Andrew Davis
Dr. Knoblet
Doctrine 3
2/2/15
Man Created in the Image of God The purpose of this paper is to define the phrase “man is made in the image of God”. What does that mean? Does it mean I look like God physically? Does it mean that we have the same emotions and thoughts? Does it mean I have the same powers that He does but I am hindered by humanity? In the following pages of this paper I hope to explain my personal view (along with outside sources) on what it means to be made in the image of God. On the very last day of creation God said “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). God made man from the dust of the ground and put His own breath into man and gave him life. God put His Own personal touch on man (Houdmann). Man is the most unique part of God’s creation and we will see later in the Bible that the greatest work of mercy and grace that God ever had was on mankind. Some people think that being made in the image of God deals with the physical likeness, as if God has a body of flesh and blood. This is not the case. Jesus tells us that God, in reference to the Father, is spirit (John 4:24) and the spirit does not have flesh and bones (Luke 24:39) (Slick).We see right here in plain text and plain speech that God does not have flesh and bones. Although Jesus came to earth in the form of a man the Creator God has no flesh and bones and therefore we cannot physically look like God. Our makeup and the makeup of God are totally different. So if we don’t look the same physically, what does it mean to say that we are made in the image of God? At first glance you could say that man is made in the image of God in that we have the same attributes as Him, but not all. God has the ability to love, hate, have compassion, and want fellowship and man is also made the same way. Man can love, hate, have compassion, and has a want for fellowship. There are many attributes that God has that man can also have but there are also some attributes that God has that man cannot have – omnipotence, omniscience, etc. When God created the vegetation and the animals, He made them all 'after its/their kind' (the phrase occurs ten times in Genesis 1:11-25). When He created Adam, He made him after the God-kind — in the image and likeness of God (Grigg). Out of all of the creatures God has made, man was made differently. Only man was made “in the image of God”. To discover what it means to be made in the image of God, we must examine the very verse that tells us that we are made in the image of Him. In Genesis 1:26 the Bible says “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. So let us first see what the “Let us” means. In Genesis we can agree that the Bible is telling us all about the creation of God. When I first read Genesis 1:26 my mind automatically got stuck on the word “us”. Now it has been debated by many theologians on what the term “us” is referring to. Some will say that “us” is a heavenly council that God is referring to and some will say that God is referring to the Trinity. I agree with this view. I think the consultation was within the Godhead. Since the Lord needs no other counselor any such consultation must have taken place within the Godhead—between God the Father and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Hebrews 1:2 tells us that when God made the worlds, He did so by His Son (Grigg). The next and final two words in this short part of Genesis 1:26 that I want to point out is the word image and the word likeness. Both the Hebrew word image (tselem) and the Hebrew word for likeness (demut) refer to something that is similar but not identical to the thing it represents or is an “image” of (Grudem). When you take a picture of something you say it is an image of whatever you took a picture of. When you do this it makes an exact replica of whatever the original image is. The word “image” sometimes becomes synonymous with the word “copy” in our culture today. We are not an exact copy of God but