Being God's Image: Why Creation Still Matters

For Colton,

the best neighbor,

who has taught me so much

about what it means to be human.

History matters because human beings matter; human beings matter because creation matters; creation matters because the creator matters. . . . This world is where the kingdom must come, on earth as it is in heaven. What view of creation, what view of justice, would be serviced by the offer merely of a new spirituality and a one-way ticket out of trouble, an escape from the real world?

N. T. WRIGHT

CONTENTS

Foreword by J. Richard Middleton

Introduction

PART 1: HUMANS IN GOD’S WORLD

 1 Pattern of Creation

 2 Crown of Creation

 3 Getting to Work

 4 The Human Project

Intermission

Being the Image and Bearing the Name

PART 2: THE WAY OF WISDOM

 5 The Human Quest

 6 Human Suffering

PART 3: HUMAN IN GOD’S NEW WORLD

 7 Jesus, the Human

 8 A New Humanity

 9 The Beloved Community

10 From Creation to New Creation

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Resources from the Bibleproject

Discussion Questions

Notes

Sidebar Notes

Bibliography

Scripture Index

Praise for Being God’s Image

About the Author

Also by Carmen Joy Imes

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

FOREWORD

J. Richard Middleton

For a long time now I have been drawn to the idea of humans as the image of God (Latin, imago Dei). As a teenager growing up in the church, I was quite shy and unsure of myself. But I found the idea of being created in God’s image significant for my adolescent development. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure at first what it meant, the very idea of being made in God’s image provided me with a sense of identity; it implied that I was of value to God and had a role to play in the world.

The first interpretation of the image of God that I encountered was what I called the YMCA model. The popular theology I was exposed to as a teenager claimed that we are like God because we have three capacities that God also does—intellect, emotion, and will. ¹ Around that time, I heard that the YMCA aimed to produce well-rounded people, involving the development of our spiritual, emotional, intellectual, social, and physical capabilities. And while it wasn’t quite the same, I came to think of this idea of the image as the YMCA model.

Not long after, I read the works of Francis Schaeffer and encountered his more nuanced proposal that the image was our personhood; humans are finite persons who reflect the infinite, personal God. ² Schaeffer proposed this in order to counter the dehumanization of persons he observed as a feature of the modern world. That was a valuable insight.

Unfortunately, both Schaeffer’s proposal and the YMCA model shared the same two problems. First, by concentrating on the inner person (a spiritual reality), the imago Dei seemed to have no intrinsic relationship to our embodied life in the external world. Second, and more importantly, neither was rooted in Scripture.

I was eighteen when I began serious study of the Bible as an undergraduate theology student. It was during these years of study that I explored the early chapters of Genesis and became aware that the image of God is intrinsically connected with our embodied earthly life. In Genesis 1:26-28 humans are created in God’s image and empowered to rule animals and subdue the earth. Given the ancient world in which Genesis 1 was written, this meant animal domestication and agriculture. By planting crops, bringing land into productivity, and harnessing animals for food and labor, we can generate a sustainable food supply, which is necessary for complex human societies to develop.

Interpreted in context, the imago Dei grounds the human vocation to cultivate the earth, developing its potentials. ³ No wonder Genesis 4 describes the building of the first city (or settlement), the origin of livestock herding, the beginning of metallurgy, and the development of music. These things came into being because humans were manifesting the imago Dei by interacting with their earthly environment to bring into being new cultural developments. By engaging in ordinary human activities—in a manner that glorifies God—we represent the Creator of the universe, the king of creation, manifesting his rule in earthly life. ⁴

Suddenly, the image of God was no longer confined to some ethereal spiritual realm, but spoke to my own concrete life in the real world. This embodied sense of the image was part and parcel of my growing awareness that the Bible affirmed this world as good (though fallen) and that God intended to reclaim the world through the death and resurrection of Christ, to bring about a new creation—not just for believers (2 Corinthians 5:17), but for the entirety of heaven and earth (Revelation 21:1). ⁵

And what was my role to be in this world? Self-understanding was the first implication of the imago Dei. I came to see that God wanted human beings (and Christians, as renewed human beings; that included me!) to be engaged in the world as his agents of blessing and healing.

This vocational understanding of the imago Dei began to rekindle my interest in art and poetry; it generated a desire to understand world affairs and history; it drew me to the beach and to hiking in the mountains; it helped me to participate in community and to value friendships; and it enabled me to sense (and respond to) a growing calling to teach the Bible, a deep desire to share with others what I had been learning about this amazing vision of what it means to be human.

Carmen Imes has also been grasped by this vision—and by a similar vocation. Her book Being God’s Image is a wide-ranging exploration of many and various dimensions of what it means to be human. She addresses how the image of God grounds our identity, no matter who we are, no matter what our mental or physical capacity. She explores implications of the image for our earthly calling framed by our hope in God’s ultimate purposes for creation. She helpfully addresses human sexuality and embodiment, disability, racism, suffering and mortality, prayer and lament, and intimacy with God.

