Sermon preached at Lindfield Evangelical Church on 21st July 2024. Audio and transcript below.
When God said in Gen 1:26 “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” It was clear that he was singling out mankind as different. As unique. As special. With a purpose unlike anything else in creation.
But different how, exactly? What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Well, let’s find out. We’ll do so by asking three investigative questions.
There are two main components to the phrase “Image of God”, aren’t there?!
Image. God.
And it simply stands to reason that if we want to know what the image of God is, we need to first find out who or what God is.
Which brings us to our first investigative question: what is God like?
God is Spirit
And we’ll begin very literally and say that: “God is spirit.” Jesus reveals this fact about the nature of God as when he is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well in John ch 4 about worship. Not limited by physical constraints like a body.
God is invisible
Paul tells us in Colossians ch 1 that: “The Son is the image of the invisible God.” In context Paul is expounding the majesty of Jesus as the supreme being through whom all things hold together. And we get this little clue about the nature of God that he is invisible.
God is outside of time, space and matter
Genesis 1:1 is also a key verse about understanding the nature of God. We learn, don’t we, that In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There was a beginning, which is time. There were the heavens, which is space. And there was the earth, which is matter. And as Kent Hovind points out, time, space and matter have to exist all at the same time, or none of them can exist. For instance, if you have time and matter but no space, where would you put it? Or if you had space and matter but no time, when would you put it? And we can’t imagine or think outside of those parameters, yet God is outside of them. Not bound by them. In fact, he created them. They find their origin in him. And as creator we learn that he is powerful, imaginative, and authoritative.
And with a God like this we can easily begin to see how Paul can speak of him as “...the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God…”
God is a community
One of the most amazing and helpful things the Bible tells us about God is that he is a community. When God says in Gen 1:26 “Let us make mankind in our image…” He speaks of more than one person. As the rest of scripture tells us, God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is not a loner. By nature he is a community.
So that’s what God is, but what is God like?
God is love
The first thing that might come to mind is 1 John 4:8 that tells us “God is love.” And this is particularly interesting because John goes on to say that “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” So there is something of the invisible, unseen God being made visible as we love others.
God’s description of himself
We could use God’s description of himself from Exodus 34 when he passed by Moses and proclaimed “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.”
God is holy and glorious
In Isaiah 6 we learn that “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” In a very literal sense holy means different, special, set apart, singled out as ‘best’. It’s a key aspect of who God is. And God is also glorious, as the seraphim said to each other. And to think of God as glorious is very helpful. Glory is related to weight, and so when we talk about the glory of God you could imagine it like this, you take all the attributes of God and just add them to a big old pile. Take his love, his mercy, his grace, his kindness, his justice and you just keep on adding to the pile, and the more you add, the heavier the pile gets. That’s God’s glory.
We can use glory as a summary word for describing all that God is. God is glorious!
That’s not all. Quite remarkably, in the Bible, we’re actually given an insight into what God was doing before creation.
God was the Father loving the Son
In John 17:24 Jesus gives us this delectable little peek behind the curtain of the dawn of time when he says “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world”. Mike Reeves so elegantly sums up that verse when he says “Before He ever created, before He ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was the Father loving His Son in His Holy Spirit”. So that’s the essence of who God is, of what God is like: A Father loving His Son in His Holy Spirit”.
Isn’t that gorgeous?
It’s a Queen of Sheba moment to just stop and think about God, isn’t it? He takes our breath away…
He is the perfect being. In himself he is complete, he is flawless and content. Self-sufficient. Self-satisfied. And actually, he doesn’t need to create.
This then begs our next question, why does God create image bearers? Let alone the universe...
Well, I don’t think I can put it any better than 18th Century mega theologian, Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards says “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow.”
What Edwards is saying here is that God didn’t create people - or anything else for that matter - because he was deficient. He didn’t create because he was incomplete or lacking in any way. Rather, he created purely out of his abundance of glory.
As John Piper has put it: “All his works are simply the spillover of his infinite exuberance for his own excellence.”
Do you get it? Creation is the spillover of God’s glory. Like a bag that you keep filling up with more and more and more things until eventually the bag bursts.
And Edwards basically says that just like a fountain overflows out of an abundance of water, so God created out of an abundance of his glory.
Now, we must be careful here, not to think that creation was accidental or coincidental. God did plan creation.
