Image of God: Invisible God made Visible

In Mat 22:15,-22.

 17. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” 18. But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19. Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” 21. They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 

Do not miss Jesus’ point: Give Caesar what bares Caesars’s image and God what bares God’s image.

What does it mean to be the image of God?

That we are all breathtakingly beautiful and divine creatures? If your know your heart, you know that’s not true. If you’ve read about the atrocities in Auschwitz by the Nazis or atrocities by the Turks and Circassians in Russia, you may tend towards thinking that human beings are merely beasts and wretched creatures. In fact, some people have considered it an insult to compare human beings to the beasts arguing that when the animals do bestial things, they do what they only know. However, human beings are worse because when they delightfully do bestial things, and worse, they know different.

We humans know different because we have different abilities that distinguish us from the beasts. We have reasoning abilities, moral and aesthetic senses; and with these we are capable of amazing things. Even though we choose wretched over divine things.

So what does this mean? Christianity depicts this clearly and in this way stands apart from other religions. Man is both divine and wretched.

Let’s travel back to Gen 1: 26,-28

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. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…

All creation reflects God but only human beings are said to be God’s image. Then, there must be a distinct way in which we are. In the ancient world, images (statues, coins etc.) were used to show authority, so that disrespecting the image was the same as disrespecting the ruler. In the same way, i think we carry God’s authority. Disrespecting any human is the same as disrespecting God.

From above Bible passage, we can obtain that one way we should image God is by having dominion/authority over nature; and the second way is by being fruitful and multiplying as God created man and woman. We see also see Adam fathering Seth in his image after His likeness in Gen 5. Third, God says “Let Us”. God is eternally social through His relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit hence portraying another way in which humans should image Him i.e., in relationship with Him, nature and fellow human beings (Again, Gen 5:1 He created them male and female). Finally, in the literary context of Gen 1 as a whole, we can follow that when God creates everything, and later creates man, man can image God by creating too e.g., art, cars etc.

Let’s think about that car. Just as that car has a specific structure that should enable a certain function; our structure is made up of our abilities, mentioned above; that should enable our function of imaging God. We perform our proper function when we have the right relationship with the Creator, nature and neighbor.

When humans fall into sin and rebellion, we take our amazing abilities and use them to insult the Creator, and degrade ourselves and others- who are His image. Awful. I hope you agree with me here. Still, are we just stuck this way? Is there a way out of this predicament?

God did provide a way. You see there’s this ‘middleman’ that the Bible speaks of where through Him, we can become divine, even though born wretched. Christ. He is the perfect image of God; who truly made God’s image visible on earth. He restores our relationship with God; and by imitating/imaging Him (being more like Him), we grow in our ability to image God. Without the knowledge of Christ, we do not image God well.

2 Cor 4:3,-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants^c for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Col 3:9

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

When you look around and see people using their abilities around you beautifully or bestially, remember, they are imaging God. Also, as we draw people towards us with our abilities, let’s not become idols but reflect the glory of our creator. This is what gives human beings intrinsic value, The Image of God.

“For what do you have that you haven’t received?“

Apostle Paul, 1 Cor 4:7