Royal Children
Genesis 1:26
The Imago Dei in the American Revolution
What does the American Revolution have to do with the imago dei? What do the American Patriots of the original thirteen colonies have in common with all people who’ve ever lived? What aspect of God’s image in man was being acted out in the rebellion of the colonies against the tyrant King George?
It may be something you wouldn’t have guessed. There were many motivators at play leading our forefathers and foremothers to declare independence from England, but perhaps the primary one was the innate desire we all have to be kings. The Patriots wanted freedom from tyranny and freedom for self-rule. They, like we, wanted to rule themselves.
Listen to this interview of Captain Levi Preston, a soldier who fought in one of the first battles of the Revolution, in Concord in 1775:
“Captain Preston, why did you go to the Concord Fight, the 19th of April, 1775?
The old man, bowed beneath the weight of years, raised himself upright, and turning to me said: ‘Why did I go?’
‘Yes,’ I replied; ‘my histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against “intolerable oppressions.”’
‘What were they? Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.’
‘What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?’
‘I never saw one of those stamps…I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.’
‘Well, what then about the tea-tax?’
‘Tea-tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.’
‘Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney or Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?’
‘Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.’
‘Well, then, what was the matter? and what did you mean in going to the fight?’
‘Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t (think) we should.’”[1]
This Captain summarized the main idea behind the American Revolution. The Patriots didn’t want to live under the rule of Britain. They wanted to rule themselves. They desired to be their own kings.
This desire, which still pulses in people all over the planet, wasn’t the result of a good education in political philosophy. It was rooted in something fundamental about how God created us.
The Climax of Creation
The text we’re going to consider today, Genesis 1:26, teaches us that God made us to be kings. This verse, and the ones that immediately follow it, say that we were made to rule the world. But it also says that we’re to rule creation as those who have a relationship with the Creator.
At the end of Genesis 1, Moses slows way down and zooms in on the most beautiful aspect of the diadem of God’s creation: man and woman. The creation of humans at the end of day six is the climax of the six days of creation. Moses uses more words to describe what happens here than any other day. What happens here is so important that Moses actually comes back to it in more detail in chapter two in order to give us a 3-D view of what God does here.
What is Man?
The main question I want us to consider today is, “What is man?” I’ll give you the answer and then try to show you how I got there. We were made by God to be “royal children,” to rule the world out of a personal relationship with God. This is what verse 26 means by the words, “image” and “likeness.”
Before we look at those words, first we need to understand that “man” is the Hebrew word adam. It’s used in three different ways in the first five chapters of Genesis. It can mean “humankind,” the first human being, or the personal name “Adam.” Verse 27 lets us know that here it means “humankind.” What this passage says about “man” applies to all humans.
Verse 26 says that man bears the “image” and “likeness” of God. Some things are clear immediately. “Image” means we’re not ultimate, that we reflect something else. Our being and identity doesn’t originate with ourselves. This tells us who we are not: we are not gods, but we are the “image of God.”
But this also tells us that, though we may not be gods, we’re not nothing. We’re not made in the image of nature, our own image, or our parents. We’re made in the “image of God.” The Milky Way, Atlantic Ocean, Rocky Mountains, Amazon Rainforest, or Beethoven’s Fifth aren’t made in God’s image. Only one thing in this vast universe is in God’s image: you and me. We aren’t deity, but we have an exclusive dignity.
We also notice that “image of God” is something we are, not something we possess. Man isn’t given the “image of God.” Man is created in the “image of God.” All that we are bears the image of God. The Bible says we have a spirit and a body, but it never isolates these things from each other. The Bible says we’re a unity: body and spirit, or embodied spirits. This means that our whole being, and not some distillation of us, is a transcription of the eternal God onto a temporal being.
This is true even after sin comes into the world. Genesis 9:6 says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” And James 3:8-9, “No human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” As long as we are human, we are the image of God.
Kings and Queens
“Image of God” is something we are, not something we possess. But what exactly are we? What does this phrase mean? And the next one, “after our likeness”? To summarize, these phrases mean that God made us to rule his world and relate to him personally. God made us kings and queens, and sons and daughters.
There’s a horizontal and vertical aspect to being made in the “image” and “likeness” of God. The horizontal is implied in the language of “image.” This term focuses on our relationship to the world. The vertical is implied in the language of “likeness,” a term focusing on our relationship with God.
