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 of God is.
Genesis names the image three times in two verses, and it never defines it. So people fill the gap. They say the image is reason, or conscience, or creativity, or a soul, or the ability to love. Some of those may be right, but none of them is in the sentence, and Genesis does not supply one. That should make anyone careful before building an argument on this teaching that the text itself does not make.
What the chapter does tie to the image is rule over creation. God says it in the verse before, "let them have dominion," and He says it again in the verse after. This verse also tells us who carries the image, in words that are easy to read past: "male and female created he them." Men and women bear it alike.
The verse does not say the image was destroyed either, and people get this wrong in both directions. In chapter nine, after the flood, God forbids murder on this very ground: "for in the image of God made he man." James uses the same idea when he warns about the tongue: "therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God." Both passages take it for granted that the image is still there in people who behave terribly. It survived the fall and the flood, and it is on the person you find hardest to be in a room with.
There is one more thing to notice. In both of those passages, the image is never used to raise your opinion of yourself. Each time it is applied, it puts a limit on how you treat somebody else. It tells you what you may not do to them and what you may not call them. So the image is their protection before it is ever your comfort. God has set His likeness on every person, and even someone the world has given up on still carries it. God Himself defends them because of it, and He defends you for the same reason.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 18 is Sufficient Grace (2 Corinthians 12:9).