One of the things I’ve been thinking about a bit recently is being made in the image of God. Genesis says mankind, man and woman are made in the image of God. That then means each of us are made in God’s image. (Genesis, creation? Another question for another day.)
Does this mean I’m omnipotent, or omniscient, or omnipresent, or an omnibus? I might have a rear end like the last one…but I’d never claim any of the others. I’m made in God’s image, but I’m not God himself. So what does it mean to bear God’s image? I’ve been letting that thought brew a little in the back of my mind for at least a month now, possibly a bit longer. I don’t have an answer, but I do have some thoughts.
If you and I are made in the image of God, then there should be something in each of us that reflects a bit of God.
That sounds a bit big. I don’t feel like I reflect, show, display, much of God. I don’t think most of us feel that.
But we are not told it is something we have to do.
It is something we are.
It isn’t something we have to strive towards, to change to be like God, to present the best picture of God we can to the world. We don’t go and study up and learn that God is called our rock, so we wear granite expressions; or that God is our shepherd, so we go and buy a sheep for the back garden. Genesis doesn’t say that mankind was made with the potential to be in God’s image, it says “Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
You, as God made you, are made in his image. I, as God made me, am made in his image.
It is easy sometimes to hold an image in our heads of what the ideal Christian is and to try and conform to it. However it’s a good job we fail, if we succeeded the church would be an homogeneous lump. I think the question we need is not ‘How can I be like my friend, mentor, leader, hero, Jesus, Peter, Paul?’ The question I think we should ask is much harder to answer, ‘How can I be the me God made me to be?’
God made each of us to reflect his image. But God is so much more than we can ever grasp, imagine, or reflect, so we each reflect a different facet of God. If we spend our lives trying to be someone else, someone we feel that somehow society, the church, our family, would like us to be, then the whole world misses out on the part of God reflected in us.
We need to ask God, not ‘What do you want me to do?’ but instead ask ‘Who did you make me to be?’
What we do and say flows from who we are.
A unique child of God.