In college, I heard Richard Pratt speak on what it means that humans are made in the image of God and his specific teaching from the book of Genesis has really stuck with me over the years. The full transcript is available online, so I’d suggest reading the whole thing, but today I’ll hit some key ideas.

Pratt notes that Christians often think that we just need to get our views about God straight, and then everything else will work out. But the Bible also talks a lot about what it means to be human. He adds,

… many times we either ignore what the Bible says about us, or we so narrow down the scope of what it says that we end up with just a bare, paper-thin idea of what it means to be a human being.

That’s the topic here.

The irony of being human

In popular culture, there’s a certain irony associated with being human; on the one hand, people are depressed, suicidal, and discouraged out how terrible our problems are and how wrong things have gone (he cites a specific example) and on the other, we’re taught to see ourselves as having almost godlike powers to determine our own destiny, and so on.

Society, Pratt notes, teaches both of these to some extent. People certainly don’t claim to be gods often, but we tend to make ourselves the center of our own universe. And we’re taught that we are the captain of our own fates, determine our own destinies, and can be anything we want to be. On the other hand, culture also tells us that we all evolved from something like a bacteria over a tremendously long time – that is, at some level we’re just nothing more than lucky mud.

Christians ought not to have the same problem; we “know better” than this – but in practice, we can live similarly. We might talk of being terrible, worthless sinners, and feel like nothing more than scum. But then if we find we’ve accomplished something, we start feeling indispensable and special. We swing from a low view of ourselves to a high view, back and forth.

The Bible says we are images of God

The Bible says who we are very early in the first book, Genesis 1:26:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…

We’re made in God’s image, but what does that mean? To sort it out, Pratt looks back to ancient times in the Middle and Near East (he refers to the “days of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner”, a reference to some movies set in ancient times starring those actors, e.g. “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben Hur”), and looks at the Hebrew word for image, used here, which basically means a three dimensional statue of someone or something. We’re of course familiar with such statues from museums of antiquities, as these were common. So in some sense, that’s what the Bible says we are – statues made to represent God.

What kind of image or statue are we, though? We were made out of the dust of the earth, Genesis tells us, so we could say we are fragile images made out of clay. We’re breakable, transient, and quickly passing away. Here today, gone tomorrow. He adds:

Do you know your great-great grandmother’s maiden name? Do you know your great grandmother’s first name? It has only been two generations, yet perhaps you don’t know your great grandmother’s name. In another two generations, they’re not going to know your name either. And you think the universe rotates around you! They are not even going to know your name.

That’s the fragile, transient side of the picture, but there’s another side, too. We’re images of God, the creator of the universe, the one who created all of the most majestic and glorious things we see around us. This is amazing, and contrary to so much of how we approach things. We tend to think of humans as just special animals, and talk of the “rat race” or it being a dog-eat-dog world. But we’re so much more than that; we’re like God!

In the ancient Near East, in Assyria and Egypt, royalty were seen as divine, or nearly so. Genesis was written by Moses to the Israelites who had come out of Egypt, so in a way it would have been a shocking rebuttal of the Egyptian view: No, the Pharaoh is not uniquely an image of the divine; everyone is the image of God. Pratt writes, “…every single human being had the value and the worth and deserved the honor of a king, a queen, or an emperor.”

Pratt said:

Imagine greeting a person by looking them right in the eye and saying to them, “Hello, your majesty.” Now, I don’t know about you, but if I did that to somebody I’d feel really bizarre. The reason I’d feel bizarre about that is because that’s just not the way I normally think about people. Americans sometimes have trouble figuring that kind of thing out, because we’re so independent - no royalty, no king or that sort of thing. But I think we can have a picture here of what it is that the Bible expects us to do toward human beings.

I remember at this point in his message, he actually had us stop, turn to one another, and say, “Hello, your majesty!” And he went on to make the point that this is not how we normally see one another; if someone cuts us off in traffic, or if a baby is screaming on the airplane, we’re not usually thinking, “Wow, that’s a glorious image of God right there!”

The take-away here is not just to treat others better, but to recognize that all of us – others, and even we ourselves – are made in the image of God and therefore precious in his sight. We’re not trash or vile, but fragile images of God, precious yet vulnerable. We’re valuable enough to God that he sent his son to die on the cross for us.

What does this title mean in practice?

It’s crucial though to look at what this means. What’s the job description for being an image of God? Gen. 1:26-28 says more; here’s v28:

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

In some translations, the key phrase “fill the earth and subdue it” translates to “multiply and have dominion”, which is how I file this away in my head.

Pratt notes how this is a pretty foreign idea to us; if someone asked us what it meant to be human and we said “to multiply and have dominion,” they’d probably think we were crazy. This, perhaps, means we don’t always do a great job at being human. Pratt said:

Melville put it something like this: “There are those queer times and occasions when a man takes this whole vast universe as one practical joke, the width thereof he but dimly discerns but more than suspects that the joke is at no one’s expense but his own.” That’s the way I feel sometimes, and I’m a follower of Jesus.

We might think that we live to make money, or live for our families, or, if we’re Christian, we might say we live to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But what does that really mean?

To understand what that means, Pratt went back to the days of ziggurats and pyramids again, when travelers would see images of the king set up again and again in they went throughout a kingdom. These statues were partly to represent the king’s authority; without such statues, a tax collector might have trouble collecting taxes because someone could say they had never seen or heard of the king. But the statues made the king more real, and his authority more tangible.