To be made in God’s “image” means that we’re a mirror of God’s rule on the earth. We reflect and represent his authority over the world. Ancient kings would set up statues of themselves throughout their land to show that it was their domain. They’d place an emblem of themselves in regions they didn’t personally live in to indicate their dominion over that region.
In the same way, God has established his image-bearers in his land. As one theologian puts it, “Man is set in the midst of creation as God’s statue.”[2] This means that man has a royal status in the world. But this doesn’t mean that we rule autonomously. We’re copies of the King and serve at his leisure. We’re God’s deputies, his acting representatives in the world. The world is God’s domain. His image-bearers are his stewards exerting his rule, not as despotic dictators, but as responsible caretakers.
God put us in nature to rule over nature. The following verses make this clear (vv. 26, 28). God delegates some of his authority to man to care for his creation. God has put us in a horizontal relationship with the earth, but our rule over the world is a result of our status. Our status is not the result of our rule. Psalm 8 makes this clear. It says that God crowned man with “glory and honor” and then “put all things under his feet” (vv. 5-6). As image-bearers, wer’re responsible to take care of God’s property. We’re his kings and queens. God designed us to literally rule the world.
Our Royal Role
This means that God sees us in ways we may not expect. I love how Ray Ortlund describes this. He says, “Britain has it’s royal family, with the pomp and ceremony…But you belong to a royal family from beyond all this world. So how crazy is it that you might feel like God is up there rolling his eyes at you, thinking what an idiot you are! The God who is actually out there respects you. To him you’re not a pawn, not a loser. In God’s eyes, you have royal dignity….Your creation was your coronation.”[3]
We all know this deep down. When asked as kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” we didn’t say, “I’d like to be a loser, a failure, a nobody.” No, we said we wanted to be something big and bold. For me, it was an astronaut, then an NBA basketball player, then a sports broadcaster. In our childhood, Ortlund says, our “God-created nobility was already longing to be fulfilled. God himself put into your heart a sense of destiny.”[4]
“Let Us” Indicates Our Role as Rulers
There’s another clue in verse 26 that hints at our role as rulers. It’s a disputable point, and one that I hold with an open hand, but it has to do with the first-person plural, “Let us make…”, at the beginning of the verse.
Many are quick to assume that this is a veiled reference to the Trinity, a reference to divine dialogue within the Godhead. It very well may be. The Bible is a divine and a human book, so a reference to the Trinity may’ve been intended by the divine author.
But it’s virtuously impossible that this is what Moses meant to communicate, and his original audience wouldn’t have understood this interpretation. This view wouldn’t make any sense until the New Testament was written. Any interpretation that steamrolls over the original author and audience is “highly suspect.”[5]
Another way this text has been interpreted has been to say that God is addressing a heavenly court of angels. Many religions of the Ancient Near East believed that there was a supreme god who operated in an assembly of lesser gods. We even find this in Psalm 82:1, “God presides in the divine assembly; He gives judgment in the midst of the gods” (cf. Job 1-2). The “gods” here are angels that are subservient and subordinate to God.
While the Old Testament acknowledges the existence of other beings we call angels, it rejects the notion that was prevalent in the cultures surrounding Israel that these beings shared power or authority with God. Only the Lord has a status that is worthy of worship.
What does this have to do with the phrase “Let us make…” being connected to our role as rulers? Here it is: ancient people around Israel believed that the ruling of the world was a community project, a group effort, of the gods. Moses is telling Israel that God announced to the heavenly assembly that he’ll share his rule with humanity. Moses is yet again subverting the bad theology of the cultures around Israel and teaching Israel that, as humans, they have a status almost equal to the divine beings, angels, or “gods.” This is exactly what David says in Psalm 8:5, “You have made (man) a little lower than the heavenly beings.”
Some say that this view means that the angels helped God create humans. But this wasn’t the case. There was no cocreation between God and angels. A good way to illustrate this is to think of the “chairman and CEO of a corporation announcing to his board of directors/shareholders, ‘Let us make all employees shareholders.’”[6]
One theologian summarizes it like this, “(In verse 26) God has communicated to the divine assembly that his rule in the world will be effected largely through humans, not through ‘gods’ or ‘angels.’ This result is completely contrary to the culture of that time.”[7]
Israel’s God doesn’t share his rule of the world with angels. He shares it with us! The first-person plural “Let us make” is yet another indication that God’s intent is that humans rule the world with and for God. God made us kings and queens.
“After His Likeness”
This doesn’t mean that God designed us as mere puppet-kings. The other phrase used in verse 26 fills out our understanding of who God made us to be. It says that we are made in the image of God, and “after (his) likeness.” What does this mean?
