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

00:00:00.000 | Donnie from New Mexico writes in to ask, "Pastor John, what does it mean to be made in the

00:00:08.920 | image of God?

00:00:10.800 | And are there differences between it before the fall of man, after the fall, and after

00:00:14.920 | being born again?"

00:00:16.620 | We are created in the image of God, and the fall of human beings into sin in Genesis 3

00:00:28.760 | did not destroy it, but defaced it.

00:00:33.440 | That's my premise.

00:00:36.440 | The texts for being in the image of God and staying in the image of God would be Genesis

00:00:42.720 | 1.

00:00:43.720 | God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he

00:00:48.480 | created them, so man and woman equally in the image of God as we were made.

00:00:55.400 | And then Genesis 9, after the fall, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood

00:01:02.800 | be shed for God made man in his own image."

00:01:06.480 | In other words, here you have the image of God functioning ethically, morally, in Genesis

00:01:13.280 | 9 as a warrant for capital punishment, even though all human beings have now become sinners.

00:01:20.920 | So being a sinner does not mean we have ceased to be in the image of God.

00:01:26.600 | Or same thing in James 3, with the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it

00:01:35.000 | we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

00:01:39.680 | So in other words, James is using being in the likeness or the image of God in our present

00:01:46.320 | condition as an argument, while we shouldn't curse each other.

00:01:50.760 | So yes, we're created in God's image, and yes, we stay in God's image.

00:01:55.720 | And the reason I say it's defaced and needs some kind of repair or restoration is because

00:02:04.440 | that's the way our salvation is described by Paul in Colossians 3.

00:02:10.520 | He says, "We have put on the new person, the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge

00:02:19.320 | after the image of its creator."

00:02:22.560 | So Paul's mindset is, we are in the image of God, but oh, how corrupt and fallen and

00:02:30.200 | sinful and defaced this image is.

00:02:33.080 | And now, with our redemption in Christ, we have put on the new man, we've put on Christ,

00:02:40.920 | and this now becomes a process of shaping us, making us again into the image of our

00:02:49.120 | creator.

00:02:50.120 | So the last thing is, well, what is it?

00:02:53.600 | That was what the question was.

00:02:55.160 | What are you talking about?

00:02:56.960 | In what sense are we in the image of God?

00:03:01.120 | And historically, people have said it's things like our morality, our sense of right and

00:03:05.760 | wrong, or our rationality, our ability to reason, or our spirituality, our ability to

00:03:12.520 | relate to God, or our aesthetic sense.

00:03:14.640 | You don't find too many monkeys creating Mona Lisas, or our judicial sense, the whole legal

00:03:23.120 | system that we're creating, a sense of right and wrong and justice and injustice.

00:03:29.760 | And I think, frankly, all of those are true and aspects of what it means to be in God's

00:03:36.080 | image.

00:03:37.080 | But the simplest thing, the plainest thing, in fact, for me, the most practical thing,

00:03:44.120 | the way it has an actual effect on my life is to say, "Images are created to image."

00:03:52.320 | If you create an image, if you make a sculpture of someone, you do it to display something

00:03:59.560 | about that someone.

00:04:00.920 | You put it in the square in the middle of town, and you want people to look at it, notice

00:04:05.840 | it, think about that person, think something about them, that they were noble or strong

00:04:10.080 | or wise or courageous or something.

00:04:13.040 | Now what would it mean if you created seven billion statues of yourself and put them all

00:04:19.320 | over the world?

00:04:21.080 | It would mean you would want people to notice you.

00:04:25.520 | God created us in his image so that we would display or reflect or communicate who he is,

00:04:34.960 | how great he is, and what he's like.

00:04:39.720 | And so here's the picture in my mind.

00:04:43.720 | I was created like a mirror, a mirror that was supposed to be 45 degrees with the clear

00:04:53.280 | reflective side pointing upward so that as God shone on it at the 45 degree angle, it

00:04:59.560 | would bounce off and it would make a 90 degree turn and be reflected out into the world.

00:05:06.280 | And at the fall, Satan persuaded me that my image is more beautiful than God's image,

00:05:14.720 | and so I flipped the mirror over.

00:05:16.840 | Now the black backside is towards God, doesn't reflect anything.

00:05:20.320 | Instead, the mirror casts a shadow in the shape of itself on the ground, and I fell

00:05:26.880 | in love with the shadow.

00:05:29.000 | That's what happened.

00:05:30.720 | And we've been loving ourselves ever since.

00:05:32.800 | And in salvation, two things happen.

00:05:35.280 | The mirror gets turned around and we see the glory of God again, and the defilement that

00:05:41.600 | had grown over the face of it gets wiped off gradually and we begin to reflect God.

00:05:47.380 | So I think being created in the image of God means that we image God, we reflect God, we

00:05:54.520 | live in a way, we think in a way, we feel in a way, we speak in a way that calls attention

00:06:00.280 | to the brightness of the glory of God.

00:06:03.400 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:06:05.880 | And for more on this topic of the image of God, Pastor John has two old articles in the

00:06:09.200 | DG Library.

00:06:10.200 | One is titled "Reflections on the Concept of Self-Worth," which was published in 1976,

00:06:15.720 | and the other is an academic article simply titled "The Image of God," which was published

00:06:20.000 | in 1971.

00:06:21.880 | Both can be found online for free in the resource library at DesiringGod.org.

00:06:25.160 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.

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

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