Now being persons, self-conscious, therefore capable of relationships, if I’m an animal I’m not even conscious that I exist, how can I be conscious that anybody else does? But I am a person and I know I exist and I know you exist and I know God exists. God is a plurality. God exists in trinitarian relationship, and I have been made for relationships. That is the ontological aspect, or the aspect of nature which is the image of God…personhood and relationship.
There are also some ethical things, and I’ve already hinted at them. As a person who is self-conscious there are ethical features. I know right from wrong. I understand virtue. I understand morality. I understand righteousness. I understand sin. I understand holiness. I understand disobedience and rebellion. I have the capacity to do what is right. I have the capacity to do what is wrong. I have a capacity for holy and loving fellowship with my heavenly Father. I have a capacity to know God, to know Christ, to know the Holy Spirit. I also have a capacity as a person in the image of God to know what’s right, to know what’s wrong, to know what’s good, to know what’s bad.
It is true that as a human being I resemble the creatures in my physical corporeal form. I am made up of flesh. I am made up of the same components. I am made up of the same atomic material, the same raw elements. But what makes me distinct is my invisible part. It’s the part that you can’t find in my DNA. It’s the part that’s not in the chromosomes. It’s that invisible self. It’s that true person that makes me like God, that is capable of relationship with you and with God.
And the question has been asked through the centuries…does…does the body of man bear the image of God? No, not in the purest and truest sense. I don’t want to get into splitting philosophical hairs here. But we are dust to dust, and that’s not like God. The personhood is eternal and that’s like God. And we are capable and shall enjoy personal relationships forever with one another in the Kingdom of God and with God Himself. But while the body is not so much the expression of the image of God, the body does serve as a vehicle through which the image of God is manifest. To put it this way, if I didn’t have a body I’d have a hard time relating to you. So while the body is not the image of God, because God is a spirit and has not a body, my body gives me the vehicle in a corporeal world, in a physical world, for the image of God to manifest itself.
Augustine used to say, “Man’s body is appropriate for his rational soul, not because of his facial features and the structure of his limbs, but rather because of the fact that he stands erect, is able to look up to heaven and gaze upon the higher regions.” John Calvin sort of felt the same way, that God has caused us to stand up so that we can face each other and so that we can look up and face Him, sort of emblematic and symbolic of our ability to have relationships. The body is not the image of God but the body is a vehicle.
Henry Morris wrote this about that. “We can only say that although God Himself has no physical body, He designed and formed man’s body to enable it to function physically in ways in which He Himself could function without a body. God can see, hear, smell…according to Genesis 8:21…He can touch and He can speak whether or not He has actual physical eyes, ears, nose, hands or mouth. Furthermore when He has designed to appear visibly to men He has done so in the form of a human body, such as in Genesis chapter 18 and the same would be true of angels. They are spirits and there are occasions when they take on bodies. There is something…says Morris…about the human body therefore which is uniquely appropriate to God manifesting Himself on occasions. He must have designed man’s body with this in mind. Accordingly He designed it not like the animals but with an erect posture, with an upward gazing countenance, capable of facial expressions corresponding to emotional feelings and with a brain and a tongue capable of articulate symbolic speech. He knew, of course, that in the fullness of time even He would become a man. And in that day He would prepare a human body for His Son and it would be made in the likeness of men just as man had been made in the likeness of God.” Well said.
So we are created in the image of God, personhood, relationship and understanding of right and wrong and morality which is critical to all our relationships, particularly our relationship to God. By the way, there’s just a very interesting use of singulars and plurals here, verse 26, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness and let them,” isn’t that interesting…that man which is singular in the English is given a modifying pronoun which is plural? “Let us make man and let them…” Verse 27, “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.” There man is referred to with a singular pronoun. Man then can be referred to singularly, excuse me, or in a general and plural sense. Man did refer to mankind. God created mankind but He created mankind by creating man, first one, and then a female, and the two of them multiplied to make the rest of the human race. Man did refer to a single man, as chapter 2 shows, Adam was created first. But Adam is generic including male and female, that’s why the plural pronoun them is used here. We see the distinctive creations of each in chapter 2. First came the man, then he went through naming the animals, somebody said the reason God didn’t give him a wife until after he had named the animals is obvious. He didn’t have to deal with a second opinion. I don’t know if that’s true, or not. It may have slowed down the process, I’ll put it that way. Nothing to do with anything feminine, just another opinion.
Now let’s look back at the text and we’ll wrap this up. I…there’s so much to cover here. When God created man, the reason He can say them is at the end of verse 27, because it says He created him, and then it says male and female, He created them. Male and female He created them. That takes us to the second point, and I think probably it’s better to wait to develop that next time. It’s fascinating. But let me just tell you what the four things are that are distinct about man’s creation. First of all, he was made in the image of God. That’s the first thing. He was made for personality and relationship. Second thing, he was made as king of the earth, to rule and subdue creation. Third, he was made as propagator of the human race, to populate the earth. And fourth, he was made to be the recipient of rich and plentiful bounty all around him. Far above the animals.
One last distinguishing characteristic, if you’re going to talk about personality, if you’re going to talk about relationship, listen carefully, you have to talk about language. Right? How much of a relationship can you have if all you can do is grunt? You say, “Well, I’m working on it with my husband, that’s about it.” Well, and that’s right. Relationship comes down to communication, doesn’t it? Animals can’t relate. They don’t have self-consciousness. They don’t have personhood. They don’t have relationships. They do whatever they need to do instinctively to achieve one end in life, and that is food and preservation. But when you come to mankind you come to the ability to speak language. This is remarkable. And I told you a few weeks ago that there was a whole article in Newsweek magazine, scientists trying desperately to figure out unsuccessfully how man evolved the ability to speak languages…to speak abstractly, to reason abstractly. Linguistic studies demonstrate as Oller(??) and Umdahl(?), two linguists have stated that, quote: “Apparently human beings and only human beings are specifically designed to acquire just a range of language systems, just the range of language systems that we see manifested in the world’s five thousand plus languages.” Interesting, there are about five thousand languages in the world. “And only human beings can acquire those languages.
You say, “Well what about a dolphin? When you say jump, don’t they jump?” They don’t jump because you said jump and they abstractly understand that those letters form a word that means to go into the air. There’s a certain sound that results in a fish going in their mouth. They learn that.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
