The Image of God in You
Written by: Andy Steen
In the last post we looked at what it originally meant to be created in God’s image. Sin has severed our special relationship with God and upended our role in his creation. But because God created us with his image as part of our very nature, the image remains despite our sin. After the flood in Genesis 9:6, God says to Noah that whoever sheds someone’s blood will be held accountable, “for in the image of God has God made man.”
The fact that everyone God has made is made in his image has an impact on how we should treat others. What does the image of God look like in you? That is, how does it affect how we should treat our neighbor?
The Image of God gives you worth
We mentioned last time that people continue to deceive themselves by looking ever deeper within for meaning. Our worth then tends to be based on what society values at any given moment, which is always changing. The Bible tells us that our worth comes from outside, from God’s authoritative declaration that we are made in his image. That alone gives each person dignity and great value. Each of our neighbors deserves our recognition of the image of God in them.
This also means that every unbeliever is struggling with their identity. Is it any wonder there is so much confusion in the world today? Imagine what it could mean to begin a spiritual conversation with someone, maybe not by starting with their sin, but by telling them that they are created in God’s image? That they were meant to reflect his glory? What’s more, that God can restore that glory? How liberating that is from the tyranny of defining your own self-worth!
The Image of God gives you value in my life
God was under no compulsion to create us. Genesis 1 need not have happened at all. And he certainly was under no obligation to craft beings in his image. The truth is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been completely happy from all eternity. Theologian Neal Plantinga describes this as divine hospitality: God made room in his world, so to speak, for us. Plantinga puts it this way:
“The act of creation itself fits the pattern of hospitality. In creation, God expands the realm of being, making room for billions of galaxies, each galaxy comprising perhaps 100 billion stars, and most of the stars with their own orbital systems. God generates all this galactic wealth, and inside it, the one planet we know, a planet inhabited not only by salamanders and sandhill cranes and fringed gentians, but also by creatures who are living icons of God himself.”
Plantinga makes the argument that being made in God’s image means we are to echo the hospitality of God himself. As God’s image, we are to make room for fellow image-bearers. This means, as Kevin DeYoung has said, that “people are not only valuable to us if they’re useful to us.” We are free as Christians to offer hospitality and extend ourselves to others simply because they are God’s image, just like us. We also (maybe especially) ought to offer hospitality to those who are different from us: different in class, religion, race, political party and so on.
How about you, fellow image-bearer? Do you recognize God’s image in others? In your crabby next-door neighbor? In your hard-charging manager? In the clerk scanning your food at the grocery check-out? How about in your brothers and sisters at church? Everyone God created is worthy of our kindness and worthy of our time. We can offer this because we share a common God-created dignity. And we can offer it because that’s what Christ did when he came down from heaven to us.