanity in Darwinian terms, when man no longer sees himself or rather represses his acknowledgement of the fact that he is a creature and that as such, he's a creature made in the image of God.
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We're not going to necessarily address that now, but keep that in the back of your mind. And as we head into next week,
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I think we'll unpack that a little bit further. Two parts that are going to occupy our time this morning, first and largest, we're going to consider image bearing and creation.
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And then we'll consider more in detail the express image of God.
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And as I said, trailing into next week, we'll consider image bearing and dominion, image bearing and dominion.
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So image bearing and creation. It's going to bring our focus to verse 26 and verse 27.
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God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
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I happen to kill a lot of creeping things with paper towels this summer on our windowsills.
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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him male and female.
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He created them. That's verse 27. That's our focus this morning. Image bearing and creation.
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The creation of humanity, the creation of man or mankind, marks the high point of chapter one as the climax of the creation account.
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As Ian Provan says, Genesis 1 .1 all the way to the first three verses of chapter two describes creation as a sequence of steps that rise step by step to the apex of creation in humanity.
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Everything else prepares the way for human beings. All that God has done on the first five days was preparatory and part of the inhabitation for humanity, which is the crowning achievement of the creation week.
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We can see this not only in the way that the week moves toward its climax in man, but also in the way that man is given all the things that God has made prior to him.
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Verse 29 and 30. But we also see it in how the creative acts of God lead to his response.
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No longer just good, but rather very good. That's the response to man now having dominion over everything else that occurred in the creation week.
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This is very good. Now returning to the actual pronouncement, we read in verse 26,
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God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.
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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him male and female.
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He created them. Man is the image of God.
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That's what the Genesis account reveals. The whole narrative slows down to these two verses and specifically slows down in verse 27.
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When I say slow down, some of you, if you're looking at a study Bible, you might notice that verse 27 is actually indented.
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It's separated from the text. That's a little clue that the translators are rightly viewing that as set apart from the rest of the narrative.
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We're going into poetry here. We're going into a highly structured literary segment.
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Man is the image of God, and that is zoomed in on in a number of ways by this parallel structure.
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Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. So God created man in his image.
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In the image of God, he created him male and female. He created them.
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This is a parallel statement that talks about the fullness of man as the fullness of the image of God.
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What does it mean for man to be made in the image of God? What does it mean for man to be in the likeness of God?
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It means that man is like God in every way that a creature can be like God, at least originally in the state of his creation, which
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God said was very good. Think about that statement for a moment. The human being is like God in every respect that a creature can be like God.
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That is what it means for man to be made in God's image. Now, as soon as we say that a human being made in God's image is like God in every way that a creature can be like God, we're setting a very important limit because we're using the word creature.
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And Adam is a creature, though he's a pristine creature. He is not divine.
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He never can be divine, never will be divine. The status of deity will never belong to man.
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The creature will never be anything more than a creature. And so we begin with what we emphasized last week, the transcendence of God, the separation of God from all that he has made.
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He is distinct from his creation, which includes even the crowning achievement of creation, which is man himself.
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Nevertheless, once we acknowledge this creaturely limitation, we should be amazed that God made humans in his own image, a carved out copy.
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That's the literal that's the background of the Hebrew. It's a danger to bring background into definition, but just to help you see how radical this is, the human being is the carved out copy of God, of the invisible, infinite
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God, the creator in the language of theologians. Human beings are the type, the copy.
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God is the archetype, the original. This copying was not a process.
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It was not blind chance unfolding over billions of years, acting indiscriminately upon primordial ooze.
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It was a direct act of God's creation. Adam was created, as we'll see next week in chapter two, when
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God formed his body from the earth and breathed life into him. This is definitive then for mankind.
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To be a human being is to be an image bearer of God as both male or female in both body and soul.
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As we've said, I don't, I wonder if anyone would remember this. This is many moons ago on a Sunday night at SLVC.
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It's not quite correct to say man has a body and soul, but rather man is a body and soul.
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You see, man is not some abstract container or some concept which then attaches to a body and attaches to a soul, no.
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Man is a body and soul. This is very significant for our understanding of what it means to be an image bearer.
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Your body is as much you as your soul. To be human is to bear
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God's image in both body and soul. Man, as God's image bearer, has a certain created analogy to God.
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As we said, it's limited by the fact that he's a creature. And one of the ways that we talk about man copying or being the type of God is this.
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Theologians talk about the attributes of God. We went through a whole series, behold your God, viewing in greater detail the attributes of God.
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And one of the things theologians want to do is to distinguish the attributes of God between those that are unique to God and those that are shared with man.
