The Image of God: What It Means to Be Human

Today's Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27 — "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."

Psalm 8:4-5 — "what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor."

The Big Idea

The Bible's most important claim about you comes before you have done anything at all: you are made in the image of God. That means every human being — every age, every ability, every background — carries a built-in dignity that cannot be earned and cannot be lost. Today is about what that image is for, what it costs us to ignore it, and who finally shows us the image in full.

Reflection

A crown on every head

In the ancient world, the phrase "image of god" was reserved for one person: the king. A pharaoh or emperor was called the image of a god, the god's living statue and official representative on earth. Ordinary people were the labor force. Then Genesis says the unthinkable: "So God created man in his own image... male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). Not the king. Not the priest. Everyone. Genesis takes the highest title in the ancient world and hands it to every farmhand, every grandmother, every baby.

Israel's poets felt the shock of this. Look up at the night sky, says Psalm 8:3-5, at the moon and stars God set in place, and then ask: "what is man that you are mindful of him?" Next to a galaxy you are very small. Yet "you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor." Crowned. There is royalty on every head you will see today — under the hoodie, behind the wrinkles, in the stroller.

C.S. Lewis took this thought to its staggering conclusion:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Read that again slowly. The most boring person in your contact list is an everlasting being made to reflect God. You have never once made eye contact with someone who does not matter.

What an image is for

But what does "image" actually mean? A clue: an image is not a photograph filed away in a drawer. It is more like a mirror, set up at an angle — designed to catch light from one direction and send it out in another. From the text itself, three purposes emerge.

First, image-bearers reflect. We are built to show what God is like — his kindness, his honesty, his delight in making things. That last one matters more than we think. The very first thing the Bible reveals about God is that he creates; so when humans paint, build, bake, code, and compose, the family resemblance shows. Francis Schaeffer, who spent years helping artists see their work as holy, put it this way:

"The Christian is the really free man — he is free to have imagination. This too is our heritage. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars." — Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

Second, image-bearers rule. "Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens" (Genesis 1:26). Dominion is a king's word, but remember whose kingdom it is. This is delegated authority — a gardener's authority, not a strip-miner's. We tend the world on behalf of its true Owner, which is why carelessness with creation is not just bad policy; it is bad worship.

Third, image-bearers relate. "Male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27) — the image is borne together, not in isolation. And it is borne facing God. The second-century pastor Irenaeus compressed the whole human job description into one line:

"The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

A human being fully alive, looking at God — that is what the image was for. Which exposes our strange modern habit: we will study everything except what we are. Augustine noticed this sixteen centuries before the smartphone:

"Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at huge waves of the sea... and they pass by themselves without wondering." — Augustine, Confessions

We scroll past wonders all day — including the wonder typing the search bar. John Calvin said the only fix is to look up first: "Man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God." You cannot know what a mirror is for until you know what it was made to reflect.

Why every life is off-limits

If humans are images of God, then how you treat a human is how you treat God's image — there is no way around it. The Bible draws this line early and hard. After the flood, God tells Noah why murder is so serious: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image" (Genesis 9:6). Attack the image, and you have raised your hand against the King it represents.

And it is not only violence. James applies the same logic to the cafeteria, the group chat, the comment section. James 3:9 — with the same tongue "we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God." Sing on Sunday, sneer on Monday — James says something has short-circuited. You cannot love the King and trash his portraits.

Here is the test: the image of God means dignity is given, never earned. The world ranks people constantly — by grades, looks, money, followers, usefulness. Genesis refuses the rankings. The newborn who can do nothing, the patient who will never recover, the enemy who voted the other way, the stranger at the border — image, image, image, image. Any view of human worth that starts with "what can this person do?" has already left Genesis 1 behind.

The true Image, and the restoration project

But be honest: we do not reflect God very well, do we? The mirror is real, but it is scratched and fogged. We were made to beam out God's character, and instead we flicker — kind at 9 a.m., cutting by noon. Genesis 3 will explain how the image got defaced. The gospel announces something better: God did not throw out the damaged portraits. He came to restore them.

How? He sent the original. Colossians 1:15 says of Jesus: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." Jesus is not one more cracked mirror. He is the perfect likeness — the human being Genesis 1 was always pointing toward. Want to know what an undamaged image of God looks like? It looks like Jesus washing feet, touching lepers, telling the truth, dying for his enemies.

And he restores us not by demanding we polish ourselves but by letting us look at him. 2 Corinthians 3:18 — "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." You become what you behold. Stare at screens that rank and shame, and you will become anxious and ranked. Behold Christ, and slowly — degree by degree — the family resemblance returns.

This is also the secret of real humility. The image of God does not make you the center of the universe; it frees you from needing to be. Tim Keller:

"The essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less." — Tim Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

When your worth is settled — crowned by God, redeemed by Christ — you can finally stop checking your reflection and start reflecting. And the project ends in glory: "we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). The God who said "Let us make man in our image" will finish the sentence.

Going Deeper

Today, practice seeing crowns. Pick three people you would normally look past — the bus driver, the kid eating alone, the relative who exhausts you — and silently say: image of God. Then go one step further with just one of them: a greeting, a question, two minutes of real attention. You are not being polite. You are honoring royalty in disguise.