Image of God and Imago Cancelled

Today's Scripture

Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Genesis 9:6 — "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image."

James 3:9-10 — "With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so."

The Big Idea

Every human being — every color, every country, every enemy — is made in the image of God. That is the load-bearing wall under everything else this plan will say. It means racism is not just unkindness toward people. It is an insult aimed, through them, at their Maker.

Reflection

The only thing said twice

Read the creation account in Genesis 1 and listen for the rhythm. The light is good. The land and seas are good. The trees, the stars, the fish, the birds — good, good, good. Then God makes human beings, and the language changes completely. Genesis 1:26-27 — "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."

Image is said of nothing else in creation. Not the sun. Not the angels. Only us. And as if we might miss it, the verse says it twice in one breath. An image is a likeness that represents — the way a portrait represents a king, or a stamp carries the design of the seal that pressed it. Every human being walks through the world carrying, pressed into them, the design of God.

David felt the wonder of this. Psalm 8:3-5 — "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?... Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor." Crowned — every human, royalty.

Irenaeus, a pastor in the second century who learned the faith from a student of the apostle John, compressed the doctrine into one line:

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

A living human being is a walking display of God's glory. And notice what Genesis does not say. It does not mention nations, tribes, or skin. The image comes first; the nations come later, in Genesis 10, as a flowering of God's blessing — not as a ranking. There is no version of a human being that carries less of the design.

Augustine adds the inward side of the same truth:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Augustine, Confessions

Made for God. Every restless heart you will ever meet — including the ones you find hardest to love — was built to find its home in him.

Insulting the Maker

Now watch what God does with this doctrine after the flood. In Genesis 9:6 he gives Noah the foundation of all human justice: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." The reason murder is so serious is not "society needs order." The reason is the image. Attack the portrait, and you have attacked the King it portrays.

John Calvin, the great Reformer of Geneva, saw exactly how personal this is to God:

"Men are indeed unworthy of God's care, if respect be had only to themselves; but since they bear the image of God engraven on them, he deems himself violated in their person." — John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis

He deems himself violated. Think of it this way. If you spray-paint a fence, you answer to the owner. If you slash a portrait the king painted of himself, you answer to the king. Every act of contempt against a human being lands, in heaven's accounting, as contempt against God. The proverbs say it plainly. Proverbs 14:31 — "Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him." And Proverbs 22:2 levels every social ranking in ten words: "The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the maker of them all."

This is why the image doctrine destroys racism at the root — not just the loud kind, but the quiet, respectable kind. Calvin pressed it into daily practice:

"The Lord enjoins us to do good to all without exception, though the greater part, if estimated by their own merit, are most unworthy of it. But Scripture subjoins a most excellent reason, when it tells us that we are not to look to what men in themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God, which exists in all, and to which we owe all honor and love." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

All honor and love. Owed — not earned by the person, but owed because of whose image they carry. The Fall defaced that image in all of us, the way water damage ruins a painting. It did not erase it. There is no human face, anywhere, of any color, that a Christian is permitted to look at and see anything less than the artwork of God.

From the same mouth

Then James, the brother of Jesus, brings the doctrine to the most ordinary place imaginable: your mouth. James 3:9-10 — "With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so."

James is describing a contradiction so basic it should be impossible — like a fountain pouring fresh water and salt water from the same spring. You cannot logically worship God on Sunday and trash his image-bearers on Monday. The two sentences cancel each other out, and God hears them both. And yet the church has managed it. For centuries, and at scale.

American slaveholders wrote catechisms — religious instruction booklets — teaching enslaved people that God commanded their obedience, while the masters sang hymns to the God who made every nation from one blood. Nineteenth-century "race science" ranked human beings like livestock, and many of its defenders would have affirmed Genesis 1 if you asked. In the lynching photographs of the early twentieth century, the crowds are full of churchgoing faces. From the same mouth, blessing and cursing.

Against all of that stood a Black Baptist preacher who believed Genesis 1 enough to bet his life on it:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." — Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," 1963

People forget that this dream is a doctrine before it is a hope. It only makes sense if Genesis 1 is true — if the deepest fact about a child is not her color but her Maker.

But do not file this under history. Ask where your own mouth does it. C.S. Lewis diagnosed the engine underneath every kind of contempt:

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Racism is pride with a paint chart, but pride has many colors. The political enemy you mock in the group chat. The neighborhood you joke about. The family member you have written off. Every one of them is an image you are looking down on — and as long as you are looking down, Lewis says, you cannot see God.

The image restored

So what do we do with a defaced image — in others, and in ourselves? Jesus welded the two great commandments together so they could never be separated. Matthew 22:37-39 — "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart... And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Like it. Love of God and love of God's images are one assignment, not two.

Then he went further than anyone expected. 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." The King so identifies with the people who carry his image — the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner — that what touches them touches him. Francis Schaeffer drew the conclusion:

"As there are no little people in God's sight, so there are no little places." — Francis Schaeffer, No Little People

No little people. No throwaway ethnicities. No faces that do not matter.

And here is the gospel under all of it. The image of God was not finally restored by our effort to look harder. It was restored because God himself took a human face. Colossians 1:15 — "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." Jesus is the original portrait, the one every human face was always echoing. And what did we do with that face? We spat on it. Struck it. Crowned it with thorns. At the cross, humanity did to God's perfect image exactly what we had been doing to each other's faces all along — and he bore it, willingly, to forgive the defacers and to begin repainting the image in everyone who comes to him.

That changes how this doctrine lands on you, too. Maybe the face you find hardest to honor is the one in the mirror — because of what you have done, or what was done to you, or simply what the world has told you that you are worth. Hear Genesis 1 again, then: the image is yours by creation, and in Christ it is being restored, not graded. God does not love you because you polished up well. He is polishing you because he loves you.

That means the person you find hardest to love is someone Christ thought worth dying for. Look at any face today — any color, any party, any country — and remember: God has one of those faces now, forever.

Going Deeper

Try this for one day. Every time you catch yourself thinking or speaking dismissively about another human being — the driver who cut you off, the politician you despise, the group you have learned to sneer at — silently add four words: image of God. Say it about them specifically. Notice what happens to the sentence you were about to say, and notice how often you need the exercise. Tonight, tell God what you found, and ask him to finish restoring the image in you.