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Those attributes that are unique to God in his divinity and therefore cannot be shared with man or communicated to man, for instance, his omnipresence, a creature, a man is finite.
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He cannot be all places at any given moment. His omnipotence. I don't have all power.
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Never met any other human being that has all power. Omniscience. I don't know if it would be a good or a bad thing to know all things.
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These are incommunicable attributes of God, meaning these things are never part of our image bearing status.
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They're part of God's deity, his divinity, that which cannot be communicated. But then there are those attributes of God which are shared with humanity.
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They're communicated, in other words, and we call those, theologians call those communicable attributes.
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For example, God's wisdom or God's love or God's goodness.
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He has these things in their fullness. These attributes are identical to his essence.
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We have them as qualities that ebb and flow, not perfectly having no bottom, no height, no depth, but actually being derivative from God, modeled after God.
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However limited and faint they may be, they reflect the likeness of God. They're analogous.
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And this is how God created man, whether male or female in both body and soul as his likeness.
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That means this. Human beings are the most supreme revelation of God.
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This is Herman Bovink, by the way. I had to say that because it's an amazing statement and you might reject it.
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I might reject it if it didn't come from such a great theologian in a wonderful argument that we won't have time to go into.
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Humans are the supreme and most perfect revelation of God. Now, I realize we're in chapter one and not chapter three of Genesis.
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In other words, we're dealing with creation and not the fall. And I don't want to read too far ahead, but there's no way we can unpack what it means to be the image of God unless we address the image of God and its relationship to the fall.
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To frame this, let me ask you a question. You're all budding theologians.
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So if you have a little golf pencil and you're, you know, of all weeks to give you half a section for notes, it should have been like three, the whole bulletin should have been notes.
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But here's the question. Think about it. Did man lose the image of God as a result of the fall?
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Did man lose the image of God as a result of the fall? If so, if man did lose the image of God as a result of the fall, what was the image that was lost?
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What was it? If not, if man didn't lose the image of God as a result of the fall, what was the image that he maintained, that he kept?
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To help guide you a little, let me add a summary from our own confession. This is the fourth chapter, the second paragraph.
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It's identical in every way except they changed a few phrases around. They moved them around to the
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Westminster, which is to say this is the widely held reformed position. After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female with reasonable and immortal souls, rendering them fit unto that life to God for which they were created, being made after the image of God in knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts and power to fulfill it.
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So notice a few things from that summary statement. We have a reasonable and immortal soul that makes us fit for a life unto
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God and being made in his image is being made in knowledge, righteousness and true holiness.
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So let me ask the question again. Did man lose the image of God as a result of the fall or does man continue to have the image of God after the fall?
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And the answer is yes to both. Man did lose the image of God as a result of the fall.
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Man did retain the image of God after the fall. So now that you're thoroughly confused, let's unpack that a bit.
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There's a sense in which both of these are true. There's a broad sense in which the image of God has been retained and it continues after the fall.
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But then there's a narrow sense in which it's been completely lost. And this is this is pretty standard.
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One of the great authorities of theology in the reformed world, Louis Burkoff, who lived about a century ago in his systematic theology, which
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I was I heard from Carl Truman that they called that it's this huge blue book that Banner published.
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And I guess students at Westminster used to call it the big blue sleeping pill. So even, you know, seminary students are like, this is too much time for bed.
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Here's what Burkoff has to say. Reformed theology does not hesitate to say that the image of God constitutes the essence of man.
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This is what it means to be a human being. It distinguishes, however, between those elements in the image of God, which man cannot lose without ceasing to be man.
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There's something about the image of God that if you were to take it away, man is no longer man. The image of God is part of how we define man.
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It consists in those essential qualities and powers of the human soul, immortality, rationality.
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We distinguish between those and on the other hand, those elements which man can lose and yet still be man, namely the ethical qualities of the soul and its powers, the moral perfection of the image, which could be and was lost by sin.
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In other words, there is a true sense in which Adam lost the image of God when he fell. That is, if we define image in the narrow sense, knowledge, righteousness, true holiness,
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Adam was created with that. Eve was created with that. They perfectly reflected the likeness of God in that way.
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Communion with God then was unmitigated splendor because they were constituted as truly holy.
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They were as morally upright as God was morally upright. They perfectly reflected the image of God, and this was utterly defaced and ruined by the fall.
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Let me just give you a few examples of this. Colossians 3, 8 and following,
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Paul writes, Now you yourselves are to put off all these anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth.
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Don't lie to one another. You've put off the old man with his deeds and you'll put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him.
