Made in the Image of God

Today's Scripture

Before we can tell the story of Christianity and slavery, we have to start where the Bible starts — with a claim about what a human being is.

Genesis 1:26-27 — "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'... 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."

James 3:9 — "With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God."

The Big Idea

Every human being — every single one — carries the image of God. "Image of God" is the Bible's way of saying each person is a living picture of the Creator, made to know him and represent him. That dignity is given at creation, not earned, and nothing can revoke it. This one truth from page one of the Bible is the truth that would eventually break slavery. It is also the truth that every defender of slavery had to find a way to deny.

Reflection

A crown on every head

In the ancient world, the phrase "image of God" already existed. But it belonged to one person: the king. In Egypt and Babylon, the king was the image of the gods — his face on the statues, his word carrying heaven's authority. Everyone else was, more or less, labor.

Then Genesis 1 was written, and it did something no empire would have dared. It took the king's title and handed it to everyone. Not the pharaoh — man. Not just men — "male and female he created them." Not just one nation — every human being who would ever live. Genesis 1:27 is the most radical demotion of kings and promotion of ordinary people in ancient literature.

What does "image" actually mean? In the ancient world, a king who conquered a distant land would set up statues — images — of himself there, so that everyone who passed by would know: this territory belongs to that king. That is what you are. A living statue of God, planted in his world to represent him. Which means every human being you will ever meet is a royal monument — and how you treat the monument is how you treat the King who set it up.

Psalm 8:5 sings the same astonishment: God has crowned humanity "with glory and honor." A crown — on the head of the shepherd, the servant, the child, the foreigner. In the fourth century, a pastor named Gregory of Nyssa stood up and preached against slave-owning itself, almost alone in the ancient world. His argument came straight from this doctrine:

"You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God." — Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes

To put a price on an image-bearer, Gregory said, is to bid against God for something only God owns. Sixteen centuries later, C.S. Lewis put the same truth in modern dress:

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Notice his last word: exploit. Lewis knew exactly where forgetting this doctrine leads.

One blood, one family

We rank people by instinct. Think of how a middle school cafeteria works: within a week, everyone knows the unspoken chart of who matters. Adults just build more expensive versions of the same chart — by income, accent, zip code, skin.

The Bible flattens the chart at the root. When Paul stood before the philosophers of Athens, he told them that God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). One man. One family tree. There is no separate origin for different races, no upper and lower model of human being. Every theory of slavery built on racial superiority crashes into this verse and does not survive.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, read his Bible and drew the unavoidable conclusion in his 1774 attack on the slave trade:

"Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature." — John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery

Notice his logic. Human dignity does not come from human law, so human law cannot cancel it. A government can declare a person property the way it could declare the sky green. The declaration changes nothing real. That is why Genesis 9:6 guards human life with the image: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." God takes attacks on image-bearers personally.

Frederick Douglass, who was born enslaved in Maryland, knew that slavery's whole strategy was to bury this truth — to convince a man he was not a man. As a boy he taught himself to read in secret, partly from the Bible, after his master forbade it with a revealing warning: teach a slave to read and "there would be no keeping him." The system understood that its survival depended on hiding what a person is. Describing the day he finally stood up to a brutal "slave-breaker" named Covey, Douglass wrote one of the most famous sentences in American literature:

"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." — Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Douglass was not claiming to become human that day. He was claiming back what Genesis said he had been all along. Slavery could chain the image of God. It could never erase it.

You cannot bless God and curse his image

Here is where the doctrine stops being comfortable and starts reading us. James writes about the tongue: James 3:9 — "With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God." His point is sharp. You cannot honor the King while spitting on his portraits. Sunday worship and weekday contempt cannot come from the same healthy heart.

The Old Testament says it even more bluntly. Proverbs 14:31 — "Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him." Oppression is not just cruelty to a person. It is an insult aimed upward.

Think of it this way. If someone tore up a photo of your little sister in front of you, you would not say, "It's fine — it's only paper." The insult passes through the image to the person you love. That is how God reads every act of contempt against a human being. It passes through the image. It lands on him.

Augustine, the great North African theologian, saw that this was true from the very design of creation:

"He did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation — not man over man, but man over the beasts." — Augustine, The City of God

God gave humanity dominion over fish and birds and cattle — never over each other. Man owning man was not in the blueprint. It is a corruption that sin invented later, which is exactly why defending it would always require bending the Book.

And Jesus pushed the doctrine further than anyone. In his parable of the final judgment, the King says, Matthew 25:40 — "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." Jesus so identifies with the lowly that what we do to them, we do to him. Every lash laid on an enslaved back landed, by the King's own accounting, on the King. Francis Schaeffer drew out what this means for all our everyday rankings:

"There are no little people and no big people in the true spiritual sense, but only consecrated and unconsecrated people." — Francis Schaeffer, No Little People

There are no little people. The question is never whether someone matters, only whether we will treat them as mattering.

The Image who came to restore the images

If all this is true, an honest question follows: why didn't it work? The men who financed slave ships had Genesis 1 in their Bibles. Many of them could quote it from memory. Over the coming days we will watch how self-interest taught clever people to read around the plainest verse in the Book — and how other believers, many of them enslaved, refused to let that verse go.

But the deepest answer to a defaced image is not a lecture. It is a restoration. The New Testament says of Jesus, Colossians 1:15 — "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." The true Image entered our world and let himself be treated the way we treat images of God: priced at thirty pieces of silver, sold, stripped, and destroyed. And God raised him from the dead — heaven's verdict that dignity, not degradation, gets the last word.

That is why the gospel, wherever it is actually believed, eventually turns people against slavery. Heaven's own worship song names the purchase that reverses every auction block: Revelation 5:9 — "by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation." Read that against the backdrop of a slave auction and the contrast is almost unbearable. At an auction, the strong price the weak and buy them for profit. At the cross, the strongest One who ever lived let himself be priced — so the bought could go free. Jesus did not purchase people to own them. He purchased them to bring them home as family, from every tribe and language, with no balcony seating in the kingdom.

Generations of enslaved believers sang about that verse in praise houses and brush arbors, and they understood it better than their masters did. Tim Keller explains why grasping this grace always changes how we treat the vulnerable:

"If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him." — Tim Keller, Generous Justice

The image of God is the foundation. The Image of God, crucified and risen, is the power. The rest of this plan is the story of what happened when Christians forgot the first — and what happened when, at terrible cost and long last, they remembered.

Going Deeper

Today, practice seeing crowns. Pick three people you would normally look past — the kid eating alone, the cashier, the driver who cut you off — and silently say over each one: image of God, crowned with glory and honor. Tonight, write down which of the three was hardest to say it about, and tell God why. That hard one is where Genesis 1 wants to start working on you.