Bearing God's Image

Transcending to Abuse

Christians believe in the dignity of Man.  They believe in the glory of Man.  Christians believe--as true truth--that man is the only creature on this planet made in the image of God Himself.  Christians believe this astounding truth not because they think it is a good idea, but because God has revealed it to be so.

Then God said, "let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  [Genesis 1: 26-27]

There are many capabilities and abilities possessed by human beings that other creatures do not have.  All of them testify to our being in the image of God Himself.  Vern Poythress gives us one example:

Human beings have the ability to stand back from their immediate situation and look at larger wholes.  They can even think about the whole of history.  In this ability, they imitate God, who has complete knowledge of himself and of all of history.  So our ability in thought and language reflects the fact that we are made in the image of God. 

We can put it another way.  We can in a sense "transcend" the immediacy of our local situation and our small-scale use of language.  In our minds we can imagine the whole of our situation as it might look "from above."  This ability for "transcendence" imitates and reflects the greater transcendence that belongs to God.  God transcends the entire created world. We are creatures, so we do not.  But in our thinking and in our language we can achieve a kind of imitation of God's transcendence.  [Vern Poythress, In The Beginning Was the Word: Language--A God Centered Approach  (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2009), p.89.]

How staggering.  Man, a finite creature, yet created with an ability to mirror, an image of God's transcendence.  How we should adore Him, our Creator!  But we also must reckon what a dark, dark blot sin has been (and is) upon our beings. How inglorious we now are.  How ignominious we have become.  Unless we are restored to God and cleansed by Christ's blood, our transcendence degenerates into a dark capacity to think of mankind as an impersonal abstraction, to be used or abused, killed or enslaved at will.