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Now what is the image of him who created him? It's the image of God. Notice what
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Paul is saying here. There's fallen man with his unrighteous deeds, and that constitutes the old man.
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But Christians have become a new man and they're renewed in righteous deeds, which are renewed according to God's image.
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Or again, Ephesians 4, 22 and following, almost the same exact language, that you put off concerning your former conduct, the old man, which grows corrupt according to deceitful lusts and be renewed in the spirit of your mind and that you put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.
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Again, notice the unrighteous deeds of the old man need to be replaced by the righteous deeds of the new man, which is created according to God's likeness, according to God's image.
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And so you can see what our confession is pointing to. Our fallen humanity lost the image of God that was made in knowledge and righteousness and in true holiness.
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That's that narrow sense of image. It was marred. It was defaced. It was utterly lost.
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Man became dead in trespasses and sins. The splendor of reflecting God's life and light and moral perfections was completely corrupted such that God could no longer have human beings dwell in his presence.
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They had to be cast out of the paradise he had made for them to inhabit. But our souls, our reason, our morality, our affections, our ambitions, though they've been absolutely corrupted by the fall, they still retain their humanity.
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And as such, the humanity still retains the image of God. Our human nature is fallen, but it is still a human nature, even though it's become disordered and weak, or as we would say, totally depraved, it doesn't become something other than human.
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And therefore it cannot be something other than the image of God. And so there's this broader sense in which man does retain the image of God as a rational creature with an immortal soul and a responsibility of moral agency.
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That all continues after the fall. Genesis 9, 6, where God commands
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Noah, whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed for in the image of God he made man.
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See, the image is continuing in some sense. First Corinthians 11, 7, a man indeed ought not to cover his head since he is the image and glory of God.
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You can ask Ben if you want to know more about the background of that passage there in First Corinthians 11. But you see, the image of God is retained even after the fall.
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There's a sense in which this is the case. James 3, 8 and 9, no man can tame the tongue, it's an unruly evil full of deadly poison.
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With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the likeness of God.
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Do you see, it's retained even after the fall.
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How can we define man as the image, the likeness, the carved out copy, the reflection of God when he's full of sin?
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How can we say that human beings in some sense image God to the world, and yet because of the fall they are completely depraved and corrupted?
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We have to understand that even when we talk about the continuing sense of man being made in God's image, it's because of the fact that man is
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God's creation. This is how vital Genesis is to everything.
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If you lose Genesis, you have nothing. In the narrow sense, in terms of what
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Adam lost as a result of the fall, he lost his communion with God. He lost the freedom and the joy of God's presence.
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But his image bearing continues, not because Adam is going to do better, not because Adam or any other fallen man can pull himself up from his bootstraps and try to undo the damage that was done, make new resolutions, work back to the image that was lost.
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No, it's because they're a man and they were created by God, and therefore no matter how fallen, how depraved, how corrupted, they are still unalterably, inescapably related to God.
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Every human being bears the image of God in this way, and that's why
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Paul can say they repress the knowledge of God, they can't escape the fact that they were made to know Him, made for Him, made through Him.
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It's inescapable, it's unalterable, they're a creature of God. God's image is stamped over every part of their being.
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We can't run away from that. We can't hide from it. What did we see last week?
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David says, lo, if my soul sinks into hell, it sinks into Sheol, you're there. Man's relationship to God as preacher to creator, it never ends, ever.
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The fact that man is God's image bearer comes by virtue of the fact that God created man, even after the fall.
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So you see, there's this broad and narrow sense in which it's true that the image of God was lost, and true that the image of God is retained.
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Two different senses. And you have to hold them both together. Here's why.
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On the one hand, the ethical foundation, the dignity of human life begins for the
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Christian by affirming that human beings are made in the image of God.
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They are personal, they are moral, they are responsible to Him as their creator. If we're to say that man utterly loses the image of God by virtue of the fall, we immediately begin to remove the foundation of Christian ethics.
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There's a reason we seek to go to Worcester and turn back the scalpels of the abortionists.
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It's because man is made in the image of God. There's a reason
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Christians choose not to abort those with disabilities, choose not to outcast, as they did 2 ,000 years ago when a mouth that was too hard to feed, a child that had a certain disability or defect was just exposed, left out to die.
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There's a reason that Christians went out to the fields to pick them up and raise them. It's because man is made in the image of God.
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So on the one hand, you must say that the image of God is retained. It's the foundation for Christian ethics.
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It's what makes pro -life pro -life. On the other hand, you must emphasize that the image of God has been lost, because this is the foundation of the gospel.