“Image” points us to the horizontal aspect of how we’re made to have a relationship with the world. “Likeness” points us to the vertical aspect of how we’re made to have a relationship with God.
Where am I getting this from? Just a few chapters later, Moses uses the language of “likeness” to refer to the relationship between a father and son (5:1-3). Listen to how Old Testament scholar Stephen Dempster explains this text:
“By juxtaposing the divine creation of Adam in the image of God and the subsequent creation of Seth in the image of Adam, the transmission of the image of God through this genealogical line is implied, as well as the link between sonship and the image of God. As Seth is a son of Adam, so Adam is a son of God. Language is being stretched here as a literal son of God is certainly not in view, but nevertheless the writer is using an analogy to make a point.”[8]
This is why Luke, in his Gospel, ends the genealogy of Jesus like this, “the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God” (3:38). Luke interprets “likeness of God” in Genesis to mean that Adam is not only an image bearer of God, but also a “son of God.”
This wouldn’t have been unusual in Moses’s day either. In the Ancient Near East, a king would be considered the image of God because he had a relationship with the deity, as a son to a father. It was thought that a king ruled the world as a son of a god. So the idea of a servant-king who’s a son wasn’t unfamiliar to Moses’ original audience.
But there was one major difference. In Egypt and other cultures around Israel, only the king had the image and likeness of God. Moses, in a way that was completely revolutionary at that time, says that all people (remember adam means “mankind”) are made in the image of God. The status of kings and sons or queens and daughters wasn’t restricted for an elite section of society.
Everyone Has Royal and Familial Status
The Bible makes the shocking claim that God gives everyone in the world royal and familial status. Yes, the New Testament makes it clear that only those who’re in Christ are called “children of God.” But what Moses is saying is that all people were made to know God in a relational way, that all people were created to enjoy their Creator. Fellowship with God isn’t for a special class or caste, for those with degrees or money, or for those who keep the rules.
Everyone on the earth is made to know God, and everyone on earth has the tools to do so personally. Being made in the “likeness” of God is why we have spirituality, a conscience, a moral sense, and a mind to discern truth. Because of sin, our relationship with God can only be restored when the Spirit of God unites us to the Son of God. But being made in the likeness of God means we have the tools we need to know God.
Everyone on earth has royal status and represents God’s rule in the world. Whether you mow yards, write papers, sell houses, build websites, raise children, teach classes, or design systems and processes and houses and skyscrapers, you do so as a king or queen.
“Oh, To Be Free!”
The reason I chose to stop down on this one verse is because many of us feel that our lives are futile. A world full of death, disease, debt, divorce, despair, depression, dictators, disagreements, and division swallows up the hopes and dreams we had as children. If I asked you now, “What do you want to be one day?”, many of us would simply say, “Free of futility, free from meaninglessness.”
As Marie-Laure, the main character in the novel All the Light We Cannot See, waits for her father’s return, her mind takes her to their favorite spot. She thinks, “Oh, to be free! To lie once more in the Jardin des Plantes with Papa. To feel his hands on hers, to hear the petals of the tulips tremble in the wind. He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.” Then she wonders, “Are you still there, Papa?”[9]
God crowned his creation with men and women. He made us the “glowing hot center” of his world. He wants us to know that every step we take is important. We long to feel his hand on ours. While we wait, we wonder if he’s still there. We long to rule, but we feel so alone.
Becoming a True Ruler and Son
The cross tells us that the King of kings died for the rulers of God’s world who couldn’t even rule themselves. He died for his governors who couldn’t govern themselves. He died to make us his sons and daughters in the next world. And he rose to prove that all this would come true for everyone who took his word for it.
The Ruler and the Son of God died and lived again so that you can live in a world where futility will die. So what do you want to be when you get past this life? A ruler seated forever with Christ reigning over the cosmos? A son or daughter with a room in the Father’s house and a seat at his table? Or consigned to an eternal existence of fear and futility and fire?
[1]Quoted in Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 50-1.
[2]Hans Walter Wolf, quoted in Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 236.
[3]Ray Ortlund, The Death of Porn: Men of Integrity Building a World of Nobility (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 25, 26.
[4]Ibid., 27.
[5]Gentry and Wellum, 239.
[6]Ibid., 244, n. 72.
[7]Ibid., 244.
[8]Quoted in ibid., 231.
[9]Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2014), 403.