But Edwards does help us understand creation and why God wants image bearers.
Do you see?
As the Father was loving the Son in the power of the Spirit - as the persons of God were together enjoying the attributes of God - that enjoyment was so great that God simply wouldn’t keep him to himself. God is too good not to share.
One of the best things I ever read was by a Harvard University professor called Elaine Scarry. She’s not a Christian, but she says something which I think can be used to explain creation in the most elegant way.
Scarry observes that “beauty brings copies of itself into being.”
And a good way to explain this is a sunset. What happens when you see a sunset? First you enjoy it, of course. But what is your instinct when you have enjoyed a sunset (or anything else beautiful for that matter)? Your instinct is to share the experience. Enjoying beauty prompts a benevolent desire for someone else to enjoy what we have enjoyed. Joy is contagious!
It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and your meal is so good you turn to your wife and say “you gotta taste this!”
And I bet you’ve all done this: you see a sunset, you enjoy the sunset, you take a photo of the sunset, you send a copy of the photo to a friend, who in turn enjoys the picture, and sends it to someone else.
That is beauty bringing copies of itself into being.
That’s what God did at creation. He recognised his own beauty, his own glory. He revelled in it and his instinct, his inclination, his great desire was to share it with others. Before creation, God was the only being. He had no one but himself to enjoy himself with. So he created - the heavens, the earth, and his image bearers.
Why did God create image bearers? Very simply, he created image bearers because he wanted more persons to share an enjoyment of his glory with. That’s the start of the meaning. Made in God’s image means able to enjoy God.
Let’s put it like this: to be made in the image of God means, to have the capacity to enjoy God in his glory, and to reflect that glory to others that they too might enjoy God. That would be my clunky technical definition.
Image bearers are beneficiaries of his glory, who become promoters of his glory.
As we read earlier, this idea is summed up well in Isaiah 43.
In Isaiah 43:6-7 we read “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth - everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”
And in 43:19-21 we read “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honour me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.”
And yes there is a broader context in these verses. But two very precise and clear truths are evident. Mankind, those who are made in God’s image, were created to display God’s glory and formed to proclaim God’s praise.
Created for glory, formed for praise. If you remember nothing else from tonight, remember this: created for glory, formed for praise.
That’s what it means to be made in the image of God. That’s the most basic, Biblical summary of what it means to be made in the image of God: Created for glory, formed for praise. Let’s expand on these a little.
Created for glory
Created for glory means we’re to make the invisible visible by living out God’s attributes in our physical form and to replicate the relationship the trinity shared before creation. This is achieved through obedience to God’s laws. Obedience experiences God’s glory because it brings prosperity, happiness and joy. Obedience glorifies God because it’s an agreement that he is indeed glorious.
Formed for praise
To praise God simply means we have enjoyed him. We praise what we love. It’s the instinct of an experience of something wonderful. We see a sunset, we say “wow”, we hear some music and we say “brilliant” we enjoy a painting and we say “amazing”. As C.S. Lewis says: It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
Praise is the proof that we have enjoyed glory. It’s also the thing which makes other people interested in that which we are praising. Praise is the impetus through which beauty makes copies of itself.
And these two things are what make us different from the animals. Nothing else in creation has the same capacity to enjoy God, to praise him, to glorify him by being able to replicate his attributes.
And God says that’s my purpose for you. Created FOR glory, formed FOR praise. And as we do that, we are image bearers. Our unique privilege & responsibility.
We are scratching the surface of what it means to be made in the image of God.
I’m well aware of how much is being left out on the topic.
But I want us to ask one more question. How do we bear the image of God? How do we glory, how do we praise?
Like we’ve said we can be obedient to God’s word and his laws. God did give us instructions for life.
At the foundational level that means “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Of course there are the Ten Commandments, the beatitudes, the epistles that direct our lives that God’s glory might be on display.
But ultimately, we fall short of the glory of God, don’t we, Rom 3?
Genesis 6 tells us “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
What happened in that moment is that Adam and Eve acted as if he were not a glorious God. And thus they damaged the image of God in them like a mirror that’s been cracked. That’s sin!
But this image of God in mankind is precious because of who it reflects. To damage it is an offence we can scarcely imagine.
And there are consequences. A punishment is due. Death.
