Part II: His Creation

Chapter 7: The Creation of His Masterpiece

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (Genesis 1:26–28).

On the sixth day of creation, after the heavens and the earth had been re-ordered and filled with living things, God made His crowning work. He had spoken the light, the seas, the dry land, the plants, the lights of heaven, the fish, the birds, and the beasts each into being with a word. But when He came to make man, the language changes. There is, as it were, a pause of deliberation in the heart of God: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Nothing else in all creation is made this way, and nothing else in all creation is said to bear God’s image. Man is the masterpiece—the summit and crown of the six days.

Before we go further, notice that solemn and weighty word, “Let us make man.” Why the plural? Christians have long heard in it an early whisper of the truth that would be made plain only later—that the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who creates by His Word and His Spirit (Genesis 1:2–3; John 1:3). Others have understood God to be speaking as a great King addressing His heavenly court. We need not resolve every grammatical question to say what Scripture plainly teaches: there is one God, He alone is the Creator, and in the fuller light of the New Testament the believer may rightly hear in “let us” the seed of the triune God in whose image we are made.88

Made in the Image of God

To be made “in the image of God” is the highest thing that can be said of any creature. The Hebrew words behind “image” (tselem) and “likeness” (demuth) describe something that is like the original and represents it. So when God says, “Let us make man in our image,” He means, in the words of Wayne Grudem, “Let us make man to be like us and to represent us.”89 Man is not God and never becomes God; but man is like God in a way nothing else in creation is, and man is appointed to stand for God upon the earth. As Anthony Hoekema put it, the image of God describes not merely something man has, but something man is.90

Theologians have explored what the image consists of along three lines, and the wisest course is to receive all three together as facets of one jewel. First, there is what we might call the endowment: God gave man faculties that mirror His own—reason, conscience, the capacity to know truth, moral judgment, creativity, and above all a free will and the ability to love. Second, there is relationship: man is made for fellowship—with God above all, and with other persons (“male and female created he them”). Third, there is function: man is made to represent God by ruling over the earth as His steward. These belong together. We are like God (endowment) so that we may know and love God (relationship) and so reflect and represent Him in the world (function).91

This is why the creation of man is unlike every other act of the six days. God did not merely speak man into being from a distance; in the fuller account of Genesis 2 we are shown the LORD God stooping down, forming man from the dust of the ground—the adamah, from which the man, adam, takes his very name—and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, so that “man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The beasts were called forth from the earth; but man received the breath of God Himself. His body is of the dust, humble and frail; his life is the direct gift of his Maker. He is a creature of two worlds, joining earth and heaven in a single living person.92

So man is a unity of body and soul—dust and breath, the material and the immaterial, woven together (1 Thessalonians 5:23; Ecclesiastes 12:7). He is not a soul that merely happens to inhabit a body, nor a body that merely happens to think; he is one living person, made to glorify God in body and spirit together.93

God created His masterpiece and loved His creation deeply, purposing great things for him. He revealed something of this wonder to His servant David, who could only stand in awe at how he had been made:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you (Psalm 139:13–18).

Read those words slowly. Before you drew a single breath, God was the Master Craftsman knitting you together. Every day of your life was written in His book before one of them came to be. His thoughts toward you outnumber the grains of sand. This is the worth God set upon the human being—not because of anything we had done, but because of how and why He made us. To be human is to be God’s deliberate, treasured handiwork.

God built into man, on the day of his creation, the capacity to reflect His own attributes. Consider what Scripture shows us about this masterpiece:

When we live according to God’s intended design and according to His Word, we are in fact revealing His attributes through our lives—doing exactly what an image is made to do, displaying the One whose likeness we bear.

Crowned to Rule—as a Steward, Not a Tyrant

“Let them have dominion,” God said, and “subdue” the earth (Genesis 1:26, 28). In the ancient world, a king would set up images of himself throughout his realm to mark the reach of his rule. In just this way, God placed His own living image—man—upon the earth as the sign and agent of His reign. Man is God’s vice-regent, ruling creation on God’s behalf and in God’s manner.95 This dominion is therefore not a license to exploit or destroy, but a sacred trust to cultivate, protect, and order the world for the glory of the One who owns it. The good king images the good God; the steward answers to his Master.

David sings of this royal dignity in another psalm: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (Psalm 8:4–6). Crowned with glory and honour—that is the dignity God conferred on the human being. He is the ruler of the earth under God, bearing a crown he did not earn.

