Let me briefly recap this study thus far about the image of God.
PART 1 In Colossians 3:10, Paul wrote: “You have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” This statement is a description of a person who is believing in Jesus, a person who is following Jesus, indeed a person who has been “raised with Christ.”
What’s happening is that person is getting remade in the image of the Creator.
PART 2 To understand what this process means, we go back to the beginning. Genesis 1:1-2 reports, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Then, Genesis 1:27-28: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
God made humans his offspring, living images to join him in finishing his creation. They – we – have the mission to carry out God’s will, plans, and purposes for the earth. Their – our – job is to expand the garden – the original temple, the place where heaven and earth meet – to encompass the entire earth. This is our identity and destiny. This is who we are and what we are about.
PART 3 Genesis 3 reveals that the first humans fell for the serpent’s scam, became convinced it would be better to act on their own instead of under God’s authority. They disobeyed. When they did, something drastically changed. Suddenly they weren’t what they were before, weren’t what they were supposed to be. They weren’t like God anymore.
God clearly explained to them, “You will die.” Later, the apostle Paul told the humans of his day, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Their rebellion and brokenness were passed on to succeeding generations. Though humanity’s origin was being made in God’s image, I think that Ephesians 2:1 means the likeness had died. All humans have “inherited” sinfulness and are therefore “dead.” Rebellion kills all of us. We can’t live in our identity as the image of God. We can’t be who we are intended to be. We can’t live out our destiny. We can’t do what we could do. The image of God is still there in us, in our spirits, but it is dead and needs to be raised to new life.
PART 4 The broken cosmos cannot be restored unless humanity is renewed in the image of its Creator. The Old Testament is important to our understanding of how God picked up the pieces of his broken creation and put them back together. Three times in the New Testament we read that the things of the Old Covenant were a “shadow” of the real thing (Colossians 2:17, Hebrews 8:5 and 10:1). The real thing is in Christ. The work that God did through Christ is the actual way that humanity and creation are restored. The things in the Old Testament (like law, temple, sacrifice, king, nation along with specific events) are shadows of that reality; they give us a basic indication of what God was going to make happen. With the people and events in the Old Testament he was moving toward something else that would actually make the difference that was needed to renew the image of God and restore the broken creation.
So, by the rebellion of humans, creation was broken. Paul called it the “Dominion of darkness” (Colossians 1:13).
So very dark:
Romans 1:20-32:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
God allowed humanity (gave them over) to go the way they chose. But he didn’t give them (us) up. God was not finished. He didn’t leave things in the mess the humans made. He began working out the renewal of his design and purpose for creation. He told the serpent, Satan: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Gen 3:15) God began a counteroffensive. The Old Testament period shows God revealing his battle plan and preparing to put it into action.
God promised to renew humans to their original identity and destiny throughout the Old Testament, but the people – the patriarchs and priests and prophets, the shepherds and kings and merchants, the mothers and fathers and children – being sinful, kept getting it wrong. God loved, called, blessed but they didn’t fulfill their reason for existence. They couldn’t help it; they were not able to be what God created them for. Then God took the decisive action with his own Son. Here in Part 5, I will share several sections of Scripture that begins to explain what God accomplished through the Son.
Luke 3:23-38
Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph… (38) the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
Luke traced Jesus’ lineage all the way back to the beginning, showing that he was the true son of God that Adam was intended to be.
John, speaking of Jesus, testified, “we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14, NASB). Compare this statement with Genesis 5:3 – “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, according to his image…” Just as Seth the son was the image of Adam the father, Jesus the Son in the flesh is the image of God the Father.
Hebrews 2:14, 17 teaches us about Jesus being human:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity… For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way…
Humans were created to be like God. Now God has become like us – fully human. The Son of God became a man by being born a baby.
Philippians 2:6-8 tells us about Christ Jesus,
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Jesus was God with us. He is the Eternal Son, fully divine, our God. The Son and the Father exist on the same level. Everything that is true about God is true about the Son. This is a critical and key truth we hold. There is no Christian faith apart from the reality of the Son of God becoming a human and living in our world.
With that, we must grip another truth – Jesus is fully and completely human. It wasn’t that he just seemed human for awhile (docetism).
And he wasn’t a super-hero human with supernatural powers. He did not keep his equality with the Father for himself; he did not self-centeredly seize his place in the Godhead. “He made himself nothing” – literally translated, “he emptied himself.” He did not stop being God, but being God was set aside. He lived from manger to cross as fully, completely human with all that entails. Just like you and me and the other 7 billion humans on the planet.
Well, wait. No, not just like you and me. He was a unique human. Instead of reaching out for what’s rightfully his, instead of being all full of himself, instead of powering his way to success, Jesus’ “very nature” was “a servant.” His humanity consisted of humble, obedient servanthood.
Now look at Hebrews 2:8-11:
In putting everything under them [humans], God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor…
Humans are supposed to be existing as God’s image, filling the earth and subduing it, ruling over all of God’s creation. Humans are supposed to be running the world the way God would. We don’t see that happening. Instead, now we see Jesus doing just that. He’s the one who finally lived out God’s design. He is the one true man who fulfills humanity’s identity and destiny.
Colossians 1:15:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
So here’s Jesus, the new Adam, the true image of God and life-giving ruler. Here is the true priest and king of creation.
We rightfully say to look at Jesus to see the real God. When we know Jesus, we know what God is really like. It is just as true to say look at Jesus to see a real human. He is the image of God that we are intended to be. When we know Jesus, we know what we are to be like.
Reformer Martin Luther said that Jesus “restores the despised weakness of the flesh which we have perversely abandoned.” I think he meant that Jesus took on human flesh without the brokenness and corruption that all other humans live with (actually are dead with) and lived up to God’s original design of humans, and thus restored the reality of a human in God’s image which we humans had “perversely abandoned.”
The Son of God came as the first real human since Adam and Eve chose to reject their identity and destiny as the images of God on the earth.