If you spend any time considering the truth that we are created capable of imaging God, then probably the first thing that impresses itself upon you is that we fail abysmally!
And you would be right. In some areas we do well: like God we too can be very creative, like God we too can know right and wrong. But in many ways we are totally unable to image Him – most especially in areas like being holy (there is none righteous no not one Rom 3:10) or being good (no one is good except God alone Mar 10:18) and so on. So what went wrong?
And the answer is, of course, the Fall. When Adam took of the fruit of that tree and ate from it, God’s curse came upon mankind, and everything was, in every area, damaged and fell to a state of being less than it had originally been created to be, and that certainly included our ability to image God.
So can we still speak of every person as being made in the image of God, or did that only apply before the Fall? To answer that we need to turn to Genesis 9 and the covenant that God makes with Noah after the flood. And we read:
Gen 9:5 And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.
Gen 9:6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
And the all-important point is simply this: Here God is speaking after the Fall and yet He still gives the fact that man is made in His own image as His reason for imposing the death sentence for murder. In other words, although the image is now marred, although it is far less than it at first was, nevertheless there remains in every human being something of the image of God that puts him still in a unique position above the animals and means that his life must not be taken unlawfully.
So it is still correct to speak of every human being having been made in the image of God. But what we now need to add is that man is powerless, of himself, to lift that image to the height that God first intended it to be (All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment Isaiah 64:6) Indeed to fully restore that image God must Himself act in three distinct and essential means of grace.
Firstly, He must redeem a person. He must bring them from spiritual death to spiritual life through the application of the work of Christ, imputing Christ’s righteousness to us. In other words we must be saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the first essential if we are to attain to that original plan of truly imaging God. Secondly Holy Spirit must then indwell us and control us to shape our minds, hearts and lives so that we understand the right and then choose to do the right, and then are actually able to do it.
But even then, the image is still massively less than God first intended it to be. Certainly we can then be holy to a degree, we can think as God thinks to a degree, we can act justly to the degree that we rightly understand what justice looks like. But… and it is a massive but we will never in this lifetime truly attain to that original plan of imaging God in full.
Only after death, through the third act of God’s grace in glorifying us will we actually image Him as He first intended that we should. Only in the New Heavens and Earth will we attain to the full measure of what it means to have been created in the image of God.
So what do we conclude?
Living after the Fall, there is a worldwide level playing field for all of humanity, across every nation, every skin colour, every ethnic group – as Paul puts it:
Rom 3:9 What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin,
Rom 3:10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one;
Rom 3:11 no one understands; no one seeks for God.
Even given the horrific lives of rebellion against God and man that some live (including the illegal taking of human life – whatever the reason), it would never be right to consider that person’s life as not having been made in the image of God, of considering them as nothing better than an animal. All the time that they have breath in their body God can, and often does, do a work of grace in such a person that starts them on that three stage journey to imaging God perfectly. Conversely we see many who appear to possess a far better image of God in their life from the very start but since they never bow the knee to Christ, it never rises above an ability to reflect something of the external appearance of what is actually good.
Friend, it is so easy for us to judge another person based on all sorts of false criteria, the bottom line is that they are fundamentally exactly the same as you and I, created to image God but incapable of doing it to any degree without the sovereign work of God in saving them, sanctifying them and finally glorifying them – and to that end we witness to them and pray for them.