Yet we must say one more thing, and it points us forward to the heart of this whole book. The glory God gave to man, the first Adam soon forfeited; the crown was tarnished and the dominion largely lost when sin entered. But the writer to the Hebrews takes up Psalm 8 and shows us that what we do not yet see fulfilled in fallen man, we do see fulfilled in One: “we see Jesus… crowned with glory and honour” (Hebrews 2:9). Jesus Christ—the last Adam, the true and faithful Man—is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) in perfection. The image marred in Adam is restored and perfected in Him; and all who are His are even now “being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” and “renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created” them (2 Corinthians 3:18; Colossians 3:10).9697

There was, then, one law—and only one—given to man at his creation: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17). This single prohibition was no arbitrary restriction; it was the appointed arena of love. Because man was made with a free will, his love for God had to be a chosen love, and love that cannot be withheld is not love at all. The one command was the place where man’s trust and obedience could be freely offered back to the God who made him—the test of whether the creature would honor the Creator, or seize for himself what God had withheld.98

And here the shadow falls across the garden. By the time God was re-ordering the earth and forming this new creature, Lucifer had already fallen and become Satan. He watched the making of man. He saw that man, too, had a free will and the power to reason and choose. And he saw his opportunity: if he could persuade man to use that God-given freedom against God—to distrust His word and break His one command—he could drag the masterpiece down into his own rebellion. To that fateful temptation, and to all that hung upon it, we now turn.

Notes

  1. 88. The plural “Let us” (Gen. 1:26) has been read in several ways: as an early intimation of the Trinity (Augustine, On the Trinity; many in the Christian tradition); as God addressing His heavenly court or divine council (so Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 27–28, and many Old Testament scholars); or as a plural of majesty or deliberation. The view taken here—that the New Testament’s fuller revelation lets Christians rightly hear in it the seed of the triune God who creates by His Word and Spirit—does not depend on settling the grammatical debate, since Scripture elsewhere clearly teaches both the Trinity and that God alone is Creator. ↩
  2. 89. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 442–450. The Hebrew tselem (“image”) and demuth (“likeness”) denote something similar to, and representative of, the original; to be made in God’s image is “to be like God and to represent God.” ↩
  3. 90. Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 11–73. Hoekema’s well-known formulation is that the image of God “describes not just something that man has, but something man is.” ↩
  4. 91. On the three classic approaches—substantive (the image as human faculties such as reason, will, and conscience), relational (the image as our capacity for relationship with God and one another), and functional (the image as the royal task of representing God in ruling creation)—see Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 33–73; and Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word, 1987), 29–32. Most evangelical theologians regard these not as rivals but as complementary facets of one rich reality. ↩
  5. 92. On Genesis 2:7—man formed from the adamah (“ground”), the wordplay with adam (“man”), and the divine inbreathing that makes him a nephesh chayyah (“living being”)—see Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 156–159. Man’s life is no mere product of matter but the direct gift of God’s own breath. ↩
  6. 93. Scripture describes the human being as a unity of material and immaterial—body and soul/spirit (Gen. 2:7; Eccl. 12:7; Matt. 10:28; 1 Thess. 5:23). Reformed theologians generally hold to a “psychosomatic unity” rather than a loose partnership of parts; see Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 203–226; Grudem, Systematic Theology, 483–498. ↩
  7. 95. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 33, draws the analogy between humanity’s dominion and the role of an ancient Near Eastern king, who set up images of himself to mark the extent of his rule; humans are God’s living images, His vice-regents. The mandate to “subdue” and “have dominion” (Gen. 1:28) is a commission to responsible, God-honoring stewardship, not exploitation. ↩
  8. 96. Psalm 8:5–6 celebrates man “crowned… with glory and honour” and given dominion. Hebrews 2:6–9 applies the psalm to Jesus, the truly faithful Man, who for a little while was made lower than the angels and is now crowned with glory—the last Adam who recovers the dominion the first Adam lost. See F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 70–80. ↩
  9. 97. On Christ as “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4) and the believer’s renewal in that image (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24; Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18), see Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 117–125; the image marred in Adam is restored and perfected in Christ. ↩
  10. 98. On the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the single prohibition of Genesis 2:16–17 as the one test of loving obedience—the arena in which Adam’s trust in God would be proved—see Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 161–166. The command came paired with a clear consequence (“thou shalt surely die”), marking it as a true probation. ↩
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