Being God's Image: Why Creation Still MattersExemplo

Jesus, the Image of God

Genesis 1 conveys our essential human identity as the “image of God.” However, the phrase “image of God” only appears in the Old Testament in Genesis 1, 5, and 9. When we cross over into the New Testament, we encounter several more passages that speak of the image of God. Strikingly, these all refer to Jesus.

For many of us, it goes without saying that Jesus is the image of God. After all, He is God! But if we view His status as God’s image primarily as a feature of His deity, we will be missing the point. Jesus is not the image of God because He is God. Jesus is the image of God because He is human. Jesus is and does what humans were meant to be and do. He surrenders His own life for the sake of others.

While every human being is God’s image, Jesus fulfills God’s intentions perfectly for the vocation entailed by this identity. Like all of us, Jesus was human. He experienced all that we do—hunger, thirst, weariness, temptation. He required sleep. He wept over loss. He was bullied and betrayed. He knew longing and desire and pain. He was injured, bled, and was scarred. Jesus’ resistance to temptation succeeds where Adam and Eve failed.

Just as the first humans’ sin had a profound impact on the trajectory of human experience, so Jesus’ ability to resist temptation opened a new future for all humans. We’re told that “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3 NIV). As a human, Jesus possesses the same identity as every other human as the image of God, but His closeness with the Father enables Him to radiate Glory and represent God in ways that are appropriate to that identity.

Jesus facilitates the restoration of the Family of God to a right relationship with Him so we, too, can radiate God’s Glory. Jesus’ full humanity carries profound implications for us. Our bodies are not a shell to be discarded so that we can experience mystical union with God. Jesus’ Incarnation—His “Enfleshment”—points to the significance of our embodiment. God’s original creative act is vindicated in Jesus, who rescues the human project.