When trying to understand just what a human being is, the first place to start is with this truth: humans are a creation made in God’s image.
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Genesis 1:26-27
Being made in God’s image doesn’t mean that humans are gods!
Being made in God’s image does mean that humans reflect many of God’s characteristics. Let’s quickly run through a list of some of these shared characteristics.
- Personal– Humans are persons (unique individuals) who can relate and communicate with each other and with God
- Creative– Humans can imagine, invent and create both abstractly and concretely, yet not as perfectly as God
- Moral– Humans have a sense of right and wrong, justice, equity and fairness and are morally responsible for their actions
- Good– Humans can appreciate goodness and beauty, attributes defined by God
- Spiritual– God is spirit and God has made humans with a spirit component
- Eternal– Once conceived, humans are eternal– but one could argue that our All-Knowing God is merely following a plan that conceived of each one of us before we were born!
- Rational– Humans have the capacity to reason, to follow lines of logical thought
- Emotional– Although God isn’t a man, God expresses the way He feels in terms that sound like human emotions as part of the way He relates with us
- Complex– Not in an entirely dissimilar way, humans demonstrate a hint of Trinitarian unity– more on this to come!
Since we are made in God’s image, it is helpful to study God’s characteristics in order to gather a better understanding of our own characteristics. God’s characteristics are perfect, but as we’ll see, human characteristics fall far short of God’s.
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