Eden, man's first and divinely prepared home, must have been a place of
ecstatic beauty. Flowers must have bloomed beside rippling streams along whose
banks grew waving trees and verdant fields. Songbirds must have warbled in the
leafy bowers that beautified that elysian garden. Beauties ten thousand more
than these that can not be described seemed fitting accomplishments of primal
man's physical, mental, and moral perfection.
The Spirit of God had moved on the water that covered the chaotic
world, had brought order, life, and beauty to reign on the earth. Above the
newly made and beautified earth stretched the vaulted expanse of the heavens,
studded with countless stars and lighted by the sun and the moon. In the
production, beautification,, and vivification of this mighty earth, in the
ordering of the myriad starry worlds, and in the appointment of the mighty ruler
of the day and the lesser ruler of the night, the creative impulse of the
Almighty seems not to have found a resting place. Nor could he find, it would
seem, among all the then created worlds an object or pattern after which to
fashion that semi-divine being which was to constitute the climax of his
creative effort. So he said, perhaps to the angelic beings, to his divine Son,
or to both, "Let us make man in our own image" (Gen. 1: 26, 27).
IN WHAT DOES THE DIVINE IMAGE CONSIST ?
It has been supposed that man's superiority to the lower animal
creation and his dominion over all the earth, being similar to God's unlimited
dominion, constitute in man the image and likeness of God. But the likeness of
God in man is more than this; for certain attributes of God—omniscience ,
omnipotence, infinite love, and absolute holiness—are mirrored in the
personality of man finitely as intelligence, will, affection, and conscience, a
n d without doubt this is all included in the expression "image of
God." But it is evident that the greatest degree of likeness was in the
moral nature. In whatever degree the physical and the intellectual may have
shared with the spiritual or moral nature the likeness and image of the Creator,
it is certain that in the primary sense it was man's moral nature that was made
in the likeness and image of God.
Paul, speaking of the redeemed nature says, "And that ye put on
the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
" To redeem means to buy back; hence if "after God," or like God,
in the "new man" consisted in righteousness and true holiness, the
likeness and image of God in primitive man, back to whose state redeemed man is
brought, must have consisted in these same moral qualities.
The New Testament writers state explicitly that through Christ we are
redeemed into the image and likeness of God.
"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of
the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory even as by the
Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18). "For whom he did foreknow, he also
did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the
first born among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). "Herein is our love made
perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so
are we in this world" (I John. 4:17). The New Testament abounds in proof
that the divine image to which man is redeemed is a state of moral purity.
"God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy
Ghost, even as he did unto us; and put no difference between us [Jews] and them,
[ Gentiles] purifying their hearts by faith" (Acts 15: 8, 9). "And
every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he [Christ] is
pure" (1 John 3: 3). "Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the
people with his own blood, suffered without the gate " (Heb. 13: 12).
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