What does it mean to be made in God’s image?
Question 5029
The opening chapter of Genesis moves through the days of creation with a recurring pattern: God speaks, things exist, God declares them good. But when the creation of humanity approaches, something different happens. The narrative slows, and God speaks in the plural: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). The phrase “in our image,” the Hebrew tselem, is the most freighted statement in the account of human origins. Everything that follows about human dignity, human responsibility, and the human capacity for relationship with God flows from it.
What the image does not mean
Before examining what the image of God means, it is worth clearing away what it does not mean. The most obvious candidate, that the image is about physical appearance, is ruled out by what Scripture teaches about God’s nature. God is Spirit (John 4:24). He is not a physical being with a body that human beings physically resemble. When Scripture speaks of God’s hands, eyes, or arms, these are anthropomorphisms that describe God’s activity in terms accessible to human understanding, not literal descriptions of a physical form.
The image is also not a reference to some fragment of divine substance deposited in humanity. Human beings are creatures; they share no identity of nature with the Creator. What the image describes is a relationship of correspondence between the Creator and the creature: a set of capacities and characteristics that reflect something of who God is in the one he has made.
What the image means
The Hebrew tselem, translated “image,” was used in the ancient Near East to describe a physical representation of a ruler placed in a territory he had conquered or governed. The statue bore the image of the king; it announced his presence and authority in that place. The parallel with Genesis 1 is illuminating. Humanity is placed in God’s creation as his image-bearer: the creature who reflects the Creator’s character, announces his presence, and exercises delegated authority on his behalf.
The demuth, translated “likeness,” appears to function as a qualifier rather than a distinct category. It softens and clarifies: not that humanity is identical to God, but that there is a genuine correspondence. The image is real but analogical. The human being is genuinely like God in certain respects while remaining genuinely different from God in every respect that belongs to the Creator-creature distinction.
The dimensions of the image
The relational dimension is the most foundational. Human beings are made for relationship with God in a way that nothing else in the created order is. The language of Genesis 1:26-27 sets humanity apart from everything else that God made. Adam walked with God in the garden. He heard God’s voice, was addressed by it, and was accountable to it. This capacity for genuine two-way relationship with the Creator, hearing, understanding, responding, and being held responsible, is the heart of what it means to bear the image.
The moral dimension belongs closely with the relational one. Because God is perfectly good and perfectly holy, and because humanity is made in his image, human beings are moral beings. They have conscience, the capacity for moral reasoning, the sense of obligation to what is right. Ecclesiastes 7:29 puts it starkly: “God made man upright.” The fall has distorted and corrupted this moral dimension, but it has not eliminated it. Romans 2:14-15 speaks of Gentiles who, by nature, do the things the law requires, having the work of the law written on their hearts. This is the image of God’s moral character still operating, however partially and inconsistently, in fallen humanity.
The functional dimension is rooted in Genesis 1:28, the mandate that follows immediately after the declaration of the image: “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion.'” The image-bearer is given dominion over the created order as the representative of the One who ultimately holds dominion over everything. This is not a licence for exploitation; it is a commission for stewardship. Because the creature bears the image of the Creator, the exercise of dominion is to reflect the character of the one who commissioned it.
The image after the fall
The fall in Genesis 3 is devastating in its consequences, but it does not erase the image of God. Two passages from very different contexts confirm this. Genesis 9:6, given to Noah after the flood, grounds the prohibition on murder in the continuing image of God: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” If the fall had destroyed the image, this grounding would make no sense. The image persists in fallen humanity as the basis of human dignity and human accountability.
James 3:9 is equally clear, and comes from a New Testament perspective fully aware of the devastation of sin: “With it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” The present tense is deliberate. People in the present, unregenerate world still bear the likeness of God. This is why human life has intrinsic value regardless of ability, achievement, or moral condition. It is not earned; it is given in the act of creation and not revoked by sin.
What the fall has done is damage the image: distort it, corrupt its expression, and cloud the relational dimension that was its core. The unregenerate person still bears the image, but in a broken and distorted form. The relationship with God for which the image-bearer was made is fractured. The moral capacity is twisted by the bias toward self. The dominion mandate is exercised, but often in the service of self-interest rather than the Creator’s purpose.
The image restored in Christ
The New Testament connects the restoration of the image directly to Christ and to the ongoing work of transformation through the gospel. Colossians 3:10 speaks of the new self “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” The renewal is ongoing, present tense and progressive, directed toward the image as God originally intended it. Romans 8:29 describes the ultimate goal: “to be conformed to the image of his Son.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 describes the process: “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.”
Christ himself is described as “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and “the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). The incarnate Son is what perfect image-bearing looks like. The goal of redemption is not that human beings become divine, but that they become fully human in the way they were always intended to be: genuinely reflecting the character of God, genuinely in relationship with him, genuinely exercising the capacities he gave in his service. Glorification is the completion of what regeneration begins.
The ethical weight of the image
The universal bearing of the image has profound ethical implications that Scripture draws out explicitly. Every human being without exception, regardless of ethnicity, ability, social status, moral condition, or belief, bears the image of God and is therefore owed the dignity that status confers. To dehumanise any person is to assault the image of God. This grounds the consistent biblical testimony about the equal value of all people, the protection of the vulnerable, and the wickedness of exploitation.
It also grounds Christian engagement with questions about life from conception to natural death. If the image is given in the act of creation and not developed gradually through conscious capacity, then there is no point in human development at which a person lacks the dignity that flows from image-bearing. This is why Psalm 139:13-16 and Jeremiah 1:5 speak of God’s knowing and forming of the individual in the womb with language that treats the unborn as already fully significant before him.
So, now what?
To be made in God’s image is the most fundamental fact about every human being you will ever meet. It is prior to their beliefs, their behaviour, and their moral condition. Every person who bears that image is a person to whom God has attached inestimable worth, and whom Christ died to redeem. That should shape how a Christian looks at every encounter, with every person, in every setting. It should also deepen the wonder of salvation: the God whose image we bear, and which we have so badly distorted, has not abandoned image-bearers to the consequences of their rebellion. He has sent his own Son, the perfect image, to restore what was lost.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27
Bibliography
- Chafer, Lewis Sperry. Systematic Theology. Vol. 2. Dallas: Dallas Seminary Press, 1947.
- Erickson, Millard J. Christian Theology. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013.
- Hoekema, Anthony A. Created in God’s Image. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986.
- Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005.
- Ryrie, Charles C. Basic Theology. Wheaton: Victor Books, 1986.