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If we don't affirm the fact that man has lost his original righteousness, we can make no sense of the righteousness of God through Christ.
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The image of God, as George Smeaton, the great Scottish preacher of the 19th century, wrote, the image of God in which
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Adam was created was replaced by the entire corruption of man's nature. His understanding had been furnished with the true and saving knowledge of his
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Creator and of spiritual things. His heart and his will had been upright. All his affections had been pure.
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Can you imagine what that would be like? To have your affections be pure? The whole man was holy.
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But revolting from God by the temptation of the devil, the opposite of that image of God became his heritage.
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Posterity derived corruption, not by imitation, but by a vicious nature incapable of any saving good, prone to evil, dead in sin.
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It's not denied that still in man lingers some glimmering of natural light, some knowledge of God, some awareness of the difference between good and evil, some regard for virtue and a hope for good in society.
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But it's evident that without the regenerating grace of God, men are neither able nor willing to return to God.
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The theological foundation and integrity of the gospel rest on the fact that man lost his original righteousness.
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In that sense, he lost the image of God. And that brings us to the second, shorter point this morning.
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The theme of the image of God, as we said, is at the very foundation of the gospel and all the implications of the gospel flow around it.
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When we understand the image of God in that broad sense and in the narrow sense, we see its fullness flowering in the
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New Testament. And it flowers in this way. We find Christ revealed at the very center of creation, at the very center of what it means to be the image of God.
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The apostles received and taught the fact that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of all that God had planned from the beginning.
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Jesus was referred to as the glory of God. What does
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John say? We beheld His glory as that of the only begotten of the
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Father. Adam was begotten of the Father.
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All humanity has to be begotten of the Father. But we see that sense in which
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John is saying there's a glory unique to the One, the Man, the
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Christ, the glory of the One begotten of the Father. Thinking back to Psalm 8, which we opened the service with,
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David writes in this psalm that God crowned humanity with glory and honor.
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Psalm 8, beginning in verse 4, What is man that you're mindful of him, the
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Son of Man that you visit him? You've made him a little lower than the angels.
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You've crowned him with glory and honor. You've made him to have dominion over the works of your hands.
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You've put all things under his feet. Do you see what David is doing? He's giving a worship commentary on Genesis 1, 26 and 27.
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You made man. You put him in charge of everything. You put creation at his disposal. You crowned him as the crowning work of creation.
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It's a commentary on Genesis 1. But when later revelation sees
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Jesus at the very core of creation, how does this change the way we understand its fullest meaning?
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Hebrews 2, beginning in verse 5, He has not put the world to come of which we speak in subjection to angels.
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But one testified in a certain place, that would be David in Psalm 8, saying, what is man that you're mindful of him?
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Or the Son of Man that you take care of him? You made him a little lower than the angels.
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You crowned him with glory and honor. You set him over the works of your hands. You've put all things in subjection under his feet.
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Do you recognize that? You just read it in Psalm 8. And what does the writer of the Hebrews go on to say?
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For in that he put all in subjection under him. Not humanity, but Jesus Christ.
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He left nothing that is not put under him. Now we do not yet see all things put under him, but we see
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Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels. That's his incarnation.
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When he humbled himself and took flesh into his person, human nature into his divinity.
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For the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor.
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Do you see, Jesus from the very beginning of creation, is not understood to have the crown of glory and honor by virtue of being preeminent over creation, but by virtue of going to the cross.
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By virtue of his death and his resurrection. He's crowned with glory and honor. But by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone.
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And it was fitting for him, for whom are all things, by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering.
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The image of God restored. Do you see, man is given dominion, and he has that dominion over creation as the image of God.
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But the writer of Hebrews looks at Psalm 8 and says, oh, it's not just general humanity, it's not just the
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Son of Man at large, it's the Son of Man. It's Jesus Christ. All things have been made subject to him as the last
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Adam. All things have been put under his feet, not as a result of the triumph of his perfect life, but rather the triumph of his suffering and his death.
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Even if our gospel is veiled, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4, it's veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the
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God of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.
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Who is the image of God? Jesus Christ, shining with the glory, shining with the glory of the likeness of his
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Father. He is the one who manifests the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
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Colossians 1, 15, he is the image of the invisible God. He is.
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He is the image of the invisible God. The firstborn over all creation.
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For by him, all things were created that are in heaven and are on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.
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All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things. And in him, all things consist.
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This is the Christ -him of Colossians. And it presents a sort of cosmology of creation in which
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Jesus is the centerpiece and the preeminent one over all that has been made. He does that as the image of God.
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Colossians 1, 15, in other words, is reading our passage this morning. It's reading Genesis 1, 26 and 27 the right way.
