This is part 3 of a 3-part series. View the entire series here.
So God created human beings in His own image. In the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.” – Genesis 1:27 NLT
In the Beginning, God Created
I’ve always found it fascinating that the first verb in the Bible is create (bara’ in the original Hebrew, meaning to create, shape, form). The first thing we learn about God is that He’s a creator. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1 NLT, emphasis added).
And God isn’t just the Creator—He’s creative. Looking around at everything He’s made, it’s plain to see just how creative He really is. Earth is one planet in one galaxy in one solar system, and yet its geographical diversity is staggering; the intricacy of its life is nearly unfathomable. There are over a million different species of bugs. A sunset never looks exactly the same from day to day.
But God’s most intricate, diverse, and beautiful creation isn’t the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest or the Sahara. It’s not a rare species of flower that only blooms at night or an ant that can lift fifty times its body weight.
God’s most intricate, diverse, and beautiful creation is us.
The Breath of Life
Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person. – Genesis 2:7 NLT
God’s breath of life is what elevates human beings above everything else He made. Every part of God’s creation is good, God said so Himself; the continual refrain during the creation of the heavens and the earth was, “God saw that it was good.” But nothing else has God’s own breath giving it life. Only human beings do.
We are made in the very image of God. That means that all the characteristics and attributes He has, we have too. God is creative, so we’re creative. God is loving, so we’re loving. God is just, so we have a bent for justice. We’re imperfect reflections of a perfect God, but we’re reflections nonetheless. Each and every person who has ever lived or ever will live—regardless of their “quality of life,” and whether they recognize God as their Savior or not—has intrinsic value because they were filled with the breath of God.
Incarnate God
The incarnation—God becoming a human being in the form of Jesus—was possible because human beings are made in the image of God. We’re not the same as God, but it could be said that we’re compatible with God. Jesus couldn’t have taken the form of a tree or a horse, because those things, while good, were not made in God’s image; Jesus could only have ever been a human.
And what life-changing news that is for us! Jesus knows what it’s like to be us, to feel what we feel. He knows what it’s like to grieve, to laugh with friends, to eat a delicious meal, to be confused, to get angry, to experience temptation. Hebrews 4:15 says, “This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for He faced all of the same testings we do, yet He did not sin” (NLT).
God understands, because He became human. He became like us, while still being completely God. He’s proud when we image Him well—when we love others, when we serve selflessly, when we surrender the small portion we’ve been given back to Him. And yet He has endless stores of grace for when we fail. And boy, do we fail.
If that doesn’t make you sit back in pure awe and wonder, I’m not sure what will.
Great Beauty, Great Harm, Greater Grace
When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, humanity was cut off from personal communion with God. God gave humans the freedom to choose our own way, and choose our own way, we did.
But we did not cease to be made in His image. Despite our sin, our brokenness, and our imperfection, we still image our Creator simply by being alive. People are capable of creating beautiful, transcendent things. We’re capable of being loving, full of joy, patient, compassionate.
And we’re also capable of inflicting great harm—to ourselves, to others, to the earth.
There’s a great tension there, one that’s hard to reconcile.
God made a way for us to be restored back to right relationship with Him through Jesus. Those in Christ have personal communion with God and the promise of eternal life in His Kingdom. That is a gift far greater than we deserve. But in this life, we still have the freedom to choose how we live and work and walk through the world. And because we’re still imperfect, and we’re going to choose wrong a lot.
Our weakness, though, is the exact thing that brings us to the feet of Jesus, that reminds us how badly we need a Savior. Even though we’re God’s image-bearers, we daily need His grace, His forgiveness, His mercy.
And thank Him, praise Him, and honor Him that He daily gives it.
