(6) Man, God’s Image Bearer

If all created reality reflects the invisible Creator, then man, the crown of the creation, must do so in some special way. (Note here that even the evolutionists agree that man is the highest form to which evolution has progressed!) And, so he does. "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)
What it means to be created in God’s image has been the subject of almost endless writing; it is also an important element in a Christian mind. One helpful way to approach it is that taken Mark Fakkema in his lectures on the philosophy of Christian education. He suggested that, on the one hand, man has in common with all the rest of creation that he is revelatory of God. As it is the business of a mirror to reflect its original, so it is the business of man to reflect God in his life. This is not an optional matter; it is built into the created status of man. But, on the other hand, man is made in God’s likeness in a special way. Since God is the great Original, the One of whom and through whom and to whom "are all things" (Romans 11:36), then man must have something original about him, too. Man cannot create out of nothing, as god does, but he can create. He has a real freedom and responsibility that nothing else in creation has. So Mr. Fakkema called man an "original-IMAGE" of God and illustrated the concept with the figure of a mirror balanced in a knife-edged support. It might be said to be held in balance by twin forces of "ought to" and "want to." As an "IMAGE," man ought to reflect the likeness of God. As an "original," man is capable of wanting to reflect that likeness. When both forces are operative, as in Adam before the fall and in Christ living among men, the mirror stays in balance and perfectly reflects the likeness of God above. So out Lord could say to Philip, " . . . he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." (John 14:9)
The seat or locus of the image of God in man is another important facet of this absorbing topic. The principle danger to be avoided here is that of attempting to define man in himself and then regarding his image-bearing aspect as an additive, something extraneous to his basic make-up. It is impossible to define or to understand man without recognizing his image-bearing relationship to God. Berkouwer puts it this way: "The relation of man’s nature to God is not something which is added to an already complete, self-enclosed, isolated nature; it is essential and complete, self-enclosed, isolated nature; it is essential and constitutive for man’s nature, and man cannot be understood apart from this relation." (see footnote 1) In an age like ours, when psychology has endeavored earnestly to emulate the physical sciences in the use of the scientific method and so to define man in strictly empirical and logical terms, such as a statement is almost incomprehensible. But there it is, and it is clearly what Scripture is saying. It is another evidence of the deep, unbridgeable gap between the Christian mind and the secular one. It is also a tacit warning of how important for Christians is the cultivation of a radically Christian way of thinking about all life and experience. John Calvin understood it and began his "Institutes of the Christian Religion" with these two sentences, "True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves. But while these two branches of knowledge are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other is not easy to discover." Which is to say, one cannot know oneself unless one knows God, and knowing God is the very best way to come to know oneself. The strangeness with which such a statement strikes our modern mind-set, even as Christians, is a measure of how far we have been beguiled by the mythology of modernity.

B. Fallen

The twentieth century has seen the worst concentration of wars in all history. It is said to have contained more human torture than any previous century. It has cradled Western man’s descent into a state of boredom and amorality antipodally opposed to the bright promise with which the century seemed to be starting. Is this the outworking of the image of God in man?
No, it is part of the history-long evidence that man is not what he once was made to be. He is fallen. He is disposed at heart to violate the basic ground rules of his being, the three-fold law to love of God, neighbor, and self. In the short space permitted in this article, two things concern us in relation to the fall: first, the temptation, second, the fall itself.
The temptation, it should be noted, was not homemade by man; it came to him from the outside. It was a three pronged attack on man’s trust in God, a clever and effective seduction into living the lie of independence from God. Genesis 3:6 indicates that it came to man in a way that was once described by T. Norton Sterrett as follows: The tree was

"good for food" = something to enjoy,

"a delight to the eyes" = something to possess,

"to be desired to make one wise" = something to be.

Before the temptation, it had never occurred to Adam and Eve that pleasure, possession, or being could even be conceptualized in other than a dependant, creaturely fashion. They enjoyed pleasures as gifts from God. Indeed, as Lewis puts it so beautifully in Letters to Malcolm, they knew "the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility." (see footnote 2) They held possessions in stewardship from God, and they knew their own being in their knowledge of His Being. Now the thought insinuated itself into their hearts that perhaps it was possible to enjoy, possess, and be as autonomous beings and not as creatures at all. Perhaps they could, as independent operators, derive pleasure from creation itself without being beholden thereby to God. Perhaps they could posses it on their own and not as representatives of Jehovah. Perhaps they could force from the creation some essential secret of being which would stand by itself, independent of Him who had up till now been the be-all and end-all of their existence. So the temptation came to them.
And so came the fall. As a mighty forest fir, its trunk severed by the sawblade of the Lilliputian lumberjack at its base, first sways, then moves, and finally crashes to the ground with an earth quaking thunderclap, so man lost his greatness and ventured into the unreal world of the image which denies its original, the shadow that insists it isn’t the shadow of anything. Nothing in man remained untouched. Whereas before he had exulted in being an original-IMAGE of God and found his freedom in subjection to the will and love of his creator, now man imagined himself to be and ULTIMATE-ORIGINAL, independent, and proud to be so.
But now, with the umbilical cord of his creaturely magnificence cut, man could no longer look to God for the preservation of his sense of self-worth. The fatal step shut that door permanently. There was no going back. He was condemned now to be the imagined source of his own greatness and to defend it with whatever guile or aggression he could muster. His world had become, in the words of Cooke, " a one-self universe. Other selves, of course, exist. But only one self is intrinsically important. Me." (see footnote 3) With the change came flooding in a whole foul stream of life, one full of antagonism toward God, neighbor, and self, one we associate with arrogance in its worst forms. And back of the new disposition, always present but seldom faced, there lurked the dark premonition, like a stomach-turning sense of impending disaster, of guilt before God and of judgement to come. It was a desolate change which, like a misstep at the cliff’s edge, left man with no way to return. Having committed himself to independence from God, the one thing he could not and would not do was return to dependence, to risk relationship out of which his misstep had taken him, Now he was bound to live the lie of independence in all the rancid ramifications it was to have in the entire range of his life experience (Revelation 22:15).

C. Redeemed

It is against the black background the utter hopelessness, of this situation that the warm light of the Gospel shines in the Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. In an enactment of undeserved love which neither man nor demons could have imagined, God came, in the person of the Son, to take upon Himself the form of humanness, to become a servant, and to die to set things right. (Philippians 2:4-9) God introduced a second man, another Adam, into the world order, through him, to create a new race of people out of the old one. (I Corinthians 15:45,47) As representative man, Christ did for his people what they cannot do for themselves. He lived the life they ought to live, thereby providing a reservoir of renewed humanity in the image of God. He drained of its sting the death they cannot exhaust, thereby resolving forever the problem of guilt. In the garden, God came to Adam asking him where he was in order to deal graciously with him. On the cross, He forsook Christ in order that we might not be forsaken. (2 Corinthians 5:21) Adam was faithless in the best of circumstances; Christ was faithful in the worst. And it is upon his faithfulness, under the crushing burden of an outer and inner darkness we cannot even begin to understand, that our restoration depends. When all about and within him declared Him forsaken by God, He would not give up his assurance of being the incarnate, sinless Son of God in human flesh, the one who must by his suffering save his people. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) is the cry of one who will not forsake God even though God has, to all appearances, forsaken him. Therein lies the hope of the Gospel, the amazing power of grace to change rebels into servants once again, to alter ULTIMATE-ORIGINALS into restored "original-IMAGES."
It is not needful here to spend much time on the way in which humans are brought into the enjoyment of what Christ lived and died to procure for them. Suffice to say that the Scriptures are emphatic in indicating that Christ Himself is the root of the entire new creation, that there is no blessing whatever for rebellious man except in union with this "last Adam," except as members in Him of the new race God is creating. The figures are many by which Scripture endeavors to communicate the importance of personal union, through repentance, faith, and the Holy Spirit, with Jesus Christ the God-man now risen from the dead. The sheep and the Shepherd, the Vine and the branches, the building and the Cornerstone, the Head and the body, the Bridegroom and the bride – these are some of the notes on which the heart-melting melody of the message of God’s love of men is carried.

Editor: Al Greene

Alta Vista College

Footnotes:

1. G.C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God." Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1962, p. 23.
2. C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. London, Collins, 1969, p. 90.
3. Joseph R Cooke, Free for the Taking. Old Tappan, N.J., Revell, 1975, p. 67.