Making God in Our Own Image

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us’ … So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Genesis 1:26-27

We are image bearers of the Creator God. Mentally, that’s a pretty significant thing to deal with. What does this mean? What is the image of God? In what way do I bear his image? Why should I give this my undivided attention at this time?

Think about this. It was after God created all of the material elements of the universe—light, water, plants, planets, animals, fish, trees, and all of the things we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear—that He created something special … something … more … something that had a moral and spiritual component as well as the physical. He created humans.

In Genesis 2, we see that the Lord formed the man and breathed life into him. That breath of life is what makes us uniquely and distinctively human.

In no other part of God’s creation did he mention that it was created in his own image, nor did he breathe life into any other element that he had made. Only humans. In some way, he created you and me to bear a particular likeness to himself. His very attributes of goodness and holiness along with a moral center that was shaped by love is what God implanted into the nature of the human being. And, it was good.

You and I have the ability to relate, which bears the image of a relational God. We are able to reason, which bears the image of a God who reasons. We also have a spirit, which bears the image of God, who is Spirit. We also bear within us this sense of morality—an innate understanding of what is right and wrong on a broad scale. One of my former professors, Dr. Kenneth Collins, describes this moral law imbedded within us as a “copy of the eternal mind, a transcript of the divine nature” (The Theology of John Wesley). This bears the image of a God who is moral and is just.

We are created in the image of God.

But have you noticed how we often want to flip this to where we are the ones desiring to make God in our own image?

In the process of doing so, all of a sudden, God doesn’t seem so relatable … we ask questions like, “Why can’t God compromise and just allow the latest cultural wave to dictate what is right and wrong?” God also doesn’t seem so reasonable … “Christianity needs to change its rules if it wants to keep up with the times.” God doesn’t seem to have the latest public opinion on morality either … “The Bible is really an old outdated book, full of trivial stories and tells how God operated a long time ago … it really doesn’t fit us in today’s world. Can you say, obsolete?” We often hear what God thought was wrong a long time ago, really isn’t wrong anymore.

Or my personal favorite, “Times have changed … so should God!”

So, like Legos in our hands, we begin to build a God that fits into our mindset … our worldview. We fashion a god that either reports to us and stands ready to meet our every demand, or one that is fairly benign and uninvolved in our daily life.

What is your vision of God? What picture do you paint in your mind when you think about God?

The urge to create God in our own image is strong. It’s also dangerous. It dips its fingers into the pool of idolatry, which God detests. The reason we wish to craft our own God is because we usually feel a need to hang on to something that is important to us: for example, our own belief as to what is right and wrong—what sin is or is not, a personal desire, a pleasure, a way of life, a particular relationship, or even power … really a number of things could fit here. We want these things to become part of a pseudo-religion where, actually … yeah you guessed it … we become a god.

This is a very corrupted paradigm of how the world created by God should be. We got here because a once paradise-world was breeched by an enemy combatant. A dangerous conversation ensued between the God-made humans and an antagonistic traitor and then a battle began. That battle was for us … you and me. Oh, by the way … it’s still raging on.

Thinking that we can create God in our own image is literal evidence of Satan demanding his own image to be stamped onto us.

The pride that drives this philosophy is confirmation of a world that had fallen into a sinful state. The problem today is still pride … thinking we could do it better than God. Because of humanity’s fall (see Genesis 3) the moral center that bears the image of God became degraded and even contaminated. So, we like artisans began to design for ourselves our own little gods and our own little religions to meet our own little standards in our own little world.

But God didn’t leave us there … no, this is what the work of Jesus was all about … restoring us to be those image bearers once again.

When we align our lives to Christ, we once again are able to relate to a relational God and reason with a mind that has been changed by Christ. Our spirits are able to discern the holy once again because the Holy Spirit lives within us. The pride is stripped away. Love now … is the proof of an overthrow within the heart of a once-ruling-throne that had no business there in the first place.