Death, in a sense, is being stripped of the privilege of being an image bearer. It’s God saying, “you don’t get to do that any more”.
But the image of God in man is so precious to God, that he’d rather fix the broken image than destroy it completely. As he says in Ezekiel 18:32 “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD”. That’s why in the very same verse God urges us to “Repent and live!” The best thing sinful image bearers can do is to repent, because repentance is the beginning of image restoration!
This is only made possible because of the Son, isn’t it?
The Son of God enters our world. Because we failed to take on God’s likeness, God takes on our likeness. Immanuel, God with us. God incarnate - God literally “in flesh”.
And what the Son does is he lives our life for us in his flesh, which is our flesh. He is the perfect image bearer, on our behalf, being “…the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…”. And he represents us before the Father, perfectly bearing God’s image in his humanity.
Then he goes to the cross. He subjects himself to the penalty of being an image breaker. His human form “...was so marred, beyond human semblance…” But as it was, the glory of God was on full display.
So as a representative of mankind, he lived our life, he died our death. But because he is also God, he rose from the dead.
And because of those three things, those three accomplishments of the Son of God, sinful mankind now has the chance to enjoy the immense privilege of experiencing one of the most special attributes of God. His mercy.
Christian, God put the image of God in you precisely so that he might show you mercy.
And in Jesus he has. The Son makes it possible for us to be shown mercy and have the image of God in us restored. If we so wish, God will forgive our sins on account of his Son’s achievements because we are image bearers.
This mercy is special. It’s truly unique. No other beings in all of creation are eligible for mercy like we are. Mercy is the exclusive privilege of image bearers on account of Jesus. God is willing to show mercy to image bearers even though they sin because it is his image in us that he is passionate about preserving.
That’s why we must champion its recognition and preservation and stand up for it every chance we get at every level of society. Especially warning those who seek to rationalise its destruction.
If we refuse this mercy, if we refuse to repent, if we refuse to have the image of God in us restored, then there awaits a wrath and a fury like no other. For those who trust in the achievements of the Son, we’re given the Holy Spirit as a personal helper to see God’s image in us restored as we walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. Restored to glory, restored to praise!
For all who are glad to trust in the Son’s achievements, there is the hope of being perfect and complete image bearers one day in heaven. Eternally to be loved by the Father along with the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s what being an image bearer means.
But different how, exactly? What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Well, let’s find out. We’ll do so by asking three investigative questions.
There are two main components to the phrase “Image of God”, aren’t there?!
Image. God.
And it simply stands to reason that if we want to know what the image of God is, we need to first find out who or what God is.
Which brings us to our first investigative question: what is God like?
God is Spirit
And we’ll begin very literally and say that: “God is spirit.” Jesus reveals this fact about the nature of God as when he is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well in John ch 4 about worship. Not limited by physical constraints like a body.
God is invisible
Paul tells us in Colossians ch 1 that: “The Son is the image of the invisible God.” In context Paul is expounding the majesty of Jesus as the supreme being through whom all things hold together. And we get this little clue about the nature of God that he is invisible.
God is outside of time, space and matter
Genesis 1:1 is also a key verse about understanding the nature of God. We learn, don’t we, that In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There was a beginning, which is time. There were the heavens, which is space. And there was the earth, which is matter. And as Kent Hovind points out, time, space and matter have to exist all at the same time, or none of them can exist. For instance, if you have time and matter but no space, where would you put it? Or if you had space and matter but no time, when would you put it? And we can’t imagine or think outside of those parameters, yet God is outside of them. Not bound by them. In fact, he created them. They find their origin in him. And as creator we learn that he is powerful, imaginative, and authoritative.
And with a God like this we can easily begin to see how Paul can speak of him as “...the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God…”
God is a community
One of the most amazing and helpful things the Bible tells us about God is that he is a community. When God says in Gen 1:26 “Let us make mankind in our image…” He speaks of more than one person. As the rest of scripture tells us, God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is not a loner. By nature he is a community.
So that’s what God is, but what is God like?
God is love
The first thing that might come to mind is 1 John 4:8 that tells us “God is love.” And this is particularly interesting because John goes on to say that “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” So there is something of the invisible, unseen God being made visible as we love others.
God’s description of himself
We could use God’s description of himself from Exodus 34 when he passed by Moses and proclaimed “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.”
