What Does It Mean to Be Made in God’s Image?

Question 5029.

God’s image is the single most important truth about you that you did not choose, earn, or vote on. “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). Everything the Bible says about human worth, human sin, and human salvation stands on that sentence. But what does it actually mean? Sunday school taught many of us the phrase without the content, so let me try to fill it in.

The Words Themselves

Two Hebrew terms carry the doctrine. Tselem, image, is the word for a carved statue, the kind ancient kings set up in distant provinces to declare “this territory is mine”. Demut, likeness, means resemblance. The terms overlap and reinforce rather than describing two different things; Scripture uses them interchangeably in Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-3 and 9:6. I have examined that question in detail in image and likeness in Genesis 1:26.

Put plainly: human beings are the living statues of the living God, planted in His world to represent Him and to resemble Him. Where the pagan nations carved idols to picture their gods, the true God forbade images made by hands for a simple reason. He had already installed His image, and it breathes.

Resemblance: Made Like the Maker

What in us resembles God? Not the body as such, for God is spirit (John 4:24), yet the resemblances are real and run deep. We reason, and can think His thoughts after Him. We speak, creatures of language made by the God who creates by His word. We choose, exercising real moral agency. We love and covenant and keep faith; we create, filling blank pages and empty fields with order and beauty; we discern good and evil with a moral sense no animal shares. Personhood itself, the capacity to say “I” to God’s “you”, is the deepest resemblance of all.

This is why the second commandment’s logic runs the way it does, and why James can say we “curse people who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9) as though cursing them reached Him. The resemblance is family likeness: Luke traces the Lord’s genealogy to “Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38), and Genesis 5:3 deliberately echoes the image language when Adam fathers Seth “in his own likeness, after his image”. We are made like God the way a child is like a father, creaturely, finite, yet unmistakably akin.

Representation: Ruling in God’s Image

Look at what follows the image statement in Genesis 1:26: “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens… and over all the earth”. God’s image is not only what we are but what we are for. As a king’s statue declared his rule, so mankind is set in creation as God’s visible representative, commissioned to rule it under Him and for Him. Psalm 8 marvels at exactly this: “You have given him dominion over the works of your hands” (Psalm 8:6).

Dominion means stewardship, not exploitation; the same mandate that says “subdue” also says “work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Gardening, engineering, medicine, art, government, parenting: all are God’s image at work, ordering God’s world as His deputies. I have applied this to creation care in the imago Dei and the environment. When you do honest work well, you are not doing something secular. You are doing something regal.

Relationship: Made for the God We Mirror

A statue represents a king it never meets, but this image walks with its King in the cool of the day. God’s image is made for fellowship with God; fellowship is its native air. Genesis 1:27 adds, “male and female he created them”, for the God whose own being is a fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit made image-bearers who exist in relationship, never in isolation. Marriage, family, friendship, and the church all flow from this relational design.

Here too is the answer to the restlessness of our species. A mirror is only itself when facing what it reflects. Cut off from God, the image-bearer still functions, but hollowly, haunted by a purpose he cannot name. As I said in what is the purpose of life?, we were made to know and glorify the One we resemble, and nothing smaller will settle us.

Marred but Not Erased

Then came the fall, and the portrait was vandalised. Every capacity that mirrors God now also misfires: reason rationalises, speech deceives, dominion exploits, love curdles into selfishness. Sin reaches every dimension of human nature, as I have set out in are we born sinners?. But vandalised is not destroyed. After the flood, God still grounds the sanctity of life in the image: “for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). Fallen man still bears God’s image; that is precisely why murder, and even cursing, remain outrages against God.

Hold both truths or lose the gospel. If the image were erased, man would be worthless and beyond redeeming. If it were undamaged, man would need no redeeming. Scripture says the masterpiece is defaced but priceless, which is exactly the kind of thing a Restorer would die to recover.

The True Image and Our Restoration

Now the New Testament’s masterstroke. There is One of whom it is said without qualification: “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), “the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). Jesus is what the image looks like undamaged, humanity as it was always meant to be, God’s likeness walking in sandals through Galilee. Whoever has seen Him has seen the Father (John 14:9).

And salvation, from one angle, is portrait restoration. The believer “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10); we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18); and the finished work is guaranteed, for God has purposed that we be “conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). One day “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). The Restorer does not simply touch up the old paintwork; He conforms us to the original.

Living as Bearers of God’s Image

Doctrine this large must land somewhere on a Monday morning, so let me spell out where. God’s image governs speech: James forbids the tongue to bless the Father and curse people made in His likeness, because contempt for the copy insults the Original. God’s image governs justice: Proverbs says “whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker” (Proverbs 14:31), tying every act of exploitation directly to heaven’s honour. God’s image governs the beginning and end of life: the embryo and the dementia patient bear it equally, which is why the believer defends both against a culture that grades people by usefulness.

God’s image also dignifies your ordinary work. The deputy ruling his small province for the King does so at a desk, a sink, a workbench, a hospital ward. And it settles the identity question our age finds so tormenting. You are not what you feel, achieve, or post; you are a bearer of God’s image, defined from above, and no market crash, diagnosis, or unkind opinion can amend the definition.

I sometimes think the whole Christian ethic could be rebuilt from this one truth if everything else were lost. Treat every person you meet today as a damaged masterpiece painted by God’s own hand, yourself included, and you will not go far wrong before bedtime.

Genesis quietly confirms that the endowment passes down every branch of the family tree. “When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God… When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Genesis 5:1-3). The image travels through ordinary begetting to every generation, marred by the fall yet never omitted from a single birth certificate. There has never been a human born without it, and there never will be. Every maternity ward on earth is, whether the staff know it or not, a gallery receiving new portraits of the King.

So, now what?

Carry this doctrine into your mirrors and your relationships. When you look at yourself, see neither a god to worship nor an animal to indulge, but a damaged royal portrait that Jesus is restoring. When you look at others, any others, see bearers of God’s image and treat them as such; there are no ordinary people in your street. Do your daily work as an image-bearer’s work, ruling a small patch of creation for the King. And if you have never yet faced the God you were made to mirror, that is the one appointment your whole design is waiting for. What is a mirror for, if it never faces the light?

“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, ESV)