Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 18 · January 18
In His Image
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
The verse never tells you what the image is.
It says it three times in one line and defines it nowhere. So the gap gets filled: reason, conscience, creativity, a soul, the capacity to love. Some of those may be right. None is in the sentence, and Genesis supplies none, which should slow down anybody arguing from the doctrine to a conclusion the text did not draw.
What the chapter does attach to it is dominion, in the verse before and the verse after, and a scope printed in the same breath and easily read past: male and female created he them.
The verse does not say the image was destroyed either, and this is the part people misplace in both directions. Nine chapters later, on the far side of the flood, the ban on murder is grounded in it: for in the image of God made he man. James picks up the same tool for the tongue, that we curse men, which are made after the similitude of God. Both assume the image is still on people behaving atrociously. It survived the fall and the flood, and it is on the person you find hardest to be in a room with.
And this is the last thing the verse does not say. It is never used in Scripture to raise your opinion of yourself. Both times it is picked up and applied it lands as a restraint on how you treat somebody else: what you may not do to them, what you may not call them. The image is their protection before it is ever your comfort. Somebody the world has finished with still has a floor under them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 18 is Sufficient Grace (2 Corinthians 12:9).