Now we will see that God separates plant life and animal life from mankind, and He says, “Let us make man in our image.”

This creature is of great interest to us because they happen to be our great-great, grandancester, and he is mine, also.

This means that you and I are cousins, although maybe not kissing cousins.

But the whole human family is related.

Man was made last of all the creatures: this was both an honor and a favor to him.

Yet man was made the same day that the beasts were; his body was made of the same earth with theirs; and while he is in the body, he inhabits the same earth with them.

God forbid that by indulging the body, and the desires of it, we should make ourselves like the beasts that perish!

Man was to be a creature different from all that had been hitherto made.

Flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, must be put together in him.

God said, "Let us make man." Man, when he was made, was to glorify the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Into that great name we are baptized, for to that great name we owe our being.

It is the soul of man that especially bears God's image.

Man was made upright.

His understanding saw Divine things clearly and truly; there were no errors or mistakes in his knowledge; his will consented at once, and in all things, to the will of God.

His affections were all regular, and he had no bad appetites or passions.

His thoughts were easily brought and fixed to the best subjects.

Thus Holy, thus happy, were our first parents in having the image of God upon them.

But how is this image of God upon man defaced?

May the Lord renew it upon our souls by his grace!



Our scripture will be coming from:



Genesis 1:26-31 KJV

[26] And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

[28] And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

[29] And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

[30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

[31] And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.



Now it is time for our verse break down:



Genesis 1:26
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Something new and significant is happening as God now speaks in a new manner.

Up to this point, His words on each new day have begun with “Let there be . . .” or “Let the . . .”.

But now His creation declaration is more reflective in nature: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

The last stage in the progress of creation being now reached - God said, Let us make man — words which show the peculiar importance of the work to be done, the formation of a creature, who was to be God‘s representative, clothed with authority and rule as visible head and monarch of the world.

Many new-covenant believers have understood these plural pronouns as trinitarian in nature.

But the original audience lacked the revelation we have to understand them that way.

The Old Testament is essentially silent on the triune nature of God.

It is the New Testament record that ultimately reveals God as being three-in-one.

That record will make it possible for believers in the first century and later to contemplate a plurality in the oneness of God’s essence.

That leaves open the question of how the earliest readers interpret the plural pronouns.

One proposal is that God is speaking to angelic beings in His heavenly court.

Another view is that the plurals are to be understood as a “plural of majesty” by which God refers to the fullness of His power and identity.

An illustration of this type of plural is the quotation “We are not amused,” supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria after hearing a story that was not as funny as the storyteller thought it to be.

An enduring issue is determining what it means to be created in God’s image, after His likeness.

That the words image and likeness refer to different things is unlikely.

First, there is no and between image and likeness in the original text.

Second, the same Hebrew words translated image and likeness appear in Genesis 5:3 to refer to the same thing.

Thus the two words should be seen as synonyms combined to add intensity.

It is problematic to identify the image of God with one of God’s specific qualities.

God is complex, so His image must also be complex.

But we are able to get a better grasp if we approach the topic from two angles: those of form and content.

The form of the image of God is person-hood.

This speaks to the intellectual, volitional, moral, creative, and religious capacities that animals do not have.

As God exercises His creative will, so also human beings alone among earth’s creatures have the ability to think of complex things that don’t exist, then take deliberate steps to make them a reality.

This was a peculiar distinction, the value attached to which appears in the words being twice mentioned.

And in what did this image of God consist?

Not in the erect form or features of man, not in his intellect, for the devil and his angels are, in this respect, far superior.

Not in his immortality, for he has not, like God, a past as well as a future eternity of being.

But in the moral dispositions of his soul, commonly called original righteousness .

As the new creation is only a restoration of this image, the history of the one throws light on the other.

And we are informed that it is renewed after the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.

A beaver may go through a sequence of steps to make a dam, but stacking a pile of sticks is not the same as building a hospital!

Content, for its part, speaks to relationship with God (in terms of servants-in-fellowship) and relationship to the world (in terms of dominion-in-stewardship).

It is the form part of the image that makes the content part of the image possible.

Regarding the servant aspect, the portrayal of God in the creation narrative highlights a certain correspondence between humans and God that allows us to have a relationship with Him.

God bids us to rule over His creation, a task elegantly described as having dominion.

“And let them have dominion.” God gave him dominion over the earth, and I do not think this means that God made him a sort of glorified gardener of the Garden of Eden.

Adam had tremendous authority given to him.

Regarding the dominion part of the content part of the image, that’s addressed in our next verse.

We will find out a little later that God says to him that he is to do certain things relative to this creation that God has given to him.

David will reflect further on this centuries later in Psalm 8:6–8.

In creating, the Lord worked and exercised dominion, and He invites us to participate with Him in exercising that dominion as we ourselves work.

This is an issue of stewardship.

The first question that arises is: How was man created?

The next chapter will tell us that.



Genesis 1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The image of God in which humanity is created includes male and female.

We have here just the simple fact of the creation of man.

That we exist in community reflects the communal nature of God that we see taught more clearly in the New Testament.

The Father, Son, and Spirit are one, yet they are clearly distinct persons.

And though male and female together form one humanity, there is a clear, God-intended distinction between male and female.

God’s statement identifying us as being in His image points to humanity’s exalted place.

Some students also see the triple-usage of the verb created as significant.

The word in the original language being translated thus occurs only eight times between Genesis 1:1 and 5:1, and fully half of those are connected with the final and most significant aspect of creation: the creation of God’s image bearers (three times here and once in 5:1).

It is difficult to over