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What Adam lost in the fall, the second Adam regained. Not by being made in the pristine paradise, but by being made in the slavery of flesh, born in a feeding trough, in a manger, not in a palace, not in a mansion, not with angels flowing this train of armament and giving him as Lord of hosts.
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All that is his due, but he comes in the weakness of the flesh, screaming for his mother's milk, writhing in his mother's blood.
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His whole life is set toward the cross. And the writer of Hebrews says, this is how he was crowned with glory and honor as the image of God.
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Brothers and sisters, the whole matter of creation and dominion emerge as this focus.
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Christ is preeminent. Christ is over all. Christ is the yes and amen.
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Christ is the firstborn in this sense of his image bearing fullness. We look to Christ and we see the full likeness of God, the fullness of the
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Godhead. What it means to be truly human. Not truly human as if we were oh, we can touch his flesh.
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He really was truly human. What I mean is we look to Jesus to understand what it means for us to live as human beings in the world of God.
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We look to Christ as the firstborn, as the image, as the likeness, because through looking at him, we know what it means to be a human being.
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We know why God made human beings. We know the end and the fruits and the joys and the trials of being a human being in a fallen world.
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Man was blessed not because of his own good actions, but by participating in God.
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You see, the image of God is not something that we possess as an object. It's rather a manifestation of a relationship.
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And this participation occurs in the life of the Christian through his union with Christ.
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In other words, what I'm saying is this, because Christ is the image of God, the perfect image of God.
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When we are united to him by faith through the Spirit, we are restored to the fullness of God's image.
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And this was always God's plan. This wasn't plan B after chapter 3.
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This was God's plan even before he created. This was God's plan from the councils of eternity.
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Romans 8, 29 and 30, Whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his
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Son. Do you see? Those whom he foreknew before the worlds began, he predestined to be conformed, fashioned, molded into the image of his
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Son. And what is the image of his Son? The image of God. The image of Christ. So that he would be the firstborn among many brethren.
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1 Corinthians 15, 49, We have been born as the image of the man of dust, but we also shall bear the image of the heavenly man.
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The glory that Adam possessed as the image of God, even before the fall, was only ever reflecting the glory of Christ as the image of God.
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Christ is the firstborn over all creation. In this sense, Christ is the express image of the invisible
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God. In this sense, the last Adam is really the first. By his
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Spirit, even now, this Lord of glory is sowing, and proving, and conforming, and renewing, and shaping, and strengthening, and empowering
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His people unto the perfect man. Unto the fullness of the stature of Christ.
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This is image of God language. Christian sanctification and Christian maturity is all about our participation with Christ.
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Our union with Him being made unto His image. So then day by day, as we all continue to behold the glory of the
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Lord, what does 2 Corinthians 3 .18 say? We're being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to the next.
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Do you retain some broad sense of the image of God by being a human being?
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Yes, you do. But it's marred, and it's limited, and it's weak, and it's been corrupted.
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By being a Christian, born by His Spirit, looking unto
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Jesus, the image of God, you are day by day, degree by degree, being renewed after the glory of His same image.
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And so I leave you with this statement, and it will carry us, I'll repeat it next week, it'll carry us into image -bearing and dominion next week.
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God's purpose in creating man as His image -bearer is completely realized in the person of Jesus Christ.
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One more time. God's purpose in creating man as His image -bearer is completely realized in the person of Jesus Christ.
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Let's pray. Father, we thank
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You for the truth of Your Word. We thank You for the depth and the awe and the mystery that You would consider man, that You would visit him, that You would put us over the works of Your hands, and to show us,
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Lord, that all of this was ultimately about our Savior, about the
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Lord of glory, about the Incarnate Son, that Your plan for humanity had always been such that our participation and enjoyment of You would not be the distance of enjoying
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You as an invisible spirit, but it would be the closeness, the intimacy of enjoying
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You as a man imaging the fullness of the Godhead, that in the eyes of Jesus, we behold the face of our
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God, of our Creator. What awe! What wonder! Who are we that You would bestow the riches of this grace upon us?
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Help us then, Lord. Help us, as we are being transformed from one degree to the next, to lay hold of the means of grace, to strive and make every effort to beat our bodies into submission, to do the first works and return to our first love, all that holds us back from being conformed into that blessed image of the one who loved us at the cost of His own blood.
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And if there's one here, Lord, who's truly an image of God and yet is not being restored after this image, not being renewed in knowledge and in righteousness and in true holiness, might
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You convict them, Lord, and lead them by the awe of this same gospel of grace.