The Bible pictures God as the king of the universe, and we are his images, representing him and his authority.

Multiplication is part of what it means to be human

That brings us to the idea of multiplication, which involved both physical and spiritual multiplication. In Genesis, God was telling Adam and Eve that he wanted them to reproduce, so that people would spread out over the earth, his creation. That’s the physical aspect.

But God also intended spiritual multiplication – multiplication of redeemed images of God, images restored to his likeness after they were corrupted. This is done in many ways, including by parents teaching and training their children to bring them to salvation, and by Christians spreading the good news of Jesus to friends, neighbors, and the world.

Pratt said:

You want to know why you live? This is why you live -to multiply more images of God so that this world can be filled up with human beings who live for him and demonstrate that he is the King of the universe and there is no other. Right now when you look around at people and see what they’re doing you have to sort of wonder who’s really the king. This world is a messed up place. But God’s plan is that we fill the world up with his redeemed images to display that he is King.

Having dominion is another part

Pratt said that this means “representative dominion”; ruling over the earth not for our own pleasure but for God:

“Have dominion over it” means being responsible managers of the world-not that you just use this world for your own pleasures without any regard for its well-being.

This also connects with the idea of statues; as already noted, they represented God’s authority:

Put a statue over in this city, and that statue had representative dominion on the behalf of the king. It sort of stood there and ruled over that area, representing the authority of the great emperor.

While statues don’t necessarily mean as much to us at present, if you think of revolutions in other countries – the former Soviet Union, or more recently Iraq and others – a major change in government is often associated with toppling of statues. For example, I’ll note that during the most recent war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had statues of himself all over, and these were torn down after his fall from power. People celebrated when these statues came down, because they were celebrating the fall of the authority they represented.

Pratt added,

Now, if images can have that kind of authority, power and significance when they’re just made of stone or metal, how much more significance do you have as the living, breathing, image of God? Phenomenal! You were given this world to rule over it.

Pratt then went on to note ways in which we rule, and represent God’s authority, throughout our lives. We work, not because of the curse of the fall, but because God assigned us to work on his behalf even before the fall.

What about the future?

This is not just temporary, though. Pratt notes that some of us see our final destiny as heaven, a place where we see ourselves playing harps in the clouds forever, which may not sound very inviting. But that’s not our final destiny; heaven is just a temporary waiting place until God creates the new heavens and the new earth – a new creation that is exactly what God designed it to be, like the garden of Eden before the fall only better. Pratt said:

…these bodies that are going to be resurrected one day are not going to jump from cloud to cloud. They’re going to be here, on earth. We will have filled the world up from end to end with redeemed images of God who honor God and enjoy God, and we will reign with Jesus over the new world. I told you it meant you were a king. I told you it meant you are a queen. That’s exactly what it means. You will rule over the earth with Jesus.

The future we look forward to, then, is not one where we escape reality, but one where reality is corrected, restored, made the way it was meant to be – one where there will no longer be injustice, pain, or suffering.

Pratt said, speaking of how he looks forward to living in the new world made right:

I don’t know that I could really spend my life devoted to raising my children for Jesus, like I have, for a set of harps. I don’t know that I can stay married to one woman all my life for a set of harps. I don’t know that I can resist sin for a set of harps. But I do know this-give me the world, and I’ll resist. Give me the world, and I’ll devote myself. Give me the world, and I will follow him to death. And so he says to us, “I give you all things. The meek shall inherit the earth.” I can live for that kind of Christianity, to glorify God and enjoy him forever in the new heavens and the new earth.

This reminds me of the closing of C.S. Lewis’s book “The Last Battle”, the final in the Chronicles of Narnia series, which has a very vivid picture of the new heavens and earth – or in that series, the new Narnia. There, the new Narnia they enter is like the very best of the old Narnia they knew and loved, only everything is bigger, better, more amazing, and more delightful, and they take great delight in Aslan – the God figure in that story. As they keep finding out more about the new Narnia, every bit is more delightful than the last, so the reader gets this picture of ever increasing amazement and delight. That, along with Pratt’s picture from this sermon, has really shaped how I think about heaven and the future, and I look forward with delight.

Some closing thoughts

I discussed this recently with a group of people, and a couple things came up in discussion that I thought were also worth relating. First, the idea of being made in the image of God helps us understand why we ought to love our enemies, beyond the commandment itself. Everyone, no matter how bad they are, still reflects God in some way and still displays his image, so how we treat them in some way reflects on God. Also, this means no one is entirely bad – so we can still appreciate even the most wicked, because there are still ways in which they display the image of God, however tarnished. No one is entirely bad.

Relatedly, the fall means that the image of God is corrupted in everyone; even the best of us (except Jesus Christ) reflects God imperfectly. This knowledge means we can be honest about the good and the bad in everyone. We can rejoice in the good things heroes of the past did, and how those reflect the goodness of God, while being honest about their failings. In an age of tearing down statues and renaming buildings because of “unforgivable” sins of those they memorialize, it’s a relief to be able to acknowledge both the good and the bad and be honest.

Finally, this is a reminder of how terrible sin is. As images, we represent God here on earth, and are to show what he is like. Sin, then, goes beyond just rebellion against God (as if that weren’t bad enough); when we sin, we are essentially saying that this is what God is like. If I lie, I’m representing God as a liar; if I break a promise, I’m saying God is unfaithful, and so on. Sin, then, goes beyond just rebellion – it dishonors and misrepresents God.