God is holy and glorious
In Isaiah 6 we learn that “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” In a very literal sense holy means different, special, set apart, singled out as ‘best’. It’s a key aspect of who God is. And God is also glorious, as the seraphim said to each other. And to think of God as glorious is very helpful. Glory is related to weight, and so when we talk about the glory of God you could imagine it like this, you take all the attributes of God and just add them to a big old pile. Take his love, his mercy, his grace, his kindness, his justice and you just keep on adding to the pile, and the more you add, the heavier the pile gets. That’s God’s glory.
We can use glory as a summary word for describing all that God is. God is glorious!
That’s not all. Quite remarkably, in the Bible, we’re actually given an insight into what God was doing before creation.
God was the Father loving the Son
In John 17:24 Jesus gives us this delectable little peek behind the curtain of the dawn of time when he says “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world”. Mike Reeves so elegantly sums up that verse when he says “Before He ever created, before He ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was the Father loving His Son in His Holy Spirit”. So that’s the essence of who God is, of what God is like: A Father loving His Son in His Holy Spirit”.
Isn’t that gorgeous?
It’s a Queen of Sheba moment to just stop and think about God, isn’t it? He takes our breath away…
He is the perfect being. In himself he is complete, he is flawless and content. Self-sufficient. Self-satisfied. And actually, he doesn’t need to create.
This then begs our next question, why does God create image bearers? Let alone the universe...
Well, I don’t think I can put it any better than 18th Century mega theologian, Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards says “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow.”
What Edwards is saying here is that God didn’t create people - or anything else for that matter - because he was deficient. He didn’t create because he was incomplete or lacking in any way. Rather, he created purely out of his abundance of glory.
As John Piper has put it: “All his works are simply the spillover of his infinite exuberance for his own excellence.”
Do you get it? Creation is the spillover of God’s glory. Like a bag that you keep filling up with more and more and more things until eventually the bag bursts.
And Edwards basically says that just like a fountain overflows out of an abundance of water, so God created out of an abundance of his glory.
Now, we must be careful here, not to think that creation was accidental or coincidental. God did plan creation.
But Edwards does help us understand creation and why God wants image bearers.
Do you see?
As the Father was loving the Son in the power of the Spirit - as the persons of God were together enjoying the attributes of God - that enjoyment was so great that God simply wouldn’t keep him to himself. God is too good not to share.
One of the best things I ever read was by a Harvard University professor called Elaine Scarry. She’s not a Christian, but she says something which I think can be used to explain creation in the most elegant way.
Scarry observes that “beauty brings copies of itself into being.”
And a good way to explain this is a sunset. What happens when you see a sunset? First you enjoy it, of course. But what is your instinct when you have enjoyed a sunset (or anything else beautiful for that matter)? Your instinct is to share the experience. Enjoying beauty prompts a benevolent desire for someone else to enjoy what we have enjoyed. Joy is contagious!
It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and your meal is so good you turn to your wife and say “you gotta taste this!”
And I bet you’ve all done this: you see a sunset, you enjoy the sunset, you take a photo of the sunset, you send a copy of the photo to a friend, who in turn enjoys the picture, and sends it to someone else.
That is beauty bringing copies of itself into being.
That’s what God did at creation. He recognised his own beauty, his own glory. He revelled in it and his instinct, his inclination, his great desire was to share it with others. Before creation, God was the only being. He had no one but himself to enjoy himself with. So he created - the heavens, the earth, and his image bearers.
Why did God create image bearers? Very simply, he created image bearers because he wanted more persons to share an enjoyment of his glory with. That’s the start of the meaning. Made in God’s image means able to enjoy God.
Let’s put it like this: to be made in the image of God means, to have the capacity to enjoy God in his glory, and to reflect that glory to others that they too might enjoy God. That would be my clunky technical definition.
Image bearers are beneficiaries of his glory, who become promoters of his glory.
As we read earlier, this idea is summed up well in Isaiah 43.
In Isaiah 43:6-7 we read “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth - everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”
And in 43:19-21 we read “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honour me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.”
And yes there is a broader context in these verses. But two very precise and clear truths are evident. Mankind, those who are made in God’s image, were created to display God’s glory and formed to proclaim God’s praise.
Created for glory, formed for praise. If you remember nothing else from tonight, remember this: created for glory, formed for praise.
That’s what it means to be made in the image of God. That’s the most basic, Biblical summary of what it means to be made in the image of God: Created for glory, formed for praise. Let’s expand on these a little.
Created for glory
Created for glory means we’re to make the invisible visible by living out God’s attributes in our physical form and to replicate the relationship the trinity shared before creation. This is achieved through obedience to God’s laws. Obedience experiences God’s glory because it brings prosperity, happiness and joy. Obedience glorifies God because it’s an agreement that he is indeed glorious.
Formed for praise
To praise God simply means we have enjoyed him. We praise what we love. It’s the instinct of an experience of something wonderful. We see a sunset, we say “wow”, we hear some music and we say “brilliant” we enjoy a painting and we say “amazing”. As C.S. Lewis says: It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
Praise is the proof that we have enjoyed glory. It’s also the thing which makes other people interested in that which we are praising. Praise is the impetus through which beauty makes copies of itself.
And these two things are what make us different from the animals. Nothing else in creation has the same capacity to enjoy God, to praise him, to glorify him by being able to replicate his attributes.
And God says that’s my purpose for you. Created FOR glory, formed FOR praise. And as we do that, we are image bearers. Our unique privilege & responsibility.
We are scratching the surface of what it means to be made in the image of God.
I’m well aware of how much is being left out on the topic.
But I want us to ask one more question. How do we bear the image of God? How do we glory, how do we praise?
Like we’ve said we can be obedient to God’s word and his laws. God did give us instructions for life.
At the foundational level that means “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Of course there are the Ten Commandments, the beatitudes, the epistles that direct our lives that God’s glory might be on display.
But ultimately, we fall short of the glory of God, don’t we, Rom 3?
Genesis 6 tells us “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
What happened in that moment is that Adam and Eve acted as if he were not a glorious God. And thus they damaged the image of God in them like a mirror that’s been cracked. That’s sin!
But this image of God in mankind is precious because of who it reflects. To damage it is an offence we can scarcely imagine.
And there are consequences. A punishment is due. Death.
Death, in a sense, is being stripped of the privilege of being an image bearer. It’s God saying, “you don’t get to do that any more”.
But the image of God in man is so precious to God, that he’d rather fix the broken image than destroy it completely. As he says in Ezekiel 18:32 “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD”. That’s why in the very same verse God urges us to “Repent and live!” The best thing sinful image bearers can do is to repent, because repentance is the beginning of image restoration!
This is only made possible because of the Son, isn’t it?
The Son of God enters our world. Because we failed to take on God’s likeness, God takes on our likeness. Immanuel, God with us. God incarnate - God literally “in flesh”.
And what the Son does is he lives our life for us in his flesh, which is our flesh. He is the perfect image bearer, on our behalf, being “…the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…”. And he represents us before the Father, perfectly bearing God’s image in his humanity.
Then he goes to the cross. He subjects himself to the penalty of being an image breaker. His human form “...was so marred, beyond human semblance…” But as it was, the glory of God was on full display.
So as a representative of mankind, he lived our life, he died our death. But because he is also God, he rose from the dead.
And because of those three things, those three accomplishments of the Son of God, sinful mankind now has the chance to enjoy the immense privilege of experiencing one of the most special attributes of God. His mercy.
Christian, God put the image of God in you precisely so that he might show you mercy.
And in Jesus he has. The Son makes it possible for us to be shown mercy and have the image of God in us restored. If we so wish, God will forgive our sins on account of his Son’s achievements because we are image bearers.
This mercy is special. It’s truly unique. No other beings in all of creation are eligible for mercy like we are. Mercy is the exclusive privilege of image bearers on account of Jesus. God is willing to show mercy to image bearers even though they sin because it is his image in us that he is passionate about preserving.
That’s why we must champion its recognition and preservation and stand up for it every chance we get at every level of society. Especially warning those who seek to rationalise its destruction.
If we refuse this mercy, if we refuse to repent, if we refuse to have the image of God in us restored, then there awaits a wrath and a fury like no other. For those who trust in the achievements of the Son, we’re given the Holy Spirit as a personal helper to see God’s image in us restored as we walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. Restored to glory, restored to praise!
For all who are glad to trust in the Son’s achievements, there is the hope of being perfect and complete image bearers one day in heaven. Eternally to be loved by the Father along with the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s what being an image bearer means.
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