Note: In this post we welcome guest blogger, David Hundert. David is studying in Kairos University – Evangelical Seminary’s Master of Divinity program.
The Hebrew word for “image” is “tselem” which translated directly, can be “image,” “likeness,” “inscribed column,” or even “replica.” The image of God is an important concept both in Old and New Testaments. In the ancient world an image was believed in some ways to carry the essence of what it represented. It was believed that an idol, when used in worship, was used so because it was believed to contain that deity’s essence.
However, if an idol was supposed to be the image of the god it represented, then what in the world does it mean for an idol to “contain the essence?” If we were created in God’s image, then what does it mean for “us” to contain His essence?
Essence is defined as the nature of a thing as opposed to it’s “existence.” In other words, a painting captures the essence of a landscape, but it isn’t the landscape.
In Genesis 1 verse 26, God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” “Image” and “likeness” are two different words in the original Hebrew. The word for likeness is “demoot” and it means “likeness,” “double,” “pattern,” “form,” “something like,” “simile,” or my favorite, “builder’s draft.” It was customary with Jews to repeat the same thing in different words, but in this case, it is believed that the second word was added for the sake of explanation. It was added to clarify what the author meant by “image.”
In Biblical times, images were used as a means of marking someone’s property. In Mesopotamia the significance of an image can be seen in the practice of kings setting up images of themselves in places where they want to establish their authority. If the image of the king was there, this was his property, or the image of Caesar on his coinage, indicating his rule. It’s kind of nice to think that if we were created in the image of God, that it’s His way of establishing His rule in us! We are His property.
So, while we are created in God’s image, we are created to bear His essence, His image. This raises the question, how can we all be the image of God? We obviously don’t all look the same, so could it be something else? What is the essence of God that we were created to bear?
You and I don’t look anything alike, so how can we both be made in the image of God? Granted, if that were the case, we can argue that looking at us, we can make the assumption that the Lord is incredibly handsome, but that’s where the similarities end, right?!
If no one has seen God the Father, how can we know if we are truly reflecting the essence of God or not? In the next post, we’ll begin to answer this important question.
Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash
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