But this book goes well beyond just the topic of the image of God or even the broader topic of what it means to be human. Carmen’s wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be human is the mother lode. But there are lots of other veins to mine.

She clarifies the relationship between Israel’s calling to bear God’s name (the topic of two of her earlier books) and the broader human vocation to represent God in the world. ⁶ She explores Jesus’s humanity—his weakness, his mission, and his victory. Her sketch of the meaning of Jesus’s death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming are crucial to frame her exploration of what it means to be human. There are valuable gems scattered throughout the book—on the relationship of Jews to Gentiles in Ephesians, on the true meaning of Romans 8:28, on the tower of Babel in Genesis 11, and on the significance of the Hebrew word hevel in Ecclesiastes (it doesn’t really mean vanity or futility or that life has no meaning). But I’ll let you discover those (and other) gems for yourself.

You could think of Being God’s Image as a primer in biblical theology, but one directed especially to lay Christians. You don’t need to be a theologian or a pastor to understand Carmen’s lucid writing. Yet Carmen has sneakily woven serious biblical scholarship into what seems to be a breezy, conversational book addressed to ordinary readers.

I invite you to delve into this book and allow your vision to be expanded. Carmen will help you appreciate the tremendous love of God for all people and for all creation, a love that led the Creator to become incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to bring healing and redemption to a broken world and a broken humanity. May this amazing biblical vision inspire and empower you to live toward your calling to be fully human in God’s marvelous world.

INTRODUCTION

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy and her siblings explore the old professor’s sprawling house, where they live during the war. In one room they discover an old wardrobe that catches Lucy’s attention. Although the others quickly move on, Lucy opens the wardrobe and climbs inside to feel the fur coats. Instead of softness, she encounters the rough bark of tree trunks, the sharp branches of trees, and the crunch of fallen snow. She finds herself in the mysterious world of Narnia. There she encounters a curious faun, part human and part goat, and they have tea together before she returns home.

Naturally, her siblings don’t believe her tales, which they find too outlandish. She leads them back to the wardrobe, but when they open the door, they find only coats, mothballs, and wood paneling—no magical world at all. But a few days later, the children, who are supposed to stay clear of visitors, are exploring the house when a tour group comes through. Lucy quickly climbs into the old wardrobe to hide, and Edmund follows her, meaning to tease her about Narnia. Edmund feels his way around the fur coats, looking for Lucy, but she seems to have disappeared. He has a sudden cold sensation. He calls for Lucy and notices a dim light and moves toward it, thinking it is the door. But it is not the light coming through the crack in the door. It is further up and further in, through a dark wood cloaked in winter. Edmund has entered Narnia.

What does this have to do with anything?

C. S. Lewis imagined an ordinary wardrobe as an unpredictable portal into a magical world. However impossible this might seem, it bears striking similarities to the experience of reading Scripture. Sometimes we open the Bible and turn its pages, finding nothing but fur coats and mothballs. Biblical times and places feel remote and even irrelevant. But other times, when we least expect it, we find ourselves transported by the pages of Scripture to another world. I know of no way to guarantee this will happen. And for that matter, disbelief doesn’t always prevent it. Edmund is the most incredulous of all; he discovers Narnia in spite of himself.

Eventually, Lucy and her siblings do make it back to Narnia. Peter and Susan discover that her stories are true. But here’s what fascinates me most about this analogy: Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan do not just visit Narnia as outsiders. They find themselves an integral part of the story. In fact, they are the fulfillment of old prophecies about two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve (that is, humans) who will reign as kings and queens of Narnia when Aslan returns to conquer the White Witch once and for all.

I can’t think of a more appropriate illustration for the journey of discovery you are about to make. The Bible is a portal to another world, a world so vibrant that when we return to our own world we see it with new eyes. The fact that you do not always find this to be the case does not make it any less true (mothballs, remember?). On its pages, you will find a story that is not simply about other people who lived long ago. As you read it, you’ll discover things that are deeply true about you—so true that without them you cannot fully be yourself.

A ROADMAP

This book is a companion volume to Bearing God’s Name (IVP Academic, 2019). The order in which you read the two books doesn’t matter. (Like Lewis, I’ve written the beginning after the end.) Together they take you on a journey through Scripture, helping you understand your identity and vocation. Since the publication of Bearing God’s Name, the question I’ve been asked more than any other is how bearing God’s name relates to being the image of God. This book is my extended answer to that important question. Here it is in a nutshell: being God’s image and bearing God’s name are related, but they are not the same thing. Every human being is created as God’s image. Imago Dei is our human identity. (Imago Dei [pronounced ihm-ah-go day-ee] is Latin for image of God and, for whatever reason, when scholars want to sound really serious about something, we say it in Latin. Sorry. I didn’t make the rules.) Our identity as God’s image implies a representational role—the Creator God appointed humans to exercise his rule over creation on his behalf. Because of human rebellion, most of us are not doing this job well; nonetheless, it remains our job. God’s answer to the brokenness resulting from human rebellion was to select a single family, the family of Abraham, to mediate his blessing to all nations. Abraham’s descendants, the people of Israel, become the people who bear God’s name, representing him in the world in order to restore the rest of humanity to our Creator.

Jesus ties these two threads together. As a descendant of Abraham, he is the ultimate human who perfectly carries out his vocation as God’s image. Jesus models for us how to appropriately exercise God’s rule over creation. As an Israelite faithful to the covenant God made with Abraham’s descendants at Mount Sinai, he also bears God’s name with honor, bringing blessing to the nations. By our faith in Jesus the Messiah, we are included in the covenant people. We bear God’s name. In Jesus we find the fullest expression of our true identity and vocation, more broadly as humans and more specifically as covenant members.

IN THE IMAGE OR AS THE IMAGE?

Without getting too lost in the weeds, I think it is worth pausing to acknowledge that some readers will find my assertions in this book surprising. It is common practice to talk about humans being made in the image of God. And for some people, that preposition is very important because it distinguishes between Jesus, who is the image of God, and everyone else, who is made according to the model he represents. The answer to this question rides in part on how one interprets a single Hebrew letter: b in Genesis 1:26. The preposition b, like most prepositions, is quite flexible. It can be translated as in, on, within, among, into, through, at, with, by, according to, or as.

The problem is that our English preposition in is also flexible, but not in the same ways as the Hebrew preposition b. That is, they don’t completely map onto each other. We cannot just pick our favorite translation from the list of possibilities above. We must consider the sense of the entire Hebrew phrase to determine whether such a translation is justified. According to An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, in is an appropriate translation when the sense is spatial or temporal, indicating location or time (e.g., Judges 16:4; Psalm 46:2). According to is appropriate with regard to monetary standards (e.g., Numbers 18:16).a None of these options capture the sense of Genesis 1:26.

Two categories that could possibly work with the traditional view are realm or manner. If the preposition is meant to specify the realm, we might say with regard to (that is, with regard to the image of God, he made them; cf. Leviticus 6:3 [5:22]). If it indicates the manner in which something is done, we might say like (that is, like the image of God, he made them; cf. Isaiah 16:9). Either of these options is possible, but both require the author to have in mind that the true image of God is something other than the humans God just made, namely, the incarnated Son of God who will not appear in the flesh for thousands of years. This seems a stretch, especially since Paul presents Adam as the pattern for Christ, not the reverse (Romans 5:14).b My first professor of biblical languages warned us repeatedly not to base doctrine solely on a preposition. Prepositions are too flexible for that.

A final option seems far more plausible to me: a b of identity. As Waltke and O’Connor explain, this use of the preposition marks the capacity in which an actor behaves (‘as, serving as, in the capacity of’).c This would indicate that God made humans as his image, to serve in the capacity intended for an image. To me, this requires the least mental gymnastics. We have two clear examples of this use of the preposition: Exodus 6:3, where Yahweh introduces himself as El Shaddai, and Psalm 118:7, where the psalmist says, Yahweh is with me, serving as my Helper (my translation). We also have a clear sense of how images functioned in the ancient Near East, which we’ll discuss later.

No matter which translation scholars prefer, all of us agree that our human identity is grounded in this affirmation and that our ethics rely on viewing every human in this light. We also agree that Jesus is the ultimate human who models for us how God intends for us to live as humans. We further agree that humans are not God. Being God’s image is not the same as being God, just as an idol is not itself a god but merely represents one.

However, I think that to talk about being God’s image (rather than being made in God’s image) reinforces the concept that the imago Dei is essential to human identity rather than a capacity that can be lost. That affirmation is central to my thesis in this book and matters enough that I am willing to break with tradition to reinforce my point.

One more note on the relationship between these books: given the similarity in titles, inevitably people will refer to this one as Bearing God’s Image. I have deliberately not called it that. God’s image is not something we bear; it’s something we are. I also won’t say that we image God. Although our status as God’s image may lead to certain actions, image is not something we do, but who we are. I hope that by the end you’ll agree that this distinction matters.

This book begins in Genesis 1–11. Part one explores what these foundational chapters teach us about being human. Since being God’s image is the primary feature that sets us apart from animals, the image of God will be the lens through which we explore this larger question throughout the Bible: What does it mean to be human? We’ll consider how our status as God’s image is expressed in our relationship with God, our relationship with creation, and our relationships with each other. Part two completes the Old Testament picture of humanity by discussing the Wisdom books—Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. These books do not directly mention the image of God, but they introduce the human quest for a meaningful life and wrestle with the reality of human suffering. For that reason, they are essential to consider as we explore what it means to be human. In part three, we’ll move into the New Testament to offer a portrait of Jesus as the ultimate human. We’ll consider the theological significance of Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension as it relates to our larger question of what it means to be human. The closing chapters will flesh out our destiny as a new humanity in the new creation. I mean this literally. We will not be floating on the clouds one day—our future is physical and embodied.

One of the most profound discoveries that will emerge from our study is that